While I have spent a Facebook post or two poking fun at the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd over the past couple of days, there is one subgroup among the crowds there that I do have some degree of sympathy for.  It’s not George Soros’s professional activist bunch, nor is it the unions.  It also isn’t the people who show up at protests even if they don’t know what they’re protesting, just because they think protests and raging against “the man” are cool.

Among the crowd, however, is a subset of people who are genuinely scared for their own personal futures.  Many of them are recent college graduates, who have now have student loans coming due, but have no way of paying for them.  Tea Party people can identify with that sort of thing, since we have that sort of fear for the country with its mounting debt, and in some cases, personally as well.  (For the moment, I am thankfully not among that crowd with personal financial worries.)

For the people in that group who are currently directing their angst at corporate America, I have one simple question:  Has any corporation ever taken tens of thousands of dollars directly from you, and made you spend four or more years of your life essentially working for them, and then given you absolutely nothing in return?  Corporate America didn’t do that to you, but it’s quite possible that your college did exactly that.

For decades, people have been sold on the necessity of getting a four-year degree.  It doesn’t even matter in what, they say, just get a degree and you’re set for the real world.  Well, it isn’t proving to be quite that simple in the real world.  Many of these recent grads are finding out that there isn’t much call for philosophers at Proctor and Gamble.  3M doesn’t exactly have a division where that Women’s Studies degree is going to get you a leg up on the other applicants, either.  Art History is a great degree if you want to be a museum curator, but not so much if you want to be — well, anything else, really.  It isn’t the fault of corporate America that they don’t have use for these skills; it’s the fault of the school that didn’t bother to tell you that part.

College is supposed to prepare a person for the real world, but many are failing to do so.  They are perfectly willing to let people throw money at them, and give them completely worthless degrees in return.  It’s not like they particularly care, as long as they get your money.  Kinda sounds like the protesters’ view of corporate America, doesn’t it?

The only thing worse than getting a worthless degree is getting one in Economics or Political Science; instead of teaching people how to survive and thrive in a capitalist economy such as ours, they teach the students to hate it instead, for all the good that will do. As a software developer, I would liken it to taking a two-week course in Java programming, and having the instructor for the class spend the entire two weeks telling me that Java is worthless and teaching me Cobol instead.  If the instructor did that, I’d demand my money back.  Getting an Econ or PoliSci degree is just that on a larger scale.  The students may leave understanding why socialism is such a great system in theory (never mind that it all falls apart once reality creeps into it), but much to their chagrin, they are still being let loose into a capitalist world with nothing to build on.

So to those students with degrees and no jobs, I would suggest that maybe they leave Wall Street alone and protest Harvard instead.  They are the ones who are taking people’s money and not delivering on their end of the deal.

Today, the left-wing world is all excited about a viral quote/video clip from Massachusetts Senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren.  It is very well worth it to read and truly understand the quote, because it really is almost perfect, in much the same way that an “almost perfect” bowling throw leaves a 7-10 split instead of hitting a strike.  It expresses a laudable underlying sentiment, while at the same time illustrating why people with her thought process are exactly the wrong people to try to solve the problem.

Here’s the quote:

The latest salvo from the White House in their quest to “create jobs” and “reduce the deficit” (they aren’t proving particularly good at either one, hence the quotes), is this idea called the “Buffett Rule” or the “Millionaire’s Tax”.  The idea is simple:  All these people who make a million or more per year don’t need all that money, and won’t miss it if we take a little more of it, and all of that money will be put to good use by our uber-efficient federal government.  So we’ll just raise the top income tax rate and get more money.

Ummm…no.

For now, let’s not worry about what would happen to the money once it gets in government’s hands, because that actually isn’t the issue here.  The question is:  Is this actually going to result in more tax revenue coming into the government in the first place?

In examining this, we have to keep one thing in mind:  Not all millionaires are alike.  The people that would be affected by the “Buffett Rule” can generally be grouped into five different categories, although there is much crossover from one to another.  Let’s go down the list…

1)     Small Business Owners

Small business owners often file as a “Subchapter S Corporation” which allows the owner to pay the company’s taxes as though the business were an individual and the business’s profits were its income.  This allows them to pay less than if they had to pay at the corporate tax rate.  Generally speaking, a small business’s profits aren’t just going into the owner’s pockets, though; that money is used to either grow or sustain the business into the future.

So what happens if we raise taxes on them?  Well, businesses that want to use profits to grow won’t be able to grow as much, and businesses that use their profits to sustain won’t be able to sustain as much.  The latter results in reductions in employee benefits or reductions in employees, and in some cases, businesses go under altogether.  It also increases the risk involved in starting a business, which may prevent some from starting to begin with.  These things result in less competition, which is bad for the consumer.

Basically, any good you get out of more taxes from these companies is offset by the lack of taxes you’ll get from the laid-off employees and no-longer-existing businesses.  And you can forget about more jobs or economic growth.  So that’s one strike against the “Buffett Rule”.

2)     Tax Shelterers / Pre-Tax Investors

Most people who make large amounts of money per year don’t live a “playboy” sort of lifestyle.  Most of the time, those who earn large amounts of money put aside what they don’t need for later, and when they do so, they want to keep that amount of money as large as possible.

