Homestead Exemption Woes

More of a local issue this time, dealing with a tax break amendment passed in Florida last month.

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Another Terrible Florida Amendment

 

            Probably the hardest arguments to make in politics are ones against tax cuts, those magical and revered initiatives that politicians break out when they need a distraction or a boost in the polls. Time and time again, Republicans have used tax cuts as part of a kind of “bread and circuses” approach to governance, wherein shoddy long-term policy initiatives are hidden by short-term material benefits. Most folks, who tend to see these breaks as a slightly larger paycheck or a refund check without any consideration to their true costs, go along with such smoke-and-mirror tactics for a while, but the shit always hits the fan eventually. The recent “Homestead Exemption Increase” Amendment that the voters of Florida have just passed will prove to be no different.

 

            Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the principle behind tax cuts; money is better off in the economy and in the hands of working people than sitting in some massive surplus lock-box. However, Republicans tend to cut taxes even when the government can’t afford to lose the revenue without slashing vital programs, and their cuts are often disproportionately for the benefit of our wealthiest and most comfortable citizens.

 

            The recently passed “Homestead Exemption” Amendment contains all of these flaws. Skipping all of the mind-numbing specifics, this initiative basically lowered property taxes for homeowners; proponents of the bill have claimed that it will save the “average homeowner” about $240 per year. Republicans claim that the Amendment is designed to help small business owners and middle-class homeowners, but in reality, the big winners on January 29 were the wealthy owners of Florida’s many McMansions, who stand to save far more than the insignificant $240 promised for “average homeowners.”

 

            And of course, the real losers are anyone who relies on the government programs which are already being butchered to pay for this cut (ie: middle-class and non-homeowners). As always, the state will be offsetting the reduced revenues from the homestead exemption increase by further castrating our already woefully inadequate educational system. Already confirmed on the chopping block is the Florida Resident Access Grant (FRAG), which most Stetson students (including myself) rely upon to afford this place; the government assures us that we’ll all be grandfathered and keep ours, but that doesn’t help the thousands of qualified students who won’t be able to gather tuition money in the future.

 

            Given the historical ease with which Floridians have been able to put short-sighted Amendments on the ballot and get them passed, I wasn’t surprised when this homestead exemption increase was ratified against the interest of most of the state’s population. I can only hope that in the future, people find the facts about a tax cut before supporting it and found out who really stands to gain.

Farce on Drugs

Here’s a piece I