Last week, I highlighted nine ballot initiatives that were worth watching because of their policy implications and/or their role is showing whether voters wanted more or less freedom. The results, by and large, are very encouraging. Let’s take a look at the results of those nine votes, as well as a few additional key initiatives.
1. The big spenders wanted to impose an income tax in the state of Washington, and they even had support from too-rich-to-care Bill Gates. The good news is that this initiative got slaughtered by a nearly two-to-one margin. I was worried about this initiative since crazy Oregon voters approved higher tax rates earlier this year. In a further bit of good news, Washington voters also approved a supermajority requirement for tax increases by a similar margin.
2. Nevada voters had a chance to vote on eminent domain abuse. This is an initiative that I mischaracterized in my original post. The language made it sound like it was designed to protect private property, but it actually was proposed by the political elite to weaken a property rights initiative that the voters previously had imposed. Fortunately, Nevada voters did not share my naiveté and the effort to weaken eminent domain protections was decisively rejected. This is important, of course, because of the Supreme Court’s reprehensible Kelo decision.
3. California voters were predictably disappointing. They rejected the initiative to legalize marijuana, thus missing an opportunity to adopt a more sensible approach to victimless crimes. The crazy voters from the Golden State also kept in place a suicidal global warming scheme that is driving jobs out of the state. The only silver lining in California’s dark cloud is that voters did approve a supermajority requirement for certain revenue increases.
4. Nearly 90 percent of voters in Kansas approved an initiative to remove any ambiguity about whether individuals have the right to keep and bear arms. Let that be a warning to those imperialist Canadians, just in case they’re plotting an invasion.
5. Arizona voters had a chance to give their opinion on Obamacare. Not surprisingly, they were not big fans, with more than 55 percent of them supporting an initiative in favor of individual choice in health care. A similar initiative was approved by an even greater margin in Oklahoma. Shifting back to Arizona, voters also strongly rejected racial and sexual discrimination by government, but they narrowly failed to approve medical marijuana.
6. Shifting to the local level, San Francisco, one of the craziest cities in America rejected a proposal to require bureaucrats to make meaningful contributions to support their bloated pension and health benefits. On the other hand, voters did approve a proposal to ban people from sleeping on sidewalks. Who knew that was a big issue?
7. Sticking with the ever-amusing Golden State, voters unfortunately eliminated the requirement for a two-thirds vote in the legislature to approve a budget, thus making it even easier for politicians to increase the burden of government spending. The state almost certainly is already on a path to bankruptcy, and this result will probably hasten its fiscal demise. Hopefully, the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives will say no when soon-to-be Governor Brown comes asking for a bailout.
8. The entire political establishment in Massachusetts was united in its opposition to an initiative to to roll back the sales tax from 6.25 percent to 3 percent, and they were sucessful. But 43 percent of voters approved, so maybe there’s some tiny sliver of hope for the Bay State.
9. Louisiana voters approved an initiative to require a two-thirds vote to approve any expansion of taxpayer-financed benefits for government employees. With 65 percent of voters saying yes to this proposal, this is a good sign that the bureaucrat gravy train may finally be slowing down.
At the risk of giving a grade, I think voters generally did a good job when asked to directly make decisions. I give them a solid B.
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[…] Two years ago, I highlighted nine key state ballot initiatives and happily reported about a week later that voters generally chose to limit statism. […]
[…] scheme palatable. Only the very richest taxpayers would have been affected. But Swiss voters, like voters in Washington state earlier this month, understood that giving politicians more money is never a solution for any […]
[…] scheme palatable. Only the very richest taxpayers would have been affected. But Swiss voters, like voters in Washington state earlier this month, understood that giving politicians more money is never a solution for any […]
Jim, for your explanation to be plausible, it would mean that the people of California voted down Prop 19 because of their pro-business concerns. Is that really likely?
I chalk it up to the Hispanic vote, rightly, realizing that all the extra marijuana that would pour into the country would do so to the benefit of Mexican drug gangs. With Mexico on the verge of becoming a narco-state due to trafficking, it is well past time to think of marijuana and other imported illegal drugs as being in any way “victimless”. Ask the family of the guy whose face was sewn onto a soccer ball if narco-trafficking is “victimless”. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34774234/)
It might be better to have a national law legalizing pot, but until there is a legal and sufficient supply in the US, legalizing pot is just handing money to some of the worst, most-vile and violent gangsters on the planet.