When the concept of “tax shelters” come up, these are generally derided as “loopholes” that rich people use to keep from “paying their fair share” of taxes.  This isn’t quite true, however.  Pre-tax investments and “tax shelters” don’t mean that the person doesn’t pay taxes on their income; it only means that they don’t do so right now.  A 401(k) is a pre-tax investment:  you haven’t paid taxes on it when you make the investment, but you also don’t have immediate access to that money.  When you withdraw that money, it is then subject to income tax at whatever the rate is then.  Other pre-tax investments work the same way.  The investor is betting that at some point in the future, tax rates will be lower than they are now, which will save them money.  It also has the benefit of giving them more money at the start, which as anyone who understands the concept of “compound interest” knows, will result in a bigger number at the end.

So what effect would the “Buffett Rule” have here?  The people who have no choice but to withdraw money from their investments at this point, i.e. retired seniors, might have to pay more, but most of them aren’t going to withdraw enough to have this rate change apply to them.  For the rest, it just means more people using these methods to defer payment of taxes until such a time as the rates are lower or they simply don’t have a choice.  In other words, you’re not going to gain much of anything from this group, either.  Strike two.

3)     The Investor Class

This is the group of people that includes Warren Buffett himself, and I should take a moment to shoot down his anecdotal defense of this plan.

Buffett notes that since most of his “income” comes from capital gains (which are taxed at 15%), and he pays himself $100,000 per year from his investments (taxed at the top marginal rate of 36%), the end result is that his “effective tax rate” is less than that of his secretary.

Here’s the problem with that argument (and why I use the word “income” in quotations above):  You can’t spend capital gains.  An increase in your net worth does not translate to income until you sell a position and convert it to cash…at which point you are subject to income tax on any earnings.  If he converted that net worth to cash, he most certainly would be paying a higher tax rate than his secretary would, though he’d be too busy swimming in a pool full of cash to care.  It’s also worth noting that any stocks or funds that we buy on the market are generally bought with money that we’ve already paid income taxes on.

On top of that, his anecdote seems to suggest that he thinks the capital gains rate should be increased, which isn’t what is being proposed.  An increase in the top income tax rate wouldn’t really affect him much, since he could always give himself a raise to cover for it.  Most people don’t have those sorts of options, of course.

So why exactly is the capital gains rate lower than the income tax rate?  Two reasons:

1)  The capital gains tax is really an “intermediate tax” – as noted earlier, you still pay income tax on any earnings once the position is sold.  This just gives the government some income in the meantime, since many people hold positions for years or decades.

2)  It is kept lower to give people incentive to take risk and invest in the first place.  As most amateur stock traders can tell you, investing involves risk, and more often than not, you end up losing instead of winning.  If the risk is not worth the potential reward, there’s less reason to take the risk.  (As both a former amateur – very amateur – stock trader and someone with a math degree and an emphasis in probability, I can back this assertion up.)

So raising the capital gains rate would only stifle investing, which runs counter to the whole idea of trying to create jobs.  Then again, that’s not what is being proposed by the White House.

The actual proposal, as noted, would have practically no impact on someone like Buffett at all.  You’d get a bit more from the $100,000 he pays himself, but you’re not getting any more of his capital gains unless he sells them (and why would he?).  What it would do is keep people from selling or moving stocks unless they had to, because those transactions (if they resulted in gains) would get taxed at a higher rate.  Again, this isn’t going to help economic growth any.  The likely result is that many of these people will transition themselves to some degree into group two, which as we’ve noted, simply means less tax revenue being paid now.

4)     The “Someone Else Pays Me” Group

Generally speaking, most of the people that are earning a million dollars per year or more are doing so either by investing or running their own businesses, and are thus profiting from the growth they are creating.  There are very few people who are actually paid a million dollars or more per year by someone else simply for performing a particular service, but there are a few:  professional athletes, Hollywood actors, and a few in the higher levels of large companies are some examples.

For the most part, the latter group are people who understand business well enough to know what to do with that money once they earn it, i.e. they join groups two or three.  Most of the others also have some sort of financial advisors or agents helping them figure out what to do with their money (which again means they join groups two or three), but there are a few who actually act exactly like liberals seem to expect every millionaire to act:  they don’t pay any attention to what is happening to their money and just pay the higher tax rate, thinking that they’ll always get more.  These are the people living the “playboy” lifestyle that was mentioned earlier.  Often times, these are the people you see in documentaries on “E!” ten years after their fame has dried up, where we learn about how they squandered their wealth and are broke now.   (And if drugs were involved – which they often are — you can bet that the dealers weren’t paying sales or income taxes on those transactions, either.)

All speculation aside, the “Buffett Rule” would have the intended effect on these people, but they are few and far between, because as noted, the smarter members of this set put themselves in groups two or three.

5)     The “How Did I Get So Lucky?” Group

These are people whose income is insignificant next to their wealth, which they generally came into through no effort of their own.  Either they inherit it (like Mark Dayton or any Kennedy at random), or they marry into it (like John Kerry).  These people often end up being liberal politicians or activists, sometimes because they don’t know how the money was made in the first place, and sometimes because they feel guilty that they got so lucky and like to assume or pretend that every other rich person got lucky, too.

So out of these five groups, we have the first three who you aren’t going to get a net gain from, and two others which are smaller than they appear, since the smarter members of those groups cross over into the other groups.

So what good would the “Buffett Rule” do?  Well, it would make some liberals feel better.  That’s about all, though.

As we continue on with the debt ceiling battle, we seem to have abandoned “Cut, Cap and Balance” for either Boehner’s plan (another useless debt commission), Reid’s plan (accounting gimmicks) or Obama’s plan (blame Bush and keep saying the words “balanced approach” until he fools people into thinking he has a plan).

