Fiscal Cliff

[hrothgar]

I repeat:

 

 

gerry mandering in this case..today

 

 

often

 

but it dont matter I repeat it dont matter

 

 

gop lost

 

 

dems won

 

 

give it up and they make policy

 

 

I said strawman

 

Wish I could tell whether this was some kind of bizarre avant gaurde version of poetry or incipient dementia...

 

The reason that this issue is significant is the the GOP membership of the House is claiming that their electoral success demonstrates that there is widespread support for their obstructionism in the country.

The Democrats claim that their success in 2012 reflects GOP favorable redistricting following the 2010 elections.

 

FWIW, I have major issues with gerrymandering, whether is is being done by the Democrats in Illinois or the Republicans in North Carolina. I hope that California's experiments work well...

[WellSpyder]

Wish I could tell whether this was some kind of bizarre avant garde version of poetry or incipient dementia...

Surely worth a nomination for one of our award categories. Most elegant insult, perhaps....

[mycroft]

The Republican strength has always - at least since Reagan - been a single point of focus. They may argue amongst themselves about what to do (*), but once it comes time to vote, they vote party line even if it's wrong. The Democrats are so much more likely to vote against caucus that what this means is that over the last 20 years the Republicans *could* say "**** you, we're going this way" and often enough, get away with it, as they get enough Red Ds (or people like Sen. Feinstein (D-MPAA)) to follow along.

 

However, they seem to believe that that is the Natural Order of Things, and can't actually see any other way to do it. Obama's Democrats are getting better at working this way, too - try to get what is right in your eyes in committee, but whip up and vote Blue at roll call. Especially now, when the Republicans have stopped even trying to hide their "my way or I take my ball and go home" tactics from the sheep voters.

 

I happen to think that the "vote your conscience" thing is an *advantage* of the U.S. republican system over the British-style parliamentary system. But it is sensitive to gaming, and here we are. Until the games stop, or at least slow down to use in normal "this is heinous, and can not stand" situations, both sides will have to game to make clear that this won't work.

 

With luck, this will clear up, and the Republicans will stop equating "we need to compromise" with "you need to agree with us". Or, you know, they could be routed around as a source of damage and become irrelevant.

 

(*) usually, at least in the past, behind the scenes. One of the interesting things since the Rise of the Tea Party is that it is seemed to be safe to have these discussions in public. I think that that arrogance stems from the same "Natural Order of Things" feelings. I don't think it's in the Republicans' best interest (even though more transparency is likely in the country's best interest).

[nigel_k]

The Republican strength has always - at least since Reagan - been a single point of focus. They may argue amongst themselves about what to do (*), but once it comes time to vote, they vote party line even if it's wrong. The Democrats are so much more likely to vote against caucus that what this means is that over the last 20 years the Republicans *could* say "**** you, we're going this way" and often enough, get away with it, as they get enough Red Ds (or people like Sen. Feinstein (D-MPAA)) to follow along.

The right tends to be more united than the left in most countries I have observed. There are more ways to spend other people's money than there are to not spend it.

[phil_20686]

FWIW, I have major issues with gerrymandering, whether is is being done by the Democrats in Illinois or the Republicans in North Carolina. I hope that California's experiments work well...

 

To my mind, all procedures for deciding districts are equally absurd? Why should we feel limited by geography? That is so pre-post-modern. :P

 

But seriously, all that is notable about the US gerrymandering is how unsubtle it is. You could easily have been a bit more subtle about it. You can gerrymander perfectly well just by controlling the council for housing zoning, create a nice ghetto in the middle of your left win areas, and when people move there you can swing a large number of nearby marginal right wing seats due to a decreased number of poor people in those areas. :)

 

Or you can do the opposite. Other good tricks include: Scheduling construction work in opposition voting districts during voting, making sure that planning permission for train lines goes through marginal seats, as it tends to bring an influx of young professionals.....

 

I guess in the UK we have just had a few centuries more to practice. :)

[hrothgar]

To my mind, all procedures for deciding districts are equally absurd? Why should we feel limited by geography? That is so pre-post-modern. :P

 

But seriously, all that is notable about the US gerrymandering is how unsubtle it is. You could easily have been a bit more subtle about it. You can gerrymander perfectly well just by controlling the council for housing zoning, create a nice ghetto in the middle of your left win areas, and when people move there you can swing a large number of nearby marginal right wing seats due to a decreased number of poor people in those areas. :)

 

Or you can do the opposite. Other good tricks include: Scheduling construction work in opposition voting districts during voting, making sure that planning permission for train lines goes through marginal seats, as it tends to bring an influx of young professionals.....

