Know-nothing politics
Sep. 21st, 2023 07:42 amSomebody came to the door yesterday canvassing for a City Council candidate. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere answered the door, and the conversation was over before I even knew anybody was there, but he left a business card.
Which says "Crime Taxes Inflation [parking icon] [school icon] [house icon] ... is 2 damn high! Fix the government! [anger icon]" and then contact information including affiliations with the Republican and Conservative Parties. (New York State law allows cross-endorsement, so multiple parties can nominate the same candidate if they wish; the candidate's name appears multiple times on the ballot, once for each recognized party that nominates the candidate, and you can pick which version of the candidate to vote for).
So as far as I can tell, the candidate's platform, boiled down to a business card, is "there's too much crime, too much taxation, too much inflation, too little (or too expensive) parking, bad schools, something something housing, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!" Problem is, crime is actually down over the last two years. Taxes are up at the Federal level over the last two years, because the Republican tax cut of 2017 came with a five-year expiration date for ordinary people (although the tax cuts for billionaires and corporations were permanent), and I don't think they've changed appreciably at the state or city level. Inflation is down considerably over the last year, now well below its post-WWII average of 3.7%. (CPI Aug 1945=18.1. CPI Aug 2023=307.026. Ratio=16.96, whose 78th root is 1.037.) So some of these complaints aren't actually true, at least no more so than usual; they're just the standard things people complain about, unmoored to objective reality.
More tellingly, fixing any one of these problems makes the others worse. For example, if you cut taxes, people have more money to spend, which drives up inflation. If you build more parking, that costs the government money so it has to raise taxes, and it takes land that might have been used for housing, so the cost of housing goes up. If you make schools better, that costs the government money so it has to raise taxes, and more people want to live in your neighborhood so the cost of housing goes up. The usual way to reduce inflation is to raise interest rates, slow down the economy, and increase unemployment (which the Federal Reserve decided not to do yesterday, but presumably will at least once later in the year).
And although a City Council member might have some influence over parking, schools, and housing, the same can't be said of the problems that the candidate called out by name (crime, taxes, inflation). So no, I don't take this candidate seriously.
shalmestere answered the door, and the conversation was over before I even knew anybody was there, but he left a business card.Which says "Crime Taxes Inflation [parking icon] [school icon] [house icon] ... is 2 damn high! Fix the government! [anger icon]" and then contact information including affiliations with the Republican and Conservative Parties. (New York State law allows cross-endorsement, so multiple parties can nominate the same candidate if they wish; the candidate's name appears multiple times on the ballot, once for each recognized party that nominates the candidate, and you can pick which version of the candidate to vote for).
So as far as I can tell, the candidate's platform, boiled down to a business card, is "there's too much crime, too much taxation, too much inflation, too little (or too expensive) parking, bad schools, something something housing, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!" Problem is, crime is actually down over the last two years. Taxes are up at the Federal level over the last two years, because the Republican tax cut of 2017 came with a five-year expiration date for ordinary people (although the tax cuts for billionaires and corporations were permanent), and I don't think they've changed appreciably at the state or city level. Inflation is down considerably over the last year, now well below its post-WWII average of 3.7%. (CPI Aug 1945=18.1. CPI Aug 2023=307.026. Ratio=16.96, whose 78th root is 1.037.) So some of these complaints aren't actually true, at least no more so than usual; they're just the standard things people complain about, unmoored to objective reality.
More tellingly, fixing any one of these problems makes the others worse. For example, if you cut taxes, people have more money to spend, which drives up inflation. If you build more parking, that costs the government money so it has to raise taxes, and it takes land that might have been used for housing, so the cost of housing goes up. If you make schools better, that costs the government money so it has to raise taxes, and more people want to live in your neighborhood so the cost of housing goes up. The usual way to reduce inflation is to raise interest rates, slow down the economy, and increase unemployment (which the Federal Reserve decided not to do yesterday, but presumably will at least once later in the year).
And although a City Council member might have some influence over parking, schools, and housing, the same can't be said of the problems that the candidate called out by name (crime, taxes, inflation). So no, I don't take this candidate seriously.