Well, I’d like to offer a new plan.  Let’s call it the “Q’s Clues Options Plan”.  It goes like this:

Step 1 is already complete.  We’ve passed a debt ceiling increase in exchange for “Cut, Cap and Balance”.  The Senate doesn’t like it.  Big whoop.  So we’ll give them two more options.

Step 2 is simple.  Pass another bill that would put forth the exact same debt limit increase in exchange for a full repeal of Obamacare.  Of course, we know the Senate would crap on that, too, despite the fact that the American people are in favor of getting rid of that as well.

Step 3 is also simple.  Pass one more bill that would provide the same debt ceiling increase in exchange for a cap on expenditure increases of no more than 2% of the previous year through 2020.  In short, from 2012 until 2020, each department gets a straight 2% increase, and nothing more.  Spending can be rearranged if needed, but the total growth can only be 2 percent.

How will this help, you ask?  Well, using the FY 2011 budget analysis document’s (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/pdf/budget.pdf) summary table on page 146, here’s what we’re looking at for budgets and increases from 2012 through 2010 (numbers in billions):

(I am choosing to start with FY 2012 as the base instead of FY 2011 because the document indicates that the FY 2012 outlays are actually less than the FY 2011 ones.  Frankly, I’m not sure I believe that, but that’s what it says, and one has to work with the data available.)

So let’s reduce those percentage increases to 2% and nothing more and leave everything else the same.  Here’s what we get:

See, that’s not so hard.  We have a surplus by 2018, $5.3 trillion in total reductions over 10 years, and nothing actually gets truly “cut”, except in the minds of Democratic demagogues who are bad at math.

So we pass those three bills and leave it at that.  Those are the options for the Senate and President.  We already know the first two are supported by the majority of Americans, and one would expect that the third would also be widely supported given that it balances the budget without truly cutting anything.  The Republicans look reasonable by offering flexibility with three perfectly good options that the American people support, and if Obama and Reid want to reject all three, then they look like even bigger fools than they do now.

That’s my plan.

If I were John Boehner (someone I am very thankful I am not), this is the speech I would give to the American people if given the opportunity.

————————-

Let me begin with a quote:  “The fact that we’re here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. Leadership means ‘The buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

This was not a quote from one of my Republican colleagues in the last couple of months.  This was a quote from then Senator Barack Obama in 2006.

It seems that the President’s plan has changed since then.  “The buck stops here,” has morphed into blaming his predecessor for his problems.  Spending has skyrocketed on his watch — far beyond what happened under his predecessor — the economy is failing, and the addition to our debt burden has been larger than that of all previous Presidents combined.  It is now my turn to stand and oppose a debt ceiling increase without significant changes to the way we spend the American people’s money.

My House colleagues and I have put forth a plan that would raise the debt ceiling in exchange for just such a significant change.  It is called “Cut, Cap and Balance”.  It requires that we cut one hundred billion dollars from the fiscal year 2012 budget, because the American people have learned that cuts that are proposed to take place 6 or 7 years down the road never actually happen.  It requires that we cap spending at a constant level relative to our GDP, so that we keep money in the private sector where it can grow, instead of in the government where it stagnates.  Finally, it includes the passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution to be passed to the states for ratification.

A CNN/Gallup poll from the past week shows that the American people overwhelmingly favor this plan.  There is not a single demographic that is opposed to it.  Even 63% of self-described Democrats approve of it.

It seems, however, that President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid want no part of this plan, which is somewhat ironic given the President’s recent statement that, “It’s time to listen to the American people.”  Listening to the American people has not been the strong suit of these two men in the last two and a half years.  In the last 20 months, they used fraud, deceit and bribery to force through a health care plan that the American people clearly said they didn’t want and still don’t, and as a result of that, the American people rejected their party at the ballot box at levels not seen in over a century.  Despite this, their tone-deafness continues.

Instead, the President has chosen to go out and lie directly to the faces of the American people.  He has stated that if the debt ceiling is not increased, we may not have the money to service our debt, or send out Social Security checks or military paychecks.  These are absolute lies.  The amount of money coming into the treasury would be more than enough to cover all of these things, and the President and his treasury secretary know it.  The only reason any of these things would not happen is if the President were to choose not to do so.  These are the sorts of scare tactics that his party has used over the past half-century, but times are changing.  The American people see through those sorts of lies now.  They are better informed than my Democratic colleagues think they are.

Another demand that has been made of me and my party is that we make compromises in order to get a deal done.  It is impossible to compromise, however, when the other side has yet to even propose a plan.  Earlier this year, Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan put together a budget proposal that would start us on the path of reducing the size of government and getting our spending back under control.  President Obama put together a proposal of his own that was recognized as a budget-buster even by his own party, as the Senate rejected it 97-0.  Senator Reid and his colleagues in the Senate have been even more derelict in their duties, as they have refused to even offer a budget in over 800 days, despite the Constitution mandating that we pass a budget each year.

We have seen similar behavior in this debate.  The House has passed “Cut, Cap and Balance”, but the Senate recently voted to not even allow debate on the bill, as though a plan that the American people overwhelmingly approve of was not worthy of their time.  I can cite twenty current Democratic Senators who have spoken in favor of a Balanced Budget Amendment in the past, but it seems their tone has changed.  The President gave a speech on April 13th that he and his supporters claim is his plan, but it has no specifics.  The Congressional Budget Office’s response to the request to score the President’s plan was, “We cannot estimate speeches.”  Quite simply, there is currently no other plan on the table besides our bill for discussion.

