[Hiltzik replies here. Note my comment, which points out that he didn’t read what I wrote.]

[Note the update below…]

My esteemed colleague (can you tell I was listening to the Alito hearings?) Michael Hiltzik has a column up in the Los Angeles Time business section today (he is the business columnist, after all) in which he explains that the Governor’s budget proposal can only be made fair by – wait for it – raising the income taxes on the highest-income Californians.

Other groups drafted to subsidize the wealthy include the disabled and poorest of the poor. The governor wants to delay a cost-of-living increase due next year for recipients of supplemental security income by 18 months, to July 2008. These recipients are, by definition, needy seniors, the blind, and the disabled. The proposal would deprive them of a total of $233 million, keeping the money for the general fund, over two budget years.

Another $307 million would be saved for the rich by withholding cost of living increases, or COLAs, scheduled to be paid to recipients of CalWORKS grants. The recipients generally are poor families with children.

My first post on Hiltzik dinged him for making exactly this argument back in November of 04.

The problem with doing this is that California is already highly dependent on high-income filers, and their income is variable.

In 2003, (the last year that the FTB has an Annual Report for -note, pdf) the top 5% of filers paid 58.8 of the personal income tax.

Since the personal income tax represented $33.7B of the $73.6B in revenues in the 03 budget, high income filers represented 58.8% of 45.8% of the budget, or 26.9% of the annual budget.

Since this represents 680,000 returns of the 13.6 million filed, it’s fair to say that half a million households provide about a quarter of the revenue to the state.

I think this is an amazingly bad idea. I don’t think that this is a bad idea because it’s unfair to the half-million rich households. I think it’s a bad idea because it builds insane levels of volatility into the state revenue stream.

Looking back on 2003 again, we note a few interesting things (go to page 14):

Exhibit Table B-1 Comparison by Taxable Years shows that, from taxable year 2000 to taxable year 2002, the total Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) declined from $829.5 billion in 2000, to $754.1 billion in 2001, to $731.2 billion in 2002, or an overall reduction of 11.9%. Consequently, the amount of personal income tax dollars deposited to the General Fund declined by 29.2%, from $40.4 billion in taxable year 2000, to $31.3 billion in 2001, to $28.6 billion in taxable year 2002.

The numbers of returns reporting incomes of $200,000 and above also declined between taxable year 2000 and 2002, as illustrated by the following table:

2000 = 414,746
2001 = 371,369
2002 = 349,845

There’s your fiscal crisis right there.

There’s an interesting research project, for someone with more time than I have, to decompose the state revenues for the past decade and really get to the bottom of this.

But by following Hiltzik’s plan, the state is in the position of a farmer with one cow. As long as the cow is healthy, all is well. But as soon as the cow gets sick…

Now taxing the hell out of the Malibu Mafia to pay for improving healthcare for the poor emotionally hits the all the right notes for me (I’m the Armed Liberal, remember). But I’m grown-up enough to notice that what feels good emotionally doesn’t necessarily make for good policy.

I wrote up some notions on tax policy back a few years ago. The notions are kind of wacky, but at least they make more sense than those Hiltzik proposed in our regional paper of record.

Hiltzik does make several other points in the column; the core is that we can’t do all the things we need to without some measure of “fiscal pain.” Since his previous columns have suggested that spending is fixed (or must grow) the fiscal pain he has in mind is simple – raise taxes. And particularly, raise taxes on the half-million.

That’s not fiscal pain, that’s fiscal suicide.

States don’t make spending decisions nimbly. There is very little in the state budget that can readily be cut back midyear when times get tough. And I won’t even talk about the farcical inability of the legislature to even pretend they are fiscally responsible.

Update: Check out the Legislative Analyst’s document on revenue volatility to get a sense of how significant a problem it is here in California.
–

Rocket scientist Duncan Black points with thoughtless glee to the fact that the Iraqis are – a month after their election – trying to work out a government.

Start Wearing Purple

Um, just asking, but it’s been almost a month since the Iraq election and we still don’t know what the final outcome is?

Not that he’s forgotten it – I mean how many national elections cause people to rend their garments for years on end – but what exactly were the headlines in the New York Times like on December 5, 2000?

The politics (and society and economics) of Iraq are far messier than I wish they were. Reality is kind of like that.

And there’s debate about what’s going on and what to do that’s worth having. But because everything in BlackWorld is filtered through one lens – “How can it help my bosses at Media Matters kick the Republicans out” – we get a characteristic cheap shot instead, and a reminder of why it is that Duncan – and to and extent the masters who pay him to blog – aren’t useful participants in that debate.