 

Comment 1: Gerrymandering has a specific definition. It specifically refers to changing the geographic boundaries that define a district. The mechanisms that you are describing would certainly change the characteristic of a district, but they should not be described as gerrymandering.

 

Comment 2: The reason that gerrymandering is a particular concern is the speed with which it happens. Most of the techniques that you are describing take decades to play out. The individuals that would (potentially) benefit will be long gone. Long lived institutions (like the political parties) often don't have enough information to make this kind of fine grained adjustment. In contrast, here in the US we have a census once ever 10 years. Immediately after the local parties get to go haywire. Things have gotten a lot worse now that there are nice little software packages that let you optimize the district boundaries.

[kenberg]

Life is short, and we cannot become expert in all areas, so often I decide things on the basis that if something feels stupid, and gerrymandering definitely feels stupid, it probably is stupid. Perhaps interestingly, it seems that the result of gerrymandering is not a district where everyone thinks the same politically but rather a district where just enough people do so. I guess this is practical, given the objectives.

 

I had no idea how conservative the area I was moving into is. The schools are pretty decent but they do sometimes mention evolution so a fair number of parents home school. As a result of the recent gerrymandering, I am now in the same congressional district as my older daughter. She lives in one of the most highly educated areas of the U.S. Of course a Ph.D. is not, very definitely it is not, an inoculation against nonsense, but I don't think that there are many evolution deniers there. More to the point of the reorganization, there aren't that many Republicans there either. So my conservative neighbors have been sort of forcibly re-located into Chris Van Hollen's district where they have zero chance of defeating him. I guess some other more liberal areas of the state were then stuffed into my former district, with the successful intent of ousting the Republican congressman Roscoe Bartlett.

 

Well, it worked. And I guess that is the criterion. I don't know if mathematics is simpler than politics, but it is a lot more pleasant.

[hrothgar]

Life is short, and we cannot become expert in all areas, so often I decide things on the basis that if something feels stupid, and gerrymandering definitely feels stupid, it probably is stupid. Perhaps interestingly, it seems that the result of gerrymandering is not a district where everyone thinks the same politically but rather a district where just enough people do so. I guess this is practical, given the objectives.

 

This a gross oversimplification, but in general the objective is to

 

1. Create as many districts as possible that your side can win by a small margin

2. Pack as many of the opponent's supporters into regions that they will win by an overwhelming margin.

 

In general, when people are drawing up districts they often include objectives like: Don't split the following town across multiple districts. I am starting to believe that "compactness" should be the overriding consideration.

[Zelandakh]

I am starting to believe that "compactness" should be the overriding consideration.

Shouldn't "fairness" be the overriding consideration? Shouldn't everyone's vote be equally valuable? Perhaps the problem is the Districts themselves - larger consituencies tend to make for more reliable results so one answer would be to designate Representatives within a State using some form of proportional representation. Naturally this could never happen over there.

[hrothgar]

Shouldn't "fairness" be the overriding consideration? Shouldn't everyone's vote be equally valuable?

 

I have an algorithm that will generate "compact" districts.

It is relatively simple. The code can be inspected. It is easy get people to agree what compact means.

 

If and when you can do the same for "fairness" I would be more than happy to have a discussion regarding the relative merits of the two approaches.

[phil_20686]

I have an algorithm that will generate "compact" districts.

It is relatively simple. The code can be inspected. It is easy get people to agree what compact means.

 

If and when you can do the same for "fairness" I would be more than happy to have a discussion regarding the relative merits of the two approaches.

 

I would guess that it is best to try to minimise the total length of all boundaries, subject to all districts having roughly equal numbers of people. I am not sure if that is what you mean by "compact".

 

I don;t actually think making each vote equally valuable should be a particular concern, it seems unachievable, and i'm not sure its even a good idea in principle. Democracy often suffers from a tragedy of the commons.

 

 

 

[hrothgar]

I would guess that it is best to try to minimise the total length of all boundaries, subject to all districts having roughly equal numbers of people. I am not sure if that is what you mean by "compact".