Every proposal we have made has been met with nothing from the Democrats except, “Your plan sucks.”  From now on, until a serious offer is put on the table, any requests for compromise from the Democrats will be met with, “Where’s your plan?”

The only things that have been given to us by the President to this point are vague proposals to cut spending several years down the road – which the American people rightly don’t believe would actually happen – and demands for tax increases.  While we are willing to compromise in several areas, this is one area where we will not yield.  If your child took your credit card and bought several thousand dollars’ worth of things you couldn’t afford online without your permission, then demanded an increase in his allowance to help pay for them, how would you respond?

A tax increase in this economy would be an automatic job-killer, and with unemployment well over nine percent, America cannot afford any more job losses.  As my colleague in the Senate, Marco Rubio, eloquently stated, “We don’t need more taxes, we need more taxpayers.”  If we stop threatening the American people with more tax increases and more burdensome regulation such as ObamaCare, we will get the economy growing again, get people back to work, and revenue coming into the government will take care of itself.

Let me conclude by saying that we will be more than happy to work with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate and the President if they are willing to put forth a plan with specific spending cuts in the near-term and long-term, and no tax increases.  If the President and his party are unwilling to put forth a serious proposal, then there will be no debt limit increase.  We know the media will attempt to blame us, but the American people know that we are the only ones who have an actual plan.  This situation is too important for political games; the viability and stability of our nation’s economy is at stake.  We will fight to preserve this great land of ours, knowing that the American people are behind us in this fight.  Thank you.

The same-sex marriage debate is a frustrating one for me for a wide variety of reasons.  One of the reasons has to do with the people who get highlighted the most on both sides of the debate.  On the right, you have a minority of people who view all homosexuals as evil sinners who are doomed to burn in Hell and require “saving”.  On the left, you have a bunch of people who think that everyone who disagrees with them is a religious zealot, since there is obviously no intellectual argument to be made against their point of view.

Well, I disagree on both counts.  Neither side seems to listen to the other, which is a shame because there’s a perfectly good compromise right there to be seen.  Both sides fight, and neither seems to recognize that what each side wants isn’t mutually exclusive with what the other wants.

I’ll start by summing up my viewpoint, then going into further detail.  Basically, I am for civil unions and against same-sex marriage, but the real problem is that we need to define the terms “marriage” and “civil union” with a standard and proper definition.

The crux of the matter boils down to how one views marriage.  Is marriage…

• …a legal construct?
• …a societal construct?
• …a religious construct?

The truth, of course, is that it is some combination of all three.  For the purposes of my explanation, however, I’m going to bypass the religious aspect of this.  Two reasons for this:  a) Most of what can be said from the religious angle also applies to the societal angle, and b) Very few people view marriage as strictly a religious thing, and those who do aren’t going to be convinced by anything I’m going to say here.  There will be one side who says, “The <insert holy book here> says homosexuality is wrong, therefore…,” and the other side who says, “Religious people are morons, therefore…”  It’s not useful to argue with that audience.  So I’m going to focus on the legal and societal aspects here.

Let’s start from the beginning.  Look at the history of marriage and its foundations.  What was its original purpose?  Quite simply, it was a societal construct designed to set the foundation for two people to start a family.  It did have some legal ramifications, but it’s purpose was primarily societal.  A society does not need to recognize that two people love each other.  It does, however, need to recognize where the children are going to come from and who is going to be expected to take care of them.

From this perspective, the notion that marriage is an institution that has discriminated against gays from its inception is simply untrue.  The societal construct that is marriage simply has no meaning in the context of a same-sex relationship, because they cannot procreate.  That’s not religious homophobes discriminating against them, it’s just biology.

With the advent of adoption and artificial insemination over the years, many in the gay community feel this argument has been blunted somewhat, but I disagree.  Neither of these requires marriage, nor do they even require two people. Nor do either of these change the fact that two people of the same gender still cannot get together and create a third person that is part each of them.  It’s still a very special thing, and still the way most children come into this world.  More importantly, it is the centerpiece of what “marriage” really is.  I’m not against adoption of anyone by anyone, but it doesn’t significantly alter the argument.  The societal construct of marriage still doesn’t mean anything for a same-sex couple.

But what about the legal aspect?

It cannot be denied that over the years, marriage has developed great legal significance.  Tax laws, inheritances, insurance coverage, and many other aspects of life revolve around marriage now in ways that they didn’t even a couple hundred years ago.  And from this point of view, there is no difference between how these would affect a same-sex couple versus an opposite-sex one.  This is what the pro-gay marriage crowd is primarily fighting for.

So we’ve got one side that wants certain legal rights while the other wants to preserve the societal meaning of a millennia-old social construct.  These are not mutually exclusive goals.  There is a way we can give same-sex couples the same legal benefits that opposite-sex couples enjoy while still recognizing the societal difference.  That’s where the term “civil union” comes in.

The biggest problem with the term “civil union”, however, is that its definition is extremely nebulous and varies from one person to another and one state to another.  Part of the reason that same-sex couples in California are not satisfied with civil unions as opposed to marriage and are fighting it in court is that they are not legally equivalent.  They do still have something to gain by getting access to “marriage”, though the voters of California have rejected this.