So barely a day after the electorate signals that perhaps the macroeconomic manipulation policies of taking from Peter, wasting half of it, and giving the other half to Paul, is perhaps not a productive economic policy,
an unelected agency shrugs it all off and decides to pass Stimulus II,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703506904575592471354774194.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories
Does it really make that much of a difference whether you spend money that you borrow or money that you print? In either case you spend money that is above and beyond your long term productivity trendline. In either case you are spending money against exceptional future production.
But where is this above average future production going to come from when incentives to produce keep decreasing, as the consequences of not producing are being blunted, while the burden (taxes) for engaging in high value work keeps increasing?
The most virulent of the welfare state viruses has already infected the US: Obamacare. There is little chance of repealing it before 2014, the year when this virus comes out of its incubation period and creates the greatest dis-incentives to be productive in a few generations. That is the year where a lot of suckers who insist on making more than 88K per year will pay for those who choose to drop their incomes below that level. Such a progressive invitation to create less wealth is rare in the developed world, even in the European Welfare states.
Meanwhile 3 billion people are going from once dismal, to now moderate incentives to produce and are springing up like a long squashed coil
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575462770053958664.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews
http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/14/news/international/china_gdp/index.htm
Whereas the 0.3 billion people of the US are going from once good incentives to produce to now ever more blunted incentives to produce:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/30/AR2010073000806.html
So good luck USA!
Convergence to the worldwide average standard of living will come much-much sooner than most Americans anticipate.
How many investors and foreigners, and for how long, are going to be fooled by these macroeconomic gimmicks of taking from one pocket, wasting some, and then putting the remainder in the other pocket? That is the 15 trillion question and the next (perhaps “The Mother of All” this time) crisis.
To take an analogy from astronomy, will the US fade away as a red giant star (a sustainable low growth European style welfare state) or will it collapse on its core to blow up like a supernova? In astronomy at least, big stars tend to become supernovas… (and California, the trendsetter, is already collapsing on its core – alas, perhaps after a couple more iterations of what Dan calls the “Mitchell Rule”).
So which one of the two decline scenarios will the US follow? In some ways the second one may hold better hope for a Phoenix like re-generation.
Utter interesting post…. As for global warming, I think it is still too early to expect the total discredit of the co2 demonizing pseudoscience because it seems the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) will continue on bringing some warm in the northern hemisphere until about 2015… One can read that here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/02/the-atlantic-ocean-via-the-amo-drives-the-apparent-%e2%80%9cglobal-warming%e2%80%9d/#more-27337.
On can read there too that that the warming was esentially in the Northern Hemisphere and it is related to the AMO i.e. to the heat contained in the Atlantic Ocean.
So we may go for a few years with low sea ice in the northern (arctic ocean) as this page shows http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/.
So mainstream media and academia will go on alarming people with such low sea ice in the north while CONVENIENTLY ignoring, as if Antarctica was in another planet, the INCONVENIENT TRUTH that Antarctic sea ice had RECORD highs recently…
But I think we will get somehow a repeat of the Dickens winters thank to unsually low solar activity, as in the early 1800s… and thanks to that maybe the total discredit of their pseudoscience may come a little sooner.
Regarding your apparent support of Medical Marijuana initiatives: can you explain to me why -for medical purposes- marijuana should be handled any differently than any other prescribed drug? We don’t get to vote on whether we want to have medically prescribed codeine or morphine. Why is it any different for marijuana? Why aren’t we picking it up at the pharmacy if there are legitimate medical reasons to prescribe? What’s the justificaiton for special pot dispensaries instead? etc
3. Maybe California voters were more aware of what was proposed than you guess.
According to Patterico the wording of the proposition would have made it impossible to fire anyone who used marijuana, even if it was on the job.
“No person shall be punished, fined, discriminated against, or be denied any right or privilege for lawfully engaging in any conduct permitted by this act or authorized pursuant to Section 11301. Provided, however, that the existing right of an employer to address consumption that actually impairs job performance by an employee shall not be affected.”