Broken Income Distribution System

This is a nice display over time of the percentage of national income received by the top decile (tenth). So why should the top 10% receive half of all national income? Because they are so productive? So essential to the economy? Because they make so many things? If you believe any of those explanations, you've never met one.

These are the real moochers, parasites or leeches. Our economy worked better when the top decile received only about a third of the national income.

Even that is a disproportionate reward for what they contribute to society.

We should so manage our economy as to promote general prosperity, not to promote increased concentration of wealth at the top. It works better that way.

Do We Have A Broken Election System?

Today's New York Times has an editorial addressing how to fix a broken election system.

Some of the ideas make sense and some of the comments are especially pertinent.

On the other hand, relatively few of the problems identified by the NY Times affect elections in North Carolina.

In Pamlico County, our election system is not broken. It functions quite well. Can it be improved? Yes.

Our voter turnout exceeded the state average - 71% for Pamlico County; 68% for the state of North Carolina. We make it easy for voters to cast their ballots by conducting early voting for longer hours, having many voting locations (ten polling places for 9600 registered voters), and having well-trained election officials.

Unlike other locations in North Carolina and around the nation, we had no long lines. Most of the time, the longest wait was about five minutes. We did have printer breakdowns at two locations, and the line grew to about half an hour at Arapahoe until we installed backup equipment and procedures to keep the lines moving.

A major factor in our success has been thorough planning and preparation. That happens because we have a superb Director of Elections: Lisa Bennett. Pamlico County is fortunate to have her.

More On The Dust Bowl

I was born in Oklahoma in 1937, near the end of the Dust Bowl period. I was a couple of hundred miles east of the Dust Bowl, in Tulsa. By the time of my first memories, about 1939, the Dust Bowl catastrophe was abating.

In 1949, I was in the eighth grade in a rural school east of Oklahoma City. As a part of our elementary school curriculum, eighth grade boys had to take a course in agriculture. I think the girls took home economics.

We boys learned about measures to take to control erosion by wind and water. We learned about planting wind rows of trees between the fields to moderate the wind. We learned about contour plowing and crop rotation, and natural methods of controlling agricultural pests. We learned about use of natural fertilizer and the benefits of using legumes, including alfalfa, in crop rotation. Legumes fix nitrogen in the soil and reduce the need for artificial fertilizers.

All of these methods were put into place out in the Oklahoma panhandle, and the dust bowl began to subside.

But it came back. In 1950 and 1951, whenever there was a sustained wind from the west, we would have vast sand storms in Oklahoma City. The storms would dim the sun and occasionally mid day would look like late evening. This was the beginning of another period of drought that lasted seven years.

In June of 1954, I flew from Denver to Tulsa by way of Amarillo and Oklahome City. Our twin-engine Convair flew low enough that I could see drifts of sand across Southeast Colorado, Eastern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle and Western Oklahoma. The sand piled up at each fence corner.

It looked pretty grim.

By 1957 the drought was over.

New Research: Velociraptor Resembles A Turkey

As you sit down tomorrow to feast on turkey, bear in mind that our holiday bird is about the same size and appearance as the Velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame.

Here's the story.

Pamlico County Elections Wrapping Up

Yesterday was the deadline for any candidate to request a recount. There was no such request for any candidate for a Pamlico County office.

Today at 5:00 was the deadline for any election protest concerning irregularities (other than counting of votes - that protest deadline was November 16). No such protest was received for any Pamlico County contest.

The statutory date to begin to issue certificates of election to winning candidates is November 22. Since that is Thanksgiving day, we will hold off until next week.

The Dust Bowl

The past two nights, public television broadcast Ken Burns' new documentary on the Dust Bowl. Very powerful!

The dust bowl was a man-made ecological disaster. Billed by PBS as the worst ecological disaster in American history, I am not entirely convinced. I think we have made equally destructive ecological disasters, just not as concentrated in geography and time.

The most powerful aspect of the movie was the in-depth interviews with dust bowl survivors, all children at the time. Their recollections are moving and revealing. Much of what they have to say might caution us about the new disasters we are creating in climate, in wetlands, by contributing to sea level rise, etc.

The movie is worth watching again and again.

Election Wrap Up: Getting Close - No Statewide Recount

Last week, there was still a possibility of a statewide recount of the race for Lt.  Governor. According to press reports, the margin between the two candidates was small enough to allow a request for a recount. There was also the possibility of a court challenge to NC provisional ballot procedures, and the possibility of a request for copies of the cover of all provisional ballots with non-public records (drivers license, social security number and date of birth) redacted. Responding to such a request would be a large undertaking.