What we need, therefore, is to define a standard for what a “civil union” should be, and explain why it is different from marriage.  Based on the descriptions above, the breakdown is fairly obvious:  Make civil unions a full legal equivalent to marriage, but with the recognition that a civil union is not societally equivalent, precisely because it cannot be.  Attempting to make a same-sex “marriage” equivalent to an opposite-sex one requires stripping away a very important component of what marriage is – one that is only relevant to an opposite-sex couple — which is the real reason so many people fight it.  This compromise preserves the societal significance of marriage while granting the same legal status to a same-sex couple.

Many of the same-sex community would still oppose this, but at that point, they would really be arguing over semantics.  Getting “marriage” over a “civil union” wouldn’t change anything for them other than making them feel better, their quixotic quest for universal acceptance be damned.  They would be better off realizing that shoving their views down our throats via activist judges and autocratic mayors hurts their cause much more in the long run than accepting a reasonable compromise such as this.

(As an aside specific to the NY Senate vote: while I do disagree with it, I’m not as bothered by it because this is how it is supposed to be done.  I’m very opposed to judges and others with authority circumventing the rules of our society to impose their will, but if the elected representatives of a state pass a law, then they will either meet with the approval of the people or have to face the music at the ballot box, which is how it should be.  Much of the reason that the Constitutional Amendment debates are happening right now is not so much in opposition to same-sex couples’ rights as much as it is in opposition to judicial activism — in short, the people are saying, “We’ll decide when we want this to happen, thank you.”)

Of course, the hardcore anti-homosexual crowd would oppose this, too, but that group is simply going to have to accept that homosexuality isn’t going anywhere, and whether or not they are going to Hell is their problem, not anyone else’s.

So to sum it up, we need to recognize that marriage is both a legal and societal construct, and recognize the significance of both.  Same-sex couples should have a means to access the legal aspects of marriage via civil unions, but should also accept the societal irrelevance of marriage to them and leave that part alone.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

With the death of Osama bin Laden, the media narrative is now that Obama’s re-election is assured in 2012.  This was even being said before bin Laden’s demise.  Looking at the numbers and trends, however, makes it clear that this is wishful thinking on the liberal media’s part.

Let’s start by breaking down what states are pretty firmly in each camp:

States Obama should win: CA (55), CT (7), DE (3), DC (3), HI (4), IL (20), MD (10), MA (11), NY (29), OR (7), RI (4), VT (3), WA (12).  Total:  168 electoral votes.

States Obama should lose: AL (9), AK (3), AZ (11), AR (6), GA (16), ID (4),  KS (6), KY (8), LA (8), MS (6), MT (3), NE (5)*, ND (3), OK (7), SC (9), SD (3), TN (11), TX (38), UT (6), WY (3).  Total: 165 electoral votes.

(*) – Nebraska splits its electoral votes by Congressional district.  Obama won district 2 by a very small margin in 2008, but I suspect he will not be so fortunate in 2012.  This is the only electoral vote that Obama got in 2008 that I’m granting to his opponent this time.

Of course, nobody is suggesting that either side should simply cede these states to their opponents, but it is logical to expect that these states will turn out this way.  The states that aren’t likely to be up for grabs are pretty close when you add it all up.  It helps that the red states gained 7 votes from the latest census (Texas gaining 4, Arizona, Utah, South Carolina and Georgia each gaining one, while Louisiana lost one), and the blue states lost 3 (two lost by New York, one each lost by Massachusetts and Illinois, while Washington gained one).

So this leaves 18 states “in play”:  CO (9), FL (29), IN (11), IA (6), ME (4), MI (16), MN (10), MO (10), NV (6), NH (4), NJ (14), NM (5), NC (15), OH (18), PA (20), VA (13), WV (5), and WI (10), a total of 195 electoral votes.  The Republican candidate would need 105 of these votes to claim victory, while Obama would need 102.  In 2008, McCain only won two of these states:  Missouri and West Virginia.  I suspect the next Republican nominee will do much better.

Why?  Well, let’s look at what’s been going on in these states lately…

2010 House, Senate And Governor Elections

Here’s a look at what happened in the 18 swing states in the major races in 2010…

(a)   – Election held in 2009

(b)  – Seat now vacant, as Governor Manchin won U.S. Senate race

No sir, that isn’t a pretty picture for Democrats.  All but 2 House delegations shifted right.  The Democrats held a majority in 15 of these House delegations coming into 2010, and they now hold 5, with Minnesota being even.  They lost 3 Senate seats in these states, while only holding 3 of the ones they were defending, and lost 9 governorships while only gaining one.  The only mild bright spots were Colorado, where the Democrats mostly won by default due to the Republicans messing up the Governor’s race, and Minnesota, which politically speaking, has always sort of been The Land That Logic Forgot.  (Being from Minnesota, I know this full well.)  And even in Minnesota, not all was bright and cheery, as we shall soon see.

So the major races didn’t look so good for the Democrats in 2010.  Maybe the good signs can be found in the state legislature races…

2010 State House and Senate Races

(a)   – Not all Senate seats are up for election each cycle in many states.  Swing indicates the change among number of seats up for election.

If there is any evidence of why Democrats should be optimistic heading into 2012, I’m not seeing it there, either.  This table pretty well illustrates just how massive a drubbing the 2010 election was.  The Democrats may have won the Governor’s race in Minnesota, but they got completely slaughtered in the state legislative races there.  New Hampshire was an even more massive shift to the right.  Ohio and Indiana had brief dalliances with the Democrats before deciding that they had had enough and went back to the right.  And Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – usually states won by the Democrats in national elections — all swept the Democrats out of office entirely.  Of the 36 governing bodies in these 18 states, Democrats currently control 9 of them, and only control both houses in 2 of them.  Oddly enough, one of those is in a state McCain won (West Virginia).