I genuinely wish they were. Bummer, I guess.

Over on the Global Voices list, two things worth of note.
They are proposing legislation which would make repressing information on the Internet more difficult, as follows:

* No US company would be allowed to host e-mail servers in a ‘repressive’ country (as defined by a State DSepartment index of freedom of speech); this would require that legal moves to obtain email content or identity would have to be done in US courts.

* No search engine hosted in the US would be allowed to block a list of key words like “freedom” and “democracy.”

* No US Internet company would be allowed to host servers originating content in a repressive country.

* No US company would be allowed to sell filtering technology without holes for the above list of protected words.

* Exports of Internet surveillance technology would require a Department of Commerce approval (much like weapons).

* Training foreign nationals in techniques to censor or surveil on the Internet would require Department of Commerce approval as above.

Personally, I can think of some highway-sized holes in this, and that the likelihood of something like this passing Congress – and the standing up in the courts – is vanishing small. But these aren’t bad principles at all, and I’d love to see some way of pushing toward them.

Microsoft and Yahoo are very bad corporate citizens for what they have done, as is Cisco (and I’m sure a host of other Internet names). As I make purchasing (and surfing) decisions in the future, I’ll be keeping that in mind.

I’ll make a suggestion; local governments (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berkeley come to mind here in California) are notorious for wanting to pass symbolic foreign-policy measures. Here’s one that could have some real impact: Don’t buy products from vendors who do bad things for freedom. Any local activists want to take this on?

Next, there’s also a discussion in which pro-free expression activists are uncomfortable accepting aid from Spirit of America, which is perceived as problematic because of its ties to the Bush Administration and some unfortunate conflicts of interest by the founder.

I’m generally supportive of SoA and the Bush Administration, so that kind of falls on deaf ears here, but I’ll suggest a broader and simpler rule when deciding on projects and allies:

“When we’re done, will more people’s voices be freely heard?”

Kind of a one-step test.

I’m just swamped, as Humperdinck once said; work, family, a major house project, and a production of the Ring (that I actually have very little to do with except worry about).

But that’s not necessarily a good excuse.

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin dings us, as I think he should have, for not mentioning the Administration’s bizarre decision not to fund Iraqi reconstruction in the current cycle.

There may be a valid and reasonable explanation for it that I just haven’t seen (if you’ve got it, please feel free to put it into the comments); but just as I noted on the NSA issue, it’s horrible optics at a time when appearances matter a lot. And that’s forgetting the very real and negative consequences of projects that won’t get done because there are no funds for them.
I don’t get it. I think that Bush is a masterful politician who has badly misplayed the domestic hand on the issue of this war. I can’t help imagining that a President more worried about victory, and less worried about midterm political advantage could have coopted much of the Democratic Party and left the Kossacks out on a limb by themselves. But we go to war with the President we’ve got, as they say.

We’re involved in card game where the size of our poke matters; as soon as it becomes obvious that we lack the political means to see the game out and simply outsit the other bastards in the game, we’re likely to lose very damn quickly.

Losing in this case would, I believe be catastrophic (I know there are some who will disagree).

So it matters a lot that we not only plan stick it out, but are widely seen to plan to stick it out.

That doesn’t speak to exact troop levels, or the mechanics of our negotiations with the various factions within Iraq. But a few hundred million more right now would send the clear message that we’re in the game, for the rest of the night, and not counting our chips and nervously looking at our watch.

I’ve seen am important part of our role here as keeping the President’s butt in the chair, and I certainly don’t think that now is the time to stop.

OK, I take back everything bad I’ve said about the L.A. Times.

They’ve just put up a laudatory article about the Ring production I’m peripherally involved in, so they’ve bought a bunch of goodwill. Until Hiltzik writes something silly again.

Call it an opera-tizer. With an intimate, condensed version of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle, Long Beach Opera aims to please purists and tempt the wary as it ushers in a series of Southland stagings of the saga.

Yes, it’s a “Ring”-let, a pocket “Ring,” the Short Cycle, the Semi-Cycle. And the condensation — which will be performed twice in its entirety, in English instead of German, over two weekends, next Saturday and Sunday and Jan. 21 and 22 — is, of course, a great way to Ring in the new year.

But then, untold opera fans have deemed “The Ring” a life-enhancing experience since 1876, when it was first performed in its entirety at the theater in Bayreuth, Germany, that Wagner built specifically to showcase it.

