Troutmaster

Elections

This past Tuesday we had elections all across the United States. I hope everyone went out and made their voice heard. I went out and voted (as always) and I saw that some of the stuff I voted for won, while other stuff lost. The important things to me were Prop 87 (I voted yes), and all the bonds that we had on the ballot for California. Interestingly enough, I heard that the supporters of Prop 87 (clinton, gore, wacked out celebrities, etc...) had spent roughly $50 M promoting it while those against it (oil companies, firefighters, etc...) spent roughly $100 M against it. On top of that my cynical side thinks that gas prices went down leading up to the election in an effort to keep us from being so mad that we would vote for Prop 87. In the end it lost 55 percent to 45 percent which means that roughly $150 M was spent to accomplish absolutely nothing. Think about it, that could be $150 M worth of school funding, 6000 Toyota Priuses (150M/25k = 6k), 25k Vespas (150M/6k = 25k), you get the idea, but instead it went to advertisers and celebrity parties. That is a shameful waste. On the bond measures I voted no on all of them because I didn't think it was a good idea to increase California's debt load to pay for roads and other important things. If they are important enough then we should either raise taxes (blasphemy, yes) or find a way to fund it in our current budget. Instead of raising taxes by $2 B to pay for something we are going to take out $2 B worth of bonds and then pay $4 B over the life of the bonds paying them back. How smart is that? Plus, we'll probably have to raise taxes later to pay off the bonds since the debt load has gone up significantly. But at least we didn't raise taxes right now... And on the national level the Dems took over the House and the Senate. Good for them. As a card carrying Republican I understand that this stuff goes in cycles and what doesn't kill us will make us stronger. And it is good to have fresh blood in the leadership every now and then. The biggest complaint I have about us having had the presidency and control of congress is that we didn't accomplish enough. We had the power to get substantive changes made (medicare, social security, immigration, terrorism, etc...) but we didn't and instead complained about the dems. We got what we deserved. We'll see how Dubya works with the Dems now that he can't get a rubber stamp on his agenda.