Well, there has to be some reason for Democrat optimism, doesn’t there?

Obama’s Approval Ratings

Obama’s approval rating must be the reason why Democrats feel good about the 2012 election, right?  Let’s take a look at a recent electoral map based on his approval rating.

Nope, try again.  Of the 18 swing states, Obama’s approval is only above water in two of them:  Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Predictions and Other X-Factors

So if the election were held today, which way would these states go?  Recall from above that Republicans need 105 electoral votes from the swing states.

Well, to start with, I do not see Obama winning any states in 2012 that he didn’t win in 2008.  So I’ll put Missouri and West Virginia on the red side.  West Virginia has a tendency to be Democratic at the state-level, but Republican at the national level, and Missouri seems to be getting more strongly red.  So that’s 15 votes.

Florida doesn’t look the least bit blue right now.  Indiana and Ohio are states that have usually been red, but temporarily shifted toward the left both statewide and nationally before shifting right back in 2010.  Virginia has gone hard right since 2008 as well.  And Obama only won North Carolina by 0.5% in 2008, and that has usually been more of a red state, despite its statewide legislative makeup.  That’s 86 more, for a total of 101.

This would mean that Obama would have to win every other swing state to get re-elected.  All of them.  Many of those states, such as New Hampshire, Maine and some of the Midwestern states aren’t looking great for him right now.  And every state among the swing states has shifted right to some degree.  Now, some of my projections above could prove to be slightly optimistic, but there is another X-factor.  The X-factor, of course, is the nominee.

Out of all of the leading Republican contenders right now, Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney are the only ones from traditionally blue states who have a realistic chance of being nominated.  Romney might very well take his home state of Massachusetts and possibly some of the Northeast, which would cripple Obama’s chances.  Pawlenty would almost certainly take Minnesota (we’re pretty loyal to our own – we voted for Mondale in 1984 when no one else would) and could bring Iowa and Wisconsin with him.  Personally, I worry that Romney could lose us more swing states than he would gain for us because of his very moderate nature, but I don’t think Pawlenty will have that problem.

That isn’t intended to be an endorsement of Pawlenty, per se (I’m actually more of a Herman Cain guy), but I do think it is worth noting that having Pawlenty as the nominee swings one state and possibly one whole area of the country that Obama simply cannot afford to lose.  Of course, any good conservative nominee with a good message should be able to win, and I’ll happily vote for any of them.

Conclusion

Everything here has to be taken with the notion that 18 months is practically forever in politics, and things could change drastically.  I’m not attempting to say that a Republican should cruise to election over Obama in 2012, either.  The point here is that if anyone can honestly look at the above and say that Obama is guaranteed reelection in 2012, I’d really love to try whatever drugs they are on.

I have a friend who is a high school teacher in Eau Claire, WI. She is very much on the liberal side of things, and is quite upset about the recent events in Wisconsin, as one might imagine given all of that. She linked to this blog from a fellow Eau Claire teacher named Joe on her Facebook page, and my thoughts on the matter were way too much for a comment response. And I realized they might make a good diary entry here, so let’s get to it.

Now I’m not going to bother dissecting things like his typical “Republicans only care about the rich and to hell with everyone else” economic view or his hopes that any Republican Senators in Wisconsin are going to get recalled (which has been nicely broken down here). Obviously, I don’t agree with a lot of what he says, but he’s a liberal and I’m a conservative, so that goes without saying. But I am going to say that to a large degree, I sympathize with the plight of teachers in positions like his and my friend’s. Yes, that’s right, I do sympathize with them. I simply feel they are blaming the wrong people.

One problem that we frequently have in this society is a tendency to over-generalize. Much like liberals group the “rich” people who run businesses and provide goods, services and jobs in the private sector with the “rich” people who inherited or married into their wealth so that they can play their “class envy” political games, some conservatives err in this example by grouping together the small-town teachers with the big-city teachers, or for that matter, grouping most of the teachers with the views of their union as a whole. Personally, I do not believe that my friend is overpaid for the work she does, and I doubt Joe is, either. We note that teachers, bus drivers and the like in cities like Milwaukee and Madison are making ridiculous sums of money, but that’s not the case for their counterparts in cities like Eau Claire. The question is: why?

Let’s start with a statistic: According to this Heritage blog, the U.S. is spending nearly $10,000 per student per year on K-12 education. That’s a hell of a lot of money. While I don’t know the specifics of the Eau Claire education budget, I’d be willing to bet that it is nowhere in the same realm as that.

The question the taxpayers are asking is this: “Where is all that money going?”

The answer, quite simply, is that it is being siphoned off by useless bureaucracies and union leaders at every level: federal, state and large metropolitan areas. This money fills public sector union coffers, which in turn, enriches their political allies, which is why they caterwaul every time someone suggests cutting down the size of government.

That being noted, here’s the dilemma: the local school districts in towns like Eau Claire, or my original hometown of Mankato, MN and the like, aren’t seeing this money, and they are by no means to blame for this. They aren’t the ones on the take, and they feel like they are being lumped in with the people who are the real problem. (In some cases, they aren’t even aware that there are people like them in other areas that make a lot more than they do, i.e. they don’t even know that there is a “real problem”.) On the other hand, it’s perfectly understandable that taxpayers are going to say, “We’re spending $10,000 a head per year on education. Why isn’t that enough?”