So I guess I’ll keep my subscription for another month or so…seriously, click over to the Long Beach Opera website, and if you have any interest at all, order some tickets. There aren’t many of them, and I think with this it will sell out.

Democratic blogger Josh Marshall is wondering about the tepid Democratic reaction to Abramoff.

As a political party, you can’t run on corruption if you’re not running for reform. But as near as I can tell there is no Democratic reform proposal in Congress. Maybe this or that representative or senator has some proposal, but nothing that the opposition party in any way, as a whole, has gotten behind.

So where’s the plan?

Today, the Democrats made a proposal – for an investigation.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat, said lobbyists had multiplied by the thousands in recent years to the point where there were now 63 of them for every lawmaker. She said they were using their campaign donations to influence policy and even write laws.

Slaughter called on the House ethics committee to investigate corruption cases involving lawmakers with links to Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who pleaded guilty this week in a U.S. corruption probe.

“The House ethics committee, after a year of inaction, must get to work immediately to investigate pending ethics and corruption cases in the House, including those involving members with ties to Jack Abramoff,” she said in the Democrats’ weekly radio address.

Let me make a few suggestions. I do think that this is an opportunity for the Democrats – as the party out of power – to make a stand. I don’t delude myself enough to believe that they will make enough of one to radically change the dysfunctional, corrupt system in place.

But there is an opportunity to make things better.

How do they get enough public support? Simple. Make it clear that it is a sea change in the way the Democrats do business, and that it isn’t simply a convenient stick to get Democrats closer to the trough.

Start by picking the most corrupt members of the Democratic party and busting them.

John Moran (D-MBNA) comes immediately to mind.

Once they show a willingness to clean their own house, they’ll own the political high ground and will be able to make a case that what they are interested in is drying up the rivers of cash, not just getting themselves a bigger spot on the bank.

Michael Yon, the citizen-journalist, has a call out on his website for volunteers.

…what I can do is provide the groundwork to assemble a group of retired military personnel who can read the stories, with their radar for embellishment and operational security set high, and select which submissions to publish. Over time, a more comprehensive and accurate picture of what is happening on the ground can emerge.

The Veteran Volunteers would need to organize themselves, as I will neither moderate nor provide any assistance other than making a forum available. A few key volunteers can assist with building the virtual organization that will be need to be in place before we can issue that Call for Stories.

Now is the time to Call for Volunteers. There will be no reward for anyone other than to know that important information is flowing, and that our troops on the ground will finally have their own voice in a forum that is widely read. It is important that the volunteers have much military experience so that they can better judge what sounds credible and most important to publish.

If you meet his requirements, drop him an email at michaelyonmagazine@hotmail.com with “Volunteer” in the subject line.

I can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

I just saw it. I’d blogged about him two Veterans Days ago, and tried to explain the impact that learning his story had on me.

In case you’ve forgotten, he was the hero of My Lai – arguably the darkest day in the history of the modern U.S. military.

He put himself and his men between American troops and the villagers they obviously intended to murder. He threatened American troops with his own crew’s weapons, and arranged for the other helicopters in his flight to evacuate a group of villagers, and then for his own crewman to rescue an uninjured small child from a pile of bodies.

When he returned to base, he reported the massacre; his reports were covered up.

On the worst day in modern history for the U.S. military, a few soldiers covered themselves with honor.

As I noted in the post, reading his story changed my attitude toward the U.S. military, and indirectly, probably started me on the part to where I am today.

I owe him an immense debt, both personally and as a citizen.

[Note the update at the bottom.]

I wasn’t nearly hard enough on Michael Hiltzik (at least I can try and spell his name correctly – I guess I’m missing my four layers of editors).

I read Part Two of his – there’s really no other word for it – venomous screed, and a few phrases just leapt out at me. Here are some highlights from both parts…

“conservative blogger who calls himself Patterico”

“a remarkable 11,000-word work of propaganda”

“Self-congratulation is a common characteristic of partisan blogs, like snouts on dogs.”

“Among those who have made it their personal business to ferret out “liberal bias” at the Los Angeles Times—the existence of which bias I have in the past described as an “ignorant partisan trope””

“As any student of history knows, these are tools and techniques that were used to great effect during the Stalinist show trials of the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

“Whether deliberately or by sheer indolence”

“reveling in ignorance of one’s subject”

“a chorus of mendacious commentary and rhetorical cant.”