 

 

It is (Though I would spell minimise with a "z")

[mycroft]

The right tends to be more united than the left in most countries I have observed. There are more ways to spend other people's money than there are to not spend it.

Heh, since when was the right in any country loath to spend other people's money? The right just doesn't want to spend other people's money on "other people".

 

And in the United States, that's only more so. Look at the spending/deficit graphs for the last 50 years.

 

And I live in Alberta, otherwise known as Republican North. They're very happy to spend other people's money. What's worse is that they're very happy to "spend" the provinces non-renewable resources and environment by selling it off very cheap to the oil companies - and, if you count old-growth forest as non-renewable, the timber companies as well. And we're running a fairly large deficit, and there's lots of talk about "spending money they don't have", but by God we aren't going to talk about raising resource rates or taxes - "we could lose jobs" (and by that we mean "we could lose *our* jobs").

 

I just might be more liberal than some.

[dwar0123]

There are some serious idealistic downsides with going towards electing representatives proportionally. You lose the concept of having your own individual local representative. This is a powerful concept.

 

However, with the extreme form of gerrymandering that exists today, with a large portion of the population being intentionally disenfranchised, that concept is already lost. You are not grouping similar people with similar concerns so that they can elect a representative to represent them. You are grouping people in such an absurd and bizarre ways that has nothing to do with their local political identity but rather with the numerical count that each party can achieve at the national level.

 

Idealism be damned, not worth having to put up with this absurd reality, fully support going towards electing representatives proportionally. The reality is that this will probably actually better serve local politicians better, as you wouldn't be able to dilute their chances by splitting their political base into multiple districts.

[Bbradley62]

Shouldn't "fairness" be the overriding consideration? Shouldn't everyone's vote be equally valuable? Perhaps the problem is the Districts themselves - larger consituencies tend to make for more reliable results so one answer would be to designate Representatives within a State using some form of proportional representation. Naturally this could never happen over there.

In fact, we do quite the opposite. Even before state legislatures began aggressively redefining congressional lines to maximize their majority-party's chance of winning more seats, many legislatures created majority-black districts in response to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in an attempt to increase African-American representation in Congress. It worked; in 1963, there were 5 black Congressmen and now there are over 40. But, if your state is 12% black (the national average) and you create a majority-black district by gerrymandering all of the black neigborhoods together, you end up with several lily-white districts. If you want Congress to "look like America", you have to do some gerrymandering to create majority-minority districts. Getting carried away with the gerrymandering is another matter...

[kenberg]

I guess what would suit my inclinations would be the adoption in advance of some specific algorithm to reorganize districts to reflect the census. We could, for example, produce an algorithm now that would be used after the 2020 census. And we would use that same algorithm after the 2030 census. Once this algorithm is agreed to, it would be use regardless of the demographic make-up of the resulting districts. Compact, as Richard suggests, wouold be good but the main thing is that boundaries would change because of population changes but the algorithm would not be jimmied for political ends. As far as "looking like America" is concerned, I don't like the concept. I am positive that I have far more in common with a randomly selected black female mathematician than I do with some white guy who claims women can't get pregnant from (legitimate, whatever that means) rape.

 

There is way, way, way too much discussion of the white vote, the black vote, the male vote, the female vote, etc. Back in the 1948 movie State of the Union, a political adviser is telling Katherine Hepburn about the importance of the Polish vote:

 

Hepburn: I thought that the Poles voted in Poland

Political adviser, condescendingly: I am referring to the Polish-Americans

Hepburn, innocently: Oh, can you be both?

 

I know that political analysts have to think about the X vote, they get paid to do so. The rest of us are free to think otherwise. Quite a few of us do.

[helene_t]

There are some serious idealistic downsides with going towards electing representatives proportionally. You lose the concept of having your own individual local representative. This is a powerful concept.

Not really. You can have transferable votes. In Denmark (and probably many other countries) you have propotional representation combined with locally elected MPs. The downside is that only people with a masters in political sciences understand how the system works.

 

I am not sure if locally elected MPs is a good thing, though. Young urban people tend not to identify with the neighbourhood they happen to live in at the moment, and besides I am not sure if you want to have MPs that worry more about being popular with their own district than working for the country's good. I think the way to bring politics closer to local community is to give locally elected councils and mayors more autonomy.

[Bbradley62]

I know that political analysts have to think about the X vote, they get paid to do so. The rest of us are free to think otherwise. Quite a few of us do.

