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November 4 will be here before we know it. So, I figured I'd post a bit about how I'm going to be voting.
First, as far as elected officials go, at the moment, I'm leaning toward probably voting a straight Democratic ticket. Because, honestly, in most cases, I don't really have a strong preference.
I DO really like Ed Markey for Senator, and Maura Healey for AG; most of the rest of them, I don't know enough to really have a strong opinion, so, if you do, I'm willing to listen. I'm probably going to hold my nose and vote for Coakley. I don't like her, but, in the rare cases where she and Baker have differences of opinion on the issues, I tend to lean a little more her way. Not much, and there aren't many policy differences. In practical terms, our pretty-conservative Democrat and pretty-liberal Republican really end up much the same on most of the issues I care about. But Baker is more in favor of lowering taxes on the wealthy (as well as lower taxes on everybody else), vouchers for private schools, and cracking down on illegal immigrants, none of which I particularly support.
For a lot of my friends, that previous sentence is a reason to vote for Baker, though. And I can't really feel that Baker would be disastrous for Massachusetts. As I said during the primaries, Coakley was the only person on the Democratic ballot who has the capacity to lose to Baker.
On to the ballot questions.
1. Question 1 is whether to eliminate indexing the gas tax to inflation. For me, this is an obvious "NO" vote. I feel that we HAVE to index gas taxes to inflation. We have a $0.24/gallon tax. If inflation goes up, that should go up. Leaving the tax the same while inflation goes up means having less money for roads and bridges. Now, we're not the WORST state in the US for our bridges -- but we're in the lower half. That's not good. Cutting money for roads and bridges is really, really stupid, and that's what Question 1 is effectively asking us to do.
2. Question 2 is whether to add the 5-cent bottle-and-can deposit to non-carbonated beverages. Right now, you buy a soda, and the can or bottle is worth five cents -- return it, get five cents. But we don't do that to water, juice, Gatorade, milk, and the like. This actually wouldn't expand it to milk, but it would to the other things. For me, this is a "YES". The Bottle Bill actually HAS reduced waste. People are more likely to recycle when they're paid to do so -- even if they're only paid a nickel. So being paid to recycle Gatorade, Red Bull, and Snapple bottles is likely to help that, too.
3. Question 3 is whether to re-ban casinos. Massachusetts started out as a no-casino state. Then Gov. Patrick led a successful attempt to open up Massachusetts to casinos. And a bunch of casino companies started bidding for the right to put in casinos. I've been against this from the beginning, because their own arguments point out how stupid this is. Why do we need casinos? Because we're getting less revenue from the lottery because people are gambling less. Why do the casino companies want to put casinos here? Because their casinos in Atlantic City and in Vegas are dying, because people are gambling less. And because Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods are struggling because people are gambling less -- they're rapidly trying to switch to full entertainment venues, based more on concerts and other shows, because their gambling operations are starting to lose money. They're scratching out a break-even by catering to Chinese and Korean multi-millionaires who come over to the United States to blow through lots of money to impress people -- I watched a guy lose what I counted up as over a thousand dollars on a single hand of pai gow. And he didn't stop playing -- he was playing at that level all night. They get a couple of those people in, they can scrape by, but otherwise, they're dying. Signing up for a dying industry just doesn't sound smart to me.
Now, I MIGHT have thought differently if the Suffolk Downs bid had gone through. Our only racetrack in the region was barely scraping by, and could have probably pulled out a couple more years if they'd gotten all the casino money. I think horse racing is cool, so I might have voted to let casinos show up, if they'd have ended up keeping our racetrack alive for a little while longer. But the Suffolk Downs bid failed, and they went with the Everett proposal, and our race track has closed. We don't have it any more. So what's the point? Suffolk Downs wasn't a source of income for the city, of course, and a casino won't be, either, but it was at least horse racing, and horses are pretty in a way that slot machines aren't.
So fuck them. This is our second chance to point out just how dumb it is to put casinos in Massachusetts. I'm a major, major "YES" on this: "YES", let's get rid of this entire mess that we stupidly got ourselves into a couple years back.
4. Question 4 would require business, except for the smallest ones, to provide at least 40 hours of paid sick leave per year. Really small companies would be required to provide at least 40 hours of unpaid sick leave. My answer is "YES". C'mon. This is sort of way below the bare minimum of what you need to have to count as a civilized country in the modern world. I mean, this wouldn't get us up to "civilized, modern country", but it'd be a start. "YES", let's at least attempt to pretend that we're somewhere in the 21st century.
So, that's what I've got. That's what I'm thinking of for this election.
To summarize: straight Democratic on offices, for lack of any better plan.
NO on 1, because cutting our funding for crumbling infrastructure even further than it currently is is just so, so dumb.
YES on 2, because bottle bills actually do have a tendency to work and get more recycling.
YES on 3, because that fixes the idiotic thing we did in letting casinos in in the first place.
YES on 4, because the rest of the world already looks down on us for treating our workers like crap, so maybe treating them like slightly smaller crap would be a nice thing.