“Uncritical readers, wishing to have their ignorant preconceptions reinforced without straining a brain cell, are no doubt gobbling it up.”

“how easily they can be punctured”

“it takes more time and effort to deflate a lie than to propound it in the first place”

“proved upon inspection to be similarly gaseous”

“to make his case stick he requires an uncritical, credulous audience that will repeat his claims endlessly without bothering to examine them”

“then there’s a juvenile tone to much of Frey’s posting”

“who combines a conservative viewpoint with an incoherent style of argument”

Go read both of the parts yourself. Take a few moments, this’ll still be here.

For now, I’m going to skip over the substantive arguments he presents – which I’ll suggest are as full of holes as Emmenthaler – as an exercise best left to Patrick, others, or myself if I’m bored this weekend.

But I want to go back to Hiltzik and the Journalist In The Hat in my original post. What’s flatly missing from Hiltzik’s piece?

Hmmm. Respect for his opponent, for the dialog, for the essentially political (as in the praxis-laden) relationship between you and someone you’re arguing with. Instead, Hiltzik means to drive Patterico from public dialog, to shame him into silence.

That’s contemptible. Ironically, Hiltzik made the same accusation toward me, in the first email he sent me after I criticized him and compared him unfavorably to Dan Walters:

“I just had the pleasure of reading your post on Winds of Change.net, which indicates you want to take away my job for speaking the truth. Nice.”

I didn’t really want to take his job away then, but I’d say that I do now.

Here’s why.

I’m a member of a mailing list for Global Voices, out of the Berkman Center at Harvard, which attempts to encourage local folks to blog both as a way of communicating within their own communities and to bring the events in their communities to wider attention.

Recently, there was a mild discussion on the list (it’s a list that encourages polite yet passionate interaction) about what the media choses to cover – 12 miners dead in West Virginia, or 200 dead in a mudslide in Java?

This showed up in my inbox (posted with the permission of the author):

From: Kevin Anderson-Washington XXXXXXXXX@bbc.co.uk
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 16:30:18 -0000
To: XXXXXXXXX@eon.law.harvard.edu
Subject: RE: Best of Both Worlds Continued

OK,

I’ve been meaning to contribute to this discussion because I come from the mainstream media world – the other world so to speak. And the editor of the programme I work on at the BBC World Service, Mark Sandell, has been following this discussion.

Our programme has asked several of you to join us to talk about what is going in your part of the world, and we use Global Voices as a way to broaden out our agenda. What stories are you talking about that we should be aware of?

I still am considering my thoughts about the ways in which blogs and traditional media complement each other. I definitely am not of the view of an adversarial relationship between bloggers and traditional media although being from the US, I have definitely seen this in action.

But, I just wanted to flag up a little note from our editor Mark Sandell, about our thinking in covering stories. We had a discussion yesterday about the mining tragedy in the US, although we expanded this to deal with mine safety elsewhere, including China and South Africa. We had a lot of e-mail comments about why we weren’t covering the landslides in Java or returning to cover the plight of quake victims in South Asia.

Mark posted his thoughts here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/world_have_your_say/4584506.stm

Right now, it’s at the top of the page, but it will shift to the middle after our day-end update. Look for the Note from the Editor. Let me know what you think. We’re trying to be more open about why we do what we do.

best,
k

Kevin Anderson
BBC World Service and Five Live

Notice a difference in tone?

I’ve slagged the Beeb on this blog in the past few years, but count me a fan if this is the direction they are moving in – of engaging their audience, offering up discussion of the hard choices they make in covering stories, and accepting transparency (and, inevitably, accountability – you can’t be visible and not be accountable).

Let’s go back to the Journalist In The Hat. What I said then was:

Then I went to Brian’s party, and met a journalist (sadly didn’t get his name or affiliation).

I’ll skip over his arrogance and rudeness; he was in a hostile environment, and maybe he was nervous. But watching the discussion, I realized something that brought the Times issue into clearer perspective for me.

…that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other’s points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.

Because that’s his job…to talk. And ours is, of course to listen.

Let’s listen to Kathleen Parker, whose bio says:

Kathleen Parker has contributed to more than a dozen newspapers and magazines during her 20 years as a journalist. She began her twice-weekly commentary column in 1987 as a staff writer for The Orlando Sentinel. After entering into syndication in 1995, her column rocketed in popularity and now appears in more than 300 papers nationwide.

