Random Thoughts About Ballot Questions
1. This would repeal sales tax on alcoholic beverages. The idea seems to be that it is somehow meaningful that alcohol is subject to two taxes rather than one. If the idea were that alcohol should not be treated differently from other consumer goods, then you'd want to repeal the excise tax. The notion that the number of taxes is somehow significant beyond the actual rates being levied is kind of silly.
There is an argument that the higher taxes cost jobs. This is basically a dumb argument not worth responding to.
Alcohol tax revenue is (at least for the next fiscal year) dedicated to funding substance abuse treatment programs. This kind of earmarking plays well in the media but is fundamentally goofy; you get weird fluctuations in funding mostly unrelated to the actual need for the programs. Nonetheless, this particular instance of goofiness is insufficient justification in favor of the ballot initiative.
3. This would reduce the sales tax rate to 3%. It's vaguely plausible to argue that state taxes are too high. Why we'd cut the sales tax rather than the income tax does not seem to be addressed.
More generally, though, there has been this notion since at least Reagan's first term of "starving the beast", i.e., if we cut off the money flowing to government, that will force the government to rein in spending. I think we can see 30 years later that this doesn't work. It certainly doesn't work at the federal level, as the federal government can borrow basically unlimited amounts of money. At the state level it's less obvious, as technically states are supposed to maintain balanced budgets, but usually state governments just screw with the accounting so that some spending is "off-budget" or the proceeds of a bond issue count as revenue rather than borrowing. It's ridiculously dishonest, but there it is. Even if we magically stopped them from playing stupid accounting tricks, it is abundantly clear that the culture of government is not going to respond to "starving the beast" in anything like the way we would want. When forced to cut spending, the state cuts local aid but maintains a full roster of obscenely overpaid tollbooth attendants, and my town cuts the school budget but keeps paying the cops $100/hour to watch guys dig holes. We're going to have to cut spending by cutting spending, and facing the decisions of what to cut, rather than trying to pass the buck to someone else to decide.
There are also some weird arguments that somehow the economic crisis makes cutting taxes a worse idea than usual. This is another argument basically too dumb to bother to answer.
In the end, though, this desire to cut taxes without confronting the question of where to cut spending is just a childish wish for something-for-nothing. TANSTAAFL.
2. This would repeal the Chapter 40B housing law. A thorough explanation would make my brain hurt, but basically the law says that developers can bypass a bunch of zoning rules if >=25% of a development is "affordable housing". That is, unless the town can convince some bureaucrats that someday soon "affordable housing" will be >=10% of total housing in that town. (Or even that they've already hit 10%, but obviously it's easier to just convince someone that you're "making progress" towards a goal than to actually hit a target.)
I'm not really sure where to start on this, as the way people think about "affordable housing" is so screwed up, as is pretty much every other aspect of this whole disaster of a situation.
OK, how about this. Governments are necessary evils. The thing that makes (our) government evil is that it enables a majority to impose their will on a minority. If I want to build a shed on my land that I own, my neighbors can tell me 'no' without buying my land or otherwise honestly acquiring property rights. More generally, zoning rules do the same -- they allow people to exercise control over other people's property simply by leveraging the government's monopoly on legitimate force. Even though I have full ownership of some piece of land, my neighbors can get together and pass a bunch of rules telling me what I can or can't put on this land.
This ability is of course a necessary evil; it would be stupid if I were allowed to build a forty-story skyscraper or a toxic waste dump on my land smack dab in the middle of a suburban residential area. But the thing about government is that in giving it the power to do what needs doing, we inevitably give it the power to do other crap just because it can. People who want their neighborhood to have such-and-such a character but don't want to have to actually expend any resources on maintaining that character can make up some zoning rules to keep out the riffraff and the undesirables. It is entirely their right to want what they want for their neighborhood, but wanting it doesn't give them moral authority over stuff they don't own. If you want to keep out the poor people, you ought to have to buy the damned land yourself.
Of course, Chapter 40B is nothing remotely like an ideal solution to the problem. It's simply substituting one form of government bullying for another. Now the state is pushing the towns around and making them do stuff simply by fiat. The honest solution would be to find most of the zoning regulations to be unconstitutional abridgments of fundamental property rights. Saying that these rules are OK except when they conflict with some social engineering project we're fond of is really bizarre. If these rules are really necessary, then it shouldn't be so easy to bypass them, and if they aren't really necessary, there's no justification for giving them the force of law. It's perfectly OK for my neighbors to gang up on me and force me to cut down my trees or to prevent me from renting out nice apartments, but not OK for them to prevent me from renting out crummy apartments? Forcing them to allow me to provide "affordable housing" but allowing them to prohibit any other productive commercial activity is ridiculous. Apparently we have to have a certain percentage of poor people in each town, but woe betide anyone who tries to actually employ those same poor people by opening a fast food joint or other retail enterprise in the charmingly old-fashioned downtown.
As an aside, the reason I keep putting "affordable housing" in quotes is because there's this odd unstated assumption that somehow housing is some sort of special good that doesn't obey the same economic rules as food or clothing or flamingo-shaped lawn ornaments. The government doesn't seem to need to force supermarkets to carry more cheap food or clothing stores to carry more cheap clothing. They seem to get by OK with food stamps without passing laws mandating that 10% of supermarket shelves be stocked with food that costs less than $0.01/kcal.
There's also a whole long potential rant in here about this perverse tendency people have to try to screw with markets instead of just let markets do their thing and then apply corrective measures after the fact where we find it appropriate. Too much of this sort of thing and you inevitably end up subsidizing tobacco farmers and taxing cigarettes, or artificially boosting food prices and giving out food stamps, or imposing rent control and being confused when there's a shortage of apartments, or subsidizing mortgages with tax deductions in a progressive tax system and then acting all surprised when house prices are too high. They made it extra attractive to buy a house if you're in the top tax bracket, and then they're surprised that developers build lots of expensive houses and not as many smaller ones?
Anyway, I'll go with "no" on question 2, while acknowledging that it preserves a bizarre system that is merely marginally less bad than the currently offered alternative.
1,2,3. Overall it seems my theme is "well, both options are kind of screwed up, but what we currently have is slightly less stupid than what's being proposed," which reminds me that I keep trying to swear off politics entirely, because politics basically just makes me despondent and/or infuriated.