This morning, we received notice from the State Board of Elections that Lt. Governor candidate Linda Coleman has decided not to seek a recount and has asked that her public records request of last week be withdrawn. There will be a few district and county recounts, but so far as we know, there will be none involving Pamlico County.

As an aside, my observation is that, given the procedures and equipment used in North Carolina, there is little likelihood that any recount will result in a different outcome.

House Of Representatives Problem

D.R. and M.D., writing in The Economist blog Democracy in America, take issue with Speaker Boehner's claim that the American people have given the House of Representatives a mandate by electing a Republican majority. They point out that the American people gave more votes to Democratic candidates for the house than to Republican members and attribute the Republican majority to successful gerrymandering: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/congressional-representation-0?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/callvotersuppression

Their blog post is interesting, because it addresses a number of problems with some of our historical assumptions about representation. The main issue the blog post addresses is that the maldistribution of seats in the house.

The authors do point out that "It is not the first time that a party has won a majority of seats in the House despite receiving fewer votes than its rival. Mr Gingrich’s team won re-election and a 26-seat majority in 1996, on 47.8% of the vote to 48.1% for the Democrats. In 1942 Sam Rayburn managed to attain a 13-seat majority for the Democrats in the mid-terms, even though his party won 46% of the vote to the Republicans’ 51% (small wonder that Rayburn holds the record as the longest-serving speaker). But rarely does it produce such a skewed result as we've seen in the House this year."

Actually, Sam Rayburn's accomplishment is less impressive when you realize it took place in an era before the Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Carr which established the principle of "one person, one vote." In other words, each member of Congress must represent an approximately equal number of citizens. That was not the case in 1942.

D.R. and M.D. tentatively suggest proportional representation as a way to avoid this problem, and then quickly back off because it would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

I'm not so sure. The Constitution doesn't even mention Congressional Districts. There may be ways without such an amendment.

I posted some thoughts on the subject last May:

Some of the ills of congress are built into our constitution. The US Senate, for example, which likes to characterize itself as "the world's greatest deliberative body" is arguably the "free world's" least democratic body. That is, first of all, a consequence of the constitutional arrangement that each state, regardless of size or economic output, have an equal number of senators. This is compounded by the increasingly inexplicable commitment of the senate to the requirement of a supermajority of senators to pass any legislation at all. My solution to that: get rid of paper filibusters imposed by the cloture rule. Let's go back to "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" style of filibuster. Filibusters would become more rare because voters could see what was happening and better understand what it was about.

Some republicans want to fix the senate by repealing the seventeenth amendment providing direct popular election of senators. What, we have too much democracy?

A common complaint about the House of Representatives is "My representative doesn't listen to people like me."

Some advocate term limits to fix this. I say, we already have term limits. Elections. What we don't have is enough representatives.

We are going through redistricting right now. This is the process after every decenniel census (except for the 1920 census - there was not a reapportionment after that census). First Congress reapportions seats in the House of Representatives to the states according to population. District boundaries are then redrawn by state legislatures and in some cases by courts.

Contrary to popular opinion, the number of seats in the House of Representatives is not in the Constitution. But the number has not changed since it was set at 435 in 1911. At that time, each member of the House represented about 216,000 citizens. Since then, our population has more than tripled, but the number remains the same. Now each member represents about 708,000 constituents.

My suggestion: enlarge the House so that each member represents about 216,000 citizens. With modern communications systems, that would allow the members closer communication with constituents. It would also lower the financial and organizational barriers to running for office. It might reduce the influence of money in politics and even create opportunities for more political parties to become competitive.

How many representatives would we have? About 1,426. Admittedly, that might make the body even more unwieldy, but it might just as well force more cooperation. It would certainly induce representatives to be more responsive to constituents.

How could we accommodate so many representatives? Replace the desks on the floor of the House with benches. Reduce representatives' personal staffs. Currently, members are allowed to hire as many as eighteen personal staffers. Reduce that to five per member. Representatives might have to study bills themselves, possibly answer phones and write some of their own correspondence. But they wouldn't have to raise so much money.

Originally Posted May 29, 2012 

Note: I would actually prefer proportional representation. Failing that unlikely outcome, a possible (but not necessary) consequence of enlarging the House might be to increase the possibility of third (or fourth...) parties. It might at least make it harder to have the kind of lock step voting patterns we see on the Republican side of the House today.