Here’s what 20-year journalist Kathleen says:

Schadenfreude – pleasure in others’ misfortunes – has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog. When someone trips, whether Dan Rather or Eason Jordan or Judith Miller, bloggers are the bloodthirsty masses slavering for a public flogging. Incivility is their weapon and humanity their victim.

I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people out there – professors, lawyers, doctors, philosophers, scientists and other journalists who also happen to blog. Again, they know who they are. But we should beware and resist the rest of the ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction.

We can’t silence them, but for civilization’s sake – and the integrity of information by which we all live or die – we can and should ignore them.

“ego-gratifying rabble”?? Where do I get my membership card?

The point of both Hiltzik’s plaintive whine and Parker’s outburst is simple – we’re trained professionals, dammit! Where’s your respect? And pull up your pants! (apology to Dennis Leary)

Frey can’t possibly be a useful of effective critic of the Times because – wait for it – he doesn’t have the depth of experience in doing daily journalism with the pressure! and stress! and hard choices that entails.

When bloggers criticized CBS News for trying to tank an election with fraudulent documents, the goal wasn’t to set the record straight, it was to embarrass the practitioners in the media.

When I criticize my betters in the media, I’m marking myself as “rabble,” and fit best to be ignored by people of substance.

What a pile of crap. Get over yourselves.

Co-blogger Trent once suggested that I was out of my depth in criticizing Bush’s strategic planning for the War on Terror – “The net assessment of national security requirements and its translation into grand strategy is a highly specialized field of academic study who best practitioners are currently working on or are consultants for the National Security Council and the Department of Defense,” Trent said. My reply was simple:

…the genius of the American system is that there certainly are experts on game theory, diplomatic history, and policy who have substantive and valuable expertise in these areas.

And they all work for guys like me. Our Congress and our President are typically business men and women, lawyers, rank amateurs when it comes to the hard games that they study so diligently at ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration). And that’s a good thing, in fact, it’s a damn good thing.

Michael Hiltzik and Kathleen Parker work for me, and for folks like me. It’s our eyeballs that sell the ads, and the advertiser money and our twenty-two fifty a month (or whatever it is) that puts food on their table.

I don’t ask for obsequiousness. But – like the waiter at the trendy WeHo restaurant who finally gave me too much attitude, at which point I asked him to come over and quietly told him:

“I’m paying to eat here and you’re being paid to work here. I’m not going to ask you to kiss my ass, but I’m going to tell you to start treating me like a human being” – Hilzik and company need a swift, enlightening, Zen-master slap to the head to get them to open their eyes.

In a way, I’m sorry for them. For hundreds of years, the guild they are members of had the only megaphone in town. Now, they’re one of many, and they will stand or fall not on whether they’ve made it into the club or not, but on what they do, and – most important – on how they manage to make the change from monologuing to having dialog with other human beings.

Kevin Anderson gets it. Michael Hiltzik doesn’t. Unless he starts to, I’d say the Kevin Andersons will wind up working for the Times instead. And we’ll all be better off.

[Edited title.]
[Update: In comments, Patterico is concerned that I want to see Hiltzik fired. No, certainly not because of his rudeness or this interaction. I’ll suggest that there are better business columnists out there, but the core of my point is that people with attitudes like Hiltzik’s to their audience are a) not the future of media; and b) damaging to the parent brand.

I’d love to see Hiltzik step out of his bubble (denoted in part by his blogroll) and join the rest of us rabble in a conversation about the issues important to him.

I’d also love to have an intimate dinner with Uma Thurman, which may be slightly more probable (TG says is she shows up at the door, I get to go, in case you’re concerned).]

(after I was gone…even the figures in scandals are younger than I am nowadays…), and somewhere there is a post or two in riffing on the notion of how little my cohort has done with the advantages we were dealt. Instead we got the kind of tawdry Babbitry Abramoff so ably represents…

But this post isn’t about that, it’s about the rare opportunity this presents to those of us – Democrat and Republican alike – to try and crack the deathgrip that law bought and sold has on our national politics.

The GOP – that bastion of strict morality, values, and propriety – is reduced to the plaintive “she did it too” of a five-year old caught hitting his sister in the back seat of the family car. The Democrats, with their own cast of bagmen, are left saying “we may have got millions from his clients, but he only gave his own money to Republicans!”

They’re both pathetic and shameless, and somehow the one thing I’d like to see is the reintroduction of shame into our national politics. Or better still, the reintroduction of people capable of feeling shame into national politics.

Let’s identify a few of them and start supporting them.