The analogy I like to use is that education is like watering a garden. Say the garden is 10 feet from the water spigot, but all we have is a 50-foot hose that has a bunch of holes in it. We turn the water on, and the water leaks out from all the holes in the hose, and hardly anything is coming out from the end we want. In this analogy, the garden is the schools, the spigot is the taxpayer money, and the holey hose is the massive bureaucracy the money has to get through before it gets to the schools. The liberal suggestion to solve this problem is that we need to increase the water pressure; but all this is going to do is cause more water to go through the holes and make the holes bigger. It’s not going to solve the problem, but it will make more money leak out the holes, which is fine with the liberal leaders. (In fact, that’s the whole point.) The conservative solution is that we should replace the hose with something shorter that has fewer (or preferably no) holes in it. This is why getting rid of a large, useless bureaucracy like the Department of Education and giving the money to the states makes sense. It would make the metaphorical hose 20 feet shorter.

Scott Walker doesn’t have that kind of power, however. All he can deal with is the state of Wisconsin, and that’s what he’s doing. He’s simply trying to repair the part of the hose that he’s responsible for.

“So what does that have to do with my collective bargaining rights?” complains the teacher.

The answer is that when unions and politicians put together a system to siphon money their way, they can’t be blatant about it, i.e. they can’t just sign up every government worker to six-figure salaries. That would be really obvious, and people would turn on them quickly. On the other hand, if that person makes close to the same base salary as their private sector counterpart, but pays little for his/her pension, practically nothing for health benefits, and gets to retire on a full pension before he/she turns 60, they really are getting a much sweeter deal, yet it isn’t blatantly obvious to the casual observer.  Then you compound it by putting those health care dollars into a bloated trust fund which costs Wisconsin taxpayers about $68 million per year more than shopping for insurance would (which further enriches the union bosses who administer the fund), and the corruption reaches new depths.

This is why Scott Walker and the Republicans took away collective bargaining “rights” for everything but salary: to make where the money is ending up more transparent. I use the term “rights” in quotation marks, because they actually are not rights; they are privileges that have been abused by union bosses and their political allies for years, and that’s why they are now being revoked. (By the way, did you know that federal workers have no collective bargaining “rights” at all? And guess who took them away? Ronald Reagan? No. Newt Gingrich? Try again. George W. Bush? Bzzzt. It was, in fact, everyone’s favorite arch-conservative – Jimmy Carter – who did that back in 1978.)

The final important facet of this little scheme is that it is a lot easier to hide where the money is going if the pile of money is bigger. That’s why the corruption gets bigger the higher up the food chain you go. This is also why a teacher in a city like Eau Claire wonders what all the fuss is about. The unions want to see as much education money as possible end up in large cities run by their political allies, as this increases their take. That’s why the lion’s share of the money ends up in Milwaukee and Madison, and in turn, not as much gets to smaller cities where the politicians aren’t always as reliable.

So in conclusion, let’s make sure that those of us on the right aren’t demonizing the wrong people. The union bosses, their “bravely bold Sir Robin” political allies and any teacher who decided to put their union before the kids in the classroom are definitely fair game. People like my friend in Eau Claire should not be grouped with them. However, I would also advise Joe in Eau Claire and people like him to realize that there really is a problem (though it isn’t you) and help us solve it.

With four days to go, let’s run down the outlook in Minnesota one more time.  I’ll do them in an order that can only make sense to a mind as disorganized as mine.  :-)

– Obviously Safe Democrat seats:  MN -04 (Betty McCollum) and MN-05 (Keith Ellison).  One would like to think that the ethically-challenged Ellison could be beaten, but it’s just too Democratic a district.  Ellison’s opponent, Joel Demos, has forced a little bit of Democrat money to be spent there, though, so we can thank him for that, as well as this good ad.

– Not-So-Obviously Safe Democrat seat:  MN-07 (Collin Peterson).  One would think that a Democrat in an R+5 district would be in at least some position to worry in this cycle, but Peterson seems to be immune to it.  A lot of this comes from the fact that he seems to subscribe to the rather odd notion that a member of the House Of Representatives should, you know, represent his district.  Peterson voted against both cap-and-tax and Obamacare, and that’s why Barney Frank is in more danger than Peterson is.

– Obviously Safe Republican Seat:  MN-02 (John Kline).  This is my home district.  If I wasn’t someone who actually paid attention to this sort of thing, I wouldn’t even have any idea who Kline’s opponent is.  I have seen precisely two signs for Kline’s opponent:  one was at the MN State Fair at the Democrats’ booth, and the other was in the window of the local Democrat election headquarters.  Kline’s opponent (in case you haven’t heard, and based on the publicity, she might not have heard, either) is former state representative Shelley Madore, who won the election for my state district’s seat in 2006, then lost it in 2008.  If you’re a Democrat who lost in 2008 — yeah.  Madore’s there because someone has to be.

– Safe-In-This-Cycle Republican seat:  MN-03 (Erik Paulsen).  Paulsen represents an R+0 district, so in a more heavily Democratic year, this might a race to worry about.  Not this year, though.