The City of Sandy Springs, GA was created in 2005, in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. WIth 94,000 residents, it is Georgia's 7th largest city. Roswell Rd is the major surface street that runs up the middle of the city, and is the high-density (read: lower income apartments and condos, and probably-not-coincidentally heavily minority) area.

 

The City founders were very proud of themselves for drawing the six city council districts such that each of them had 22% minority residents; a small piece of Roswell Rd went into each of the six districts. Not surprisingly, all six districts are represented by someone who comes from the majority, affluent part of the district. Having been to several of the council meetings, I can tell you that no one on the council thinks that he/she represents the people who live on Roswell Rd.

 

While I certainly agree that recent gerrymandering has run amok, I think it is clearly desirable to have lines drawn such that (when reasonably possible) each significant portion of the population has representation in the governing body.

[akwoo]

Here's my proposal, which allows everyone to have their own representative, wastes no one's vote, and uses modern technology.

 

Every voter designates a proxy in Congress. All bills are decided by one citizen, one vote, but voters only vote through their proxy. If a politician gets 2.5 million voters to designate him or her as their proxy, that politician gets 2.5 million votes on every piece of legislation.

 

To prevent Congress from getting too big, and also to prevent very small groups from having too much power as a result of bargaining on close votes, anyone who is a proxy for less than 0.1% of the total census population actually gets no votes.

 

Voters can change their proxies at any time, with effect the next day. Each voter must actually re-designate their proxy (i.e. actually vote) every two years.

 

Any action of Congress can be delayed for two weeks (to be decided on a specific day approximately two weeks hence) by a 40% minority; they can try to convince enough voters to switch their proxies in the meantime.

[Cthulhu D]

The right tends to be more united than the left in most countries I have observed. There are more ways to spend other people's money than there are to not spend it.

 

It's not that at all - it's that the blue collar unions are in with the environmentalists, the civil rights guys, people opposing police powers and such and they all want different things. Building a coalition is trickier. The right has fewer groups comprising it and thus a more cohesive ideaology. The fact that the right is typically more authoritarian helps as well. The problem becomes of course when winning your demographics stops being enough to actually win - the left is practised at getting the hispanic vote to work togther pro abortion activists, the right.. well, just go to freerepublic.com to see what the right thinks about working together with hispanics or pro abortion activists!

 

The City of Sandy Springs, GA was created in 2005, in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. WIth 94,000 residents, it is Georgia's 7th largest city. Roswell Rd is the major surface street that runs up the middle of the city, and is the high-density (read: lower income apartments and condos, and probably-not-coincidentally heavily minority) area.

 

The City founders were very proud of themselves for drawing the six city council districts such that each of them had 22% minority residents; a small piece of Roswell Rd went into each of the six districts. Not surprisingly, all six districts are represented by someone who comes from the majority, affluent part of the district. Having been to several of the council meetings, I can tell you that no one on the council thinks that he/she represents the people who live on Roswell Rd.

 

While I certainly agree that recent gerrymandering has run amok, I think it is clearly desirable to have lines drawn such that (when reasonably possible) each significant portion of the population has representation in the governing body.

 

Yeah, this points partly to why purely alogrithmic approaches don't quite work. It is logical to group together communities of intrest, like the people who live on a bay or whatever. If you are intrested in purely alogrithmic approaches, someone has done this for the US already: http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html

 

It also includes some awesome gerrymanders like Florida's 22 and 23 districts which were purely desired to waste the votes of as many democrats as possible. See also Texas and Illinois.

[kenberg]

If people agreed on the goals then they could probably figure out the mechanism. I did not mean that a totally mindless algorithm should be used. You can group for various geographical features, and in fact it would be natural to do so. Basically, I think that the mechanism for redrawing boundaries to reflect changing population density needs to be worked out well in advance of the population shifts. Say a region is growing, now, in 2012. So you work out something now about how the lines will be redrawn after the 2020 census. Something like "We will move the Western boundary further out far enough in so that the district will still contain the appropriate percentage of the state's population. You do this now, before you know just where the new people will be moving in, what their political allegiance will be, what their race and religion will be, etc. Then you let nature take its course.

 

It's not this simple, I know that, but if we could have agreement that we will try to have advance planning for redistricting to respond to changes in the size of populations rather than the make up of populations, and by advance I mean absolutely as advanced as possible, I think the situation could be brought under reasonable control.