First, as far as elected officials go, at the moment, I'm leaning toward probably voting a straight Democratic ticket. Because, honestly, in most cases, I don't really have a strong preference.
I DO really like Ed Markey for Senator, and Maura Healey for AG; most of the rest of them, I don't know enough to really have a strong opinion, so, if you do, I'm willing to listen. I'm probably going to hold my nose and vote for Coakley. I don't like her, but, in the rare cases where she and Baker have differences of opinion on the issues, I tend to lean a little more her way. Not much, and there aren't many policy differences. In practical terms, our pretty-conservative Democrat and pretty-liberal Republican really end up much the same on most of the issues I care about. But Baker is more in favor of lowering taxes on the wealthy (as well as lower taxes on everybody else), vouchers for private schools, and cracking down on illegal immigrants, none of which I particularly support.
For a lot of my friends, that previous sentence is a reason to vote for Baker, though. And I can't really feel that Baker would be disastrous for Massachusetts. As I said during the primaries, Coakley was the only person on the Democratic ballot who has the capacity to lose to Baker.
On to the ballot questions.
1. Question 1 is whether to eliminate indexing the gas tax to inflation. For me, this is an obvious "NO" vote. I feel that we HAVE to index gas taxes to inflation. We have a $0.24/gallon tax. If inflation goes up, that should go up. Leaving the tax the same while inflation goes up means having less money for roads and bridges. Now, we're not the WORST state in the US for our bridges -- but we're in the lower half. That's not good. Cutting money for roads and bridges is really, really stupid, and that's what Question 1 is effectively asking us to do.
2. Question 2 is whether to add the 5-cent bottle-and-can deposit to non-carbonated beverages. Right now, you buy a soda, and the can or bottle is worth five cents -- return it, get five cents. But we don't do that to water, juice, Gatorade, milk, and the like. This actually wouldn't expand it to milk, but it would to the other things. For me, this is a "YES". The Bottle Bill actually HAS reduced waste. People are more likely to recycle when they're paid to do so -- even if they're only paid a nickel. So being paid to recycle Gatorade, Red Bull, and Snapple bottles is likely to help that, too.
3. Question 3 is whether to re-ban casinos. Massachusetts started out as a no-casino state. Then Gov. Patrick led a successful attempt to open up Massachusetts to casinos. And a bunch of casino companies started bidding for the right to put in casinos. I've been against this from the beginning, because their own arguments point out how stupid this is. Why do we need casinos? Because we're getting less revenue from the lottery because people are gambling less. Why do the casino companies want to put casinos here? Because their casinos in Atlantic City and in Vegas are dying, because people are gambling less. And because Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods are struggling because people are gambling less -- they're rapidly trying to switch to full entertainment venues, based more on concerts and other shows, because their gambling operations are starting to lose money. They're scratching out a break-even by catering to Chinese and Korean multi-millionaires who come over to the United States to blow through lots of money to impress people -- I watched a guy lose what I counted up as over a thousand dollars on a single hand of pai gow. And he didn't stop playing -- he was playing at that level all night. They get a couple of those people in, they can scrape by, but otherwise, they're dying. Signing up for a dying industry just doesn't sound smart to me.
Now, I MIGHT have thought differently if the Suffolk Downs bid had gone through. Our only racetrack in the region was barely scraping by, and could have probably pulled out a couple more years if they'd gotten all the casino money. I think horse racing is cool, so I might have voted to let casinos show up, if they'd have ended up keeping our racetrack alive for a little while longer. But the Suffolk Downs bid failed, and they went with the Everett proposal, and our race track has closed. We don't have it any more. So what's the point? Suffolk Downs wasn't a source of income for the city, of course, and a casino won't be, either, but it was at least horse racing, and horses are pretty in a way that slot machines aren't.
So fuck them. This is our second chance to point out just how dumb it is to put casinos in Massachusetts. I'm a major, major "YES" on this: "YES", let's get rid of this entire mess that we stupidly got ourselves into a couple years back.
4. Question 4 would require business, except for the smallest ones, to provide at least 40 hours of paid sick leave per year. Really small companies would be required to provide at least 40 hours of unpaid sick leave. My answer is "YES". C'mon. This is sort of way below the bare minimum of what you need to have to count as a civilized country in the modern world. I mean, this wouldn't get us up to "civilized, modern country", but it'd be a start. "YES", let's at least attempt to pretend that we're somewhere in the 21st century.
So, that's what I've got. That's what I'm thinking of for this election.
To summarize: straight Democratic on offices, for lack of any better plan.
NO on 1, because cutting our funding for crumbling infrastructure even further than it currently is is just so, so dumb.
YES on 2, because bottle bills actually do have a tendency to work and get more recycling.
YES on 3, because that fixes the idiotic thing we did in letting casinos in in the first place.
YES on 4, because the rest of the world already looks down on us for treating our workers like crap, so maybe treating them like slightly smaller crap would be a nice thing.