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zataomm  4mo ago (text post)   5381 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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Congratulations you've accidentally reinvented the electoral college.

Sure, and I think that was a better system. But even the originalists don’t seem to want to restore core aspects of American democracy like limiting the vote to property owners. $500,000 would be a good starting point.

500k of what kind of property? If you do total net worth then you get into a situation where registering to vote becomes more complicated than doing your taxes, and more intrusive, and you need an entire government agency just to keep track of year-to-year eligibility. Not to mention that you end up further entrenching the current gerontocracy since most young people won't be eligible between student loan debt, lack of equity in their homes, and lack of significant retirement savings. Speaking of which, you then have to deal with the complicated business of trying to determine the present value of defined benefit pension plans.

If you do it the old-fashioned way and limit it to what's listed on the tax rolls then you end up having varying criteria for various parts of the country, with no consistency whatsoever. For instance, the kind of person who owns in most parts of the country probably rents if they live in New York. $500k may seem reasonable based on whatever housing market you're familiar with, but in a lot of the country it's ridiculous. Here in Pittsburgh one of the most desirable suburbs is Upper St. Clair. The school district ranks among the best in the state, and there's no shortage of large homes. If you tell someone you live there they assume you have money. Except most of the people who live there don't really have money, at least not serious money — most of the residents are typical upper-middle-class professionals who live in 4 bedroom. 2,000 square foot homes built in the 70s. You pay a premium to live there over more working-class (in relative terms) suburbs like Bethel Park or South Park, but not that much of a premium. Most of these houses cost significantly less than 500k.

I don’t even expect property ownership. I think honestly being a net tax payer would be good enough for me.

Is it annually or over your life?

I’d personally say over the last 10 years. Being able to do so in most cases simply means a modicum of personal responsibility and good decision making. It also would tend to give a person stake in the continued success of the country. If you’re on the dole, getting more money or less required hoops to getting on the dole is your main concern. If you have a job and pay into the system, you are more inclined to want the productive parts of society to continue and even improve so that you can get more done.

I’m just thinking let’s say you are a relatively upper middle class person. Have a 401k of around 900k-1m invested conservatively. You are at retirement. You on net paid taxes for 35+ years. But now, your investment income of 50-70k pa is going to have a pretty small effective tax rate. And you draw SS. All of a sudden, net-net you are taking in more than you pay despite being a productive taxpayer for decades.

I like the ten year window idea. It largely (though not entirely) solves the above. Of course making it a non-annual test increases complexity.

largely off topic, but are you suggesting withdrawing 5-7% per year from the 401k? (50-70k/1M). 4% is generally the "safe rate of withdrawl" I see quoted.

Looking at the IRS IRA required minimum distribution (RMD) table, at age 80 you are required to withdraw 5% from your 401k, and the percentage goes up each year after that. At age 75 your withdrawal already exceeds 4%. You don't have to spend it, but you do have to take it as income and pay taxes on it.

I’m assuming a return of roughly 4-8% return so maybe some small principal drawdowns but mostly income.

Thats close to correct. I’ve seen 4% before but that is largely for permenent endowments like say Harvard etc. A financial advisor in his numbers might kill you off at some point.

5 maybe 6% though can fit with 2% inflation and last forever. Easier to get to when 30 year rates were 5% and then 8-9% on equities. With 30 year rates at 5% throw on some credit risks (mortgages were 8% then though that includes prepayment risks). You can make the math work for a 7% withdrawal rate for an individual. A 4% withdrawal would significantly lower risks.

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No voting on filing a loss seems fair.

Most counties already have records of owner occupiers of houses based on the tax system. It’s not that hard to restrict the franchise to people with provable residence and property, and it in general shows a degree of future orientation, good decision making, maturity, etc.

In many parts of the country it mostly shows that they had the good sense to be born at a time conducive to buying, or they have extreme FOMO, or that their parents had the good sense to shuffle off the mortal coil and pass down the house.

Except for all the people with guns, gasoline, matches and the numbers that will raise some rather heated challenges to the minority of feudal wannabes trying to take away people's right to vote.

Solving antifa behavior is actually really easy if you're willing to let the police beat them, and the underclass that expects permanent disenfranchisment from this policy already thinks they live in a brutal plutocracy anyways.

Attempted tyrant behavior like stripping voting rights from everyone but property owners would be quite easily solved - few things would bridge divides across the political spectrum as much as unifying against that. It'd be in the ballpark of attempting to end age of consent laws or make Aztec paganism the mandatory state religion in terms of unpopularity. Take away the ballot box, the bullet box is next, and guns are a whole lot cheaper and widely distributed than land.

More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.

I think people forget that democracy is a technology that improves upon what came previously -- violence. Instead of fighting and some dying, we can just count the fighters on each side and declare a probable winner without bloodshed. If the counting is a proxy for potential fighting power, whom should be counted? Men (because men do almost all the fighting) and landowners (because non-landowners have no incentive to stay and fight). Women's suffrage was a turning point in the republic, because it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth.