 

This, something like this, could work, if the people closest to the process had a sense of civic responsibility. Unfortunately....

[y66]

Fiscal Cliff Cast: Jack Lew, White House Chief of Staff

 

From a December 2010 story

 

Now a boyish 55 years old, half a lifetime ago Mr. Lew was a remarkably young lieutenant to Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the proud Irish-Catholic New Deal Democrat, as Mr. O’Neill repeatedly battled and compromised with President Ronald Reagan and a Republican-led Senate in the 1980s. Among their deals was the 1983 law preserving Social Security by reducing benefits and increasing payroll taxes, and the 1986 tax code overhaul.

 

“Even to this day, when I talk with Jack, he’s one of the few people who understand the personality of the Congress,” said Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who was a Democratic congressman in the 1980s and, in the 1990s, Mr. Clinton’s first budget director and later his chief of staff.

 

Yet through all the years and back-room politicking, Mr. Lew has maintained a bipartisan reputation as a straight-shooter.

 

He “knows how to deal, and his word is good as gold,” said Billy Pitts, the top House Republican leadership aide in the 1980s.

 

Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, long the Senate Republican leader on budget issues, said he rejected Mr. Lew’s request for the traditional courtesy call before Mr. Lew’s Senate confirmation vote because “I didn’t need to have him waste his time.”

 

“I’m a fan,” Mr. Gregg said. “Obviously we don’t have the same philosophy but that doesn’t matter. He is a pragmatist.”

[Zelandakh]

But, if your state is 12% black (the national average) and you create a majority-black district by gerrymandering all of the black neigborhoods together, you end up with several lily-white districts. If you want Congress to "look like America", you have to do some gerrymandering to create majority-minority districts. Getting carried away with the gerrymandering is another matter...

Let's say that a State has 10 Representatives. Rather than defining 1 majority African-American district, 9 lily-white districts and ignoring Hispanics completely you could instead elect all 10 Representatives based on the votes they get throughout the State. If all A-As vote for a given A-A candidate they will have directly elected a minority Representative without having to rig the system to make it work. This is an example of how larger constituencies of multiple Representatives usually result in a more representative set of Representatives being elected than small constituencies of single Representatives. The downside is the loss of a direct link with a small community, although as Helene points out there are ways of overcoming this issue to some extent. Of course, an A-A may feel more affinity with an A-A Representative living across the State than with their "local" Representative; the same being true of any other grouping you may care to mention.

[helene_t]

This, something like this, could work, if the people closest to the process had a sense of civic responsibility. Unfortunately....

This is one more reason why you really need to get rid of this single-representative-district system and switch to PI. It should be even more obvious in a country like the US in which mobility is so high so that people are less likely to identify with their district.

 

The single-representative system is probably the only posibility for the UN general assembly because it would be impossible for all the member countries to agree on a common election system. But for entities with a uniform political system (i.e. countries) I don't think it has much merrit.

 

It is probably not going to get changed, though. PI would mean that the two main parties would lose influence so virtually all currently elected politicians would oppose it.

[y66]

Krugman posted this today:

 

In today’s column, I tried to emphasize a point that is weirdly absent from public discourse, at least among VSPs: the favorite VSP “solution” to the long-run budget deficit, raising the Medicare eligibility age, actually yields only minor savings. The point is that if you want to control Medicare costs, you can’t do it by kicking a small number of relatively young seniors off the program; to control costs, you have to, you know, control costs.

 

And the truth is that we know a lot about how to do that — after all, every other advanced country has much lower health costs than we do, and even within the US, the VHA and even Medicaid are much better at controlling costs than Medicare, and even more so relative to private insurance.

 

The key is having a health insurance system that can say no — no, we won’t pay premium prices for drugs that are little if any better, we won’t pay for medical procedures that yield little or no benefit

 

But even as Republicans demand “entitlement reform”, they are dead set against anything like that. Bargaining over drug prices? Horrors! The Independent Payment Advisory Board? Death panels! They refuse to contemplate using approaches that have worked around the world; the only solution they will countenance is the solution that has never worked anywhere, namely, converting Medicare into an underfunded voucher system.

 

So pay no attention when they talk about how much they hate deficits. If they were serious about deficits, they’d be willing to consider policies that might actually work; instead, they cling to free-market fantasies that have failed repeatedly in practice.