– Seats That I Am Lumping Together To Make An Offbeat Prediction:  MN-06 (Michele Bachmann) and MN-08 (Jim Oberstar).  So what in the world could these two seats possibly have in common?  Not much, really.  One is a powerful committee chairman, the other is a two-term incumbent who narrowly won against a political neophyte twice.  One is a darling of the conservative movement who was heavily targeted by the opposing party back when they still thought they could play offense, the other was about as safe as they come, having been in that seat since before your humble author was even born.  (Oberstar won the seat in 1974, while the man currently behind the keyboard was born in 1975.)  One is in a tight race right now, and the other isn’t — and it’s exactly the opposite of what you would have thought even as recently as three months ago.  Oberstar is getting a scare from Republican Chip Cravaack; at least one poll had Cravaack within the margin of error.  Bachmann, meanwhile, has been trouncing State Senator Tarryl Clark, a well-known proud tax-and-spend liberal who chose precisely the wrong cycle to try to run as a proud tax-and-spend liberal.  One of the Democrats’ biggest laments from this cycle will be all the money they wasted on this race.  While I’d love to see Oberstar lose, I believe he will still hang on, but here’s the offbeat prediction I alluded to:  Bachmann will win by more than Oberstar does.

– The Seat That’s Flipping:  MN-01 (Tim Walz).  I originally grew up in Mankato, which is right in the center of this district, and I have cousins who had Tim Walz as a teacher at Mankato West High School.  He seems to be a decent fellow by all accounts.  But as a representative of this R+1 district, he’s pretty much the exact opposite of Collin Peterson — a Pelosi lapdog.  As fellow southern Minnesotan eburke has pointed out here, Walz is one of those guys who talks a good conservative game at home before doing the opposite in Washington.  He takes his veteran status and NRA endorsement and tries to fool people into thinking he’s a conservative.  He was able to get by with it in 2006, when incumbent Gil Gutknecht got caught up in the Abramoff scandal, as well as in 2008, when he had no serious challenger in a Democrat wave year.  But now that he has the dual millstones of Obamacare and cap-and-trade around his neck, he’s ripe for the picking, and Randy Demmer is just the man to do it.  When the upcoming Crimson Tide became apparent, Demmer finally started getting some well-deserved attention, and his fundraising has been very good going against Walz’s big union war chest.  The only poll I’ve seen on this race had Walz up 46-41, but the poll used a 2006 turnout model.  Not likely this time around.  Demmer will restore this seat where it belongs.

– Oh Yeah, Don’t Want To Forget This Race:  Governor (open, current Governor is Tim Pawlenty).  This is a three-way race between Democrat and former U.S. Senator Mark Dayton, Republican Tom Emmer, and Independence Party candidate Tom Horner, a former RINO.  Horner is obviously not going to win, and any dropoff in his numbers will likely benefit both Emmer and Dayton equally, so we’ll ignore him.  As much as I like what I’ve seen from Emmer, this race is ultimately about Mark Dayton, heir to the Dayton-Hudson fortune.  Aside from the money, Dayton’s biggest advantage is his name recognition, and his biggest disadvantage is, well, name recognition.  He was a Senator from 2001-2006, and was about as useless as my nipples.  (Still a slight improvement over “Acting Senator” Al Fraudken in that at least he wasn’t a complete embarrassment to the state.)  He even gave himself an ‘F’ for his time there, not running for re-election.  But now we’re supposed to believe that he would somehow be more competent as a Governor?  We’ll just have to wait and see what the voters say.  Oddly enough, even though Minnesota hasn’t voted Republican in a Presidential election since 1972, we also haven’t had a Democrat in the Governor’s mansion since 1990.  Will Minnesota continue to be contrarian, or will the Crimson Tide be enough to carry Emmer to victory?  I’m predicting the latter, and by just enough to avoid getting Frankened.

See you at the polls!

Like most of you here, I’ve kept a watch on Neil Stevens’ Swing-O-Meter and his various poll-based projections. (Always a worthwhile read, Neil.) And like many of you, I also have enjoyed watching more and more names mount and shift right on Cook’s Political Report. Being a numbers guy myself, I thought it would be fun to create my own gauge for what kind of swing the Republicans might end up with this time around, so I have come up with the 90-50 formula.

We start with the current version of Cook’s House Projections. As has been noted before, Cook is notoriously hesitant to shift any race with an incumbent beyond “Toss-Up”, which means that when he lists a race as such, there is much more than a 50% chance that the other side is going to win the race. And if you believe what you read from many other sources, many of the “Lean D” races are quite competitive, with some polls indicating a Republican lead. As for the Republican side, Charles Djou’s seat is at worst a toss-up for us (recent polls show him leading), and there is no seat that is currently listed as “Lean Republican” that looks like an upset. So we’ll leave those out.

So the formula works out like this: 90% of “Democratic Toss-Ups” will shift, 50% of “Lean Democratic” will shift. Add to that any seat that Cook has already placed on the other side, and you have your number.

So let’s see what we end up with:

Democrat Toss-Ups: There are currently 46 of them. 46 * 90% = 41.4, so we’ll round down and say 41 of these seats shift.

Leans Democrat: 28 Democrat seats fall into this category. 28 * 50% = 14 seats.

R seats leaning D: There are 3 of these (IL-10, DE-AL, and LA-2).

D seats leaning or likely R: There are 17 in the “Lean R” column, and 6 more in the “Likely R” column, for a total of 23.

So to sum it all up:

Toss-ups: 41
Leans: + 14
R to D: – 3
D to R: + 23
——————-
Total: 75 seats

That seems like a good number to me. Feel free to play along at home when Cook’s next report comes out.