It only changes the incentive structure up to a point, though. Places where I've rented I haven't hesitated to bitch about every problem because it's the landlord's responsibility to fix and not mine. For example, years ago I rented an apartment that had a powder room downstairs and a full bath upstairs. One day the toilet in the powder room wouldn't stop running, and my cursory examination of the internal mechanism revealed no obvious malfunction that I could easily remedy. So I shut the water off at the valve, called the landlady, and insisted she fix it. She sent her husband over and I showed him the problem, and he had a plumber come out to give an estimate. I have no idea how much the repair cost, but it was evidently enough for the husband to try to talk me out of getting the work done. He didn't see what the problem was since there was a perfectly operational bathroom upstairs. Realistically, he was right — I rarely used the downstairs bathroom to begin with, being forced to go upstairs in times when I otherwise would have used the powder room was only a trifling inconvenience, and I would have paid the same amount for the place if it hadn't come with a powder room to begin with. Nonetheless, I insisted that he get it fixed. He ended up redoing the whole powder room because he had evidently planned on doing that when I moved out but decided that if he was sending a guy in there he might as well get everything done now if I didn't mind. If that had been my house I probably just would have shut the water off and procrastinated fixing it until it was convenient for me.

This is a relatively minor example, but with homeowners these little decisions compound more than you'd think. When I was looking to buy I noticed that there was almost a direct correlation between how long someone had owned a house and how much work needed to be done. For instance, there were several houses I looked at that were built in the '60s and being sold by the original owners or their families after these owners either passed away or went into assisted living. Almost all of them hadn't been updated since the '60s, except for essential stuff like heating and plumbing (and often this was only barely good enough; one house I was told that the only problem with the roof was that there was a leak in '96 but they patched it an it hadn't leaked since. This was in 2016 so even if the roof was relatively new in '96 it would have been due for a replacement soon, and I doubt the roof was new when it started leaking). If a homeowner only plans on leaving in a coffin, it's hard to convince them that they need to spend large sums of their already limited incomes on purely cosmetic upgrades, like new kitchens, bathrooms, flooring, etc. In other words, they're more concerned with keeping the dwelling habitable than in enhancing the value of the property.

I didn't literally mean the apartment you live in. I meant the neighborhood/city/region/state/country (I was purposefully vague about the scope).

You're talking about things that affect you. Of course you care about the condition of your literal apartment when you can force the landlord to fix it free of charge. But people passing through generally aren't lobbying for long-term infrastructure improvements of the town.

I don't know if that's necessarily true, though. Places like New York City have a lot of long-term renters. On the other side of the coin, a lot of the poorest ghettos have long-term renters who won't leave the neighborhood unless rising prices force them out. Conversely, it's trendy on the east coast for outdoorsy types to move out west for a few years just to see what it's like. Sure, some of these people rent, and some of them stay long-term, but a surprisingly large number of them buy houses and sell them a few years later. When interest rates were low anyone with the cash on hand would buy, and a lot of people made out like bandits when they sold a few years later and bought less expensive houses back east with cash.

The other thing is that most people aren't particularly engaged politically, regardless of whether they buy or rent. When was the last time you attended a meeting of your local government? Unlike watching C-Span you can actually address the board, and they might take your opinion into consideration. They also almost always happen in the evening, except maybe in big cities with full-time politicians. I've attended several over the years for various reasons. They're only ever busy if there's some controversial item on the agenda, and even then it's rarely busier than a busy voting precinct. On an average night, there's usually only one or two spectators.

Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.

Sure, it leads to rent seeking.

because it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth.

Indeed. We in the big cities vote ourselves the provincials wealth by limiting housing construction. Very good for me personally but hardly good for the economy overall.

it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth

What stops the enfranchised elite from voting themselves other people's wealth (e.g. enclosure)?

More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.

I hear this and it's such a strange concept to me. I live in an expensive west coast city. The people I know with close ties and care about the place are locals who, for the most part, have parents who own houses because they got into the market so long ago, and they can't imagine ever being able to afford to buy instead of renting. The people who own houses are either the aforementioned older generation or the people who moved here for high-paying jobs and can actually afford to buy into the market, but will happily hop off to some other city if the opportunity presents itself because the cost of owning a home just isn't a big deal to them. Obviously, I'm generalizing and a lot of people fall into neither group, but those two are very common in my experience and make me quite suspicious of claims that "landowner" is a remotely good proxy for "cares about the local government".

If you own a home, you can sell it, but the price you get is (to a first-order approximation) the prosperity of the surrounding area. A renter just picks up and leaves and gets nothing no mater how well or poorly the area is doing.

Data beats theory. Unless you’ve observed otherwise yourself, @token_progressive is the only one providing (anec)data here

Then I'll say the opposite as @token_progressive: In my experience, a) the homeowners I know explicitly state that they plan to stay in their house for a long time b) the renters I know explicitly state that part of the reason why they wouldn't take a mortgage to own a home is because they don't want to be tied to one place and finally c) the homeowners I know, even if they end up selling their house, do in fact stay mostly in one place and are very invested into a tight-knit community there while d) the renters do in fact end up travelling somewhere else very often. Mind you that I very clearly belong to the second category.

But I'm not living in an ultra-expensive large american city, merely in a moderately expensive middle size city.

It is truly one of the silliest parts of American constitutional history that one of the core mechanisms of its executive has been so subverted that the original intent has been rendered illegal and basically nobody cares.

The real question is how do you make something like it resist parties.

The fact that the electors had no other purpose than that ultimate decision probably fated them to servility regardless. Maybe they should have made them senators. Or a high court of sorts. So as to maintain a functional requirement that they be discerning and virtuous men, as intended.

The real question is how do you make something like it resist parties.

With approval voting, or at least a Condorcet method. Duverger's Law isn't the only force leading to partisan politics but it's a pretty overwhelming one.

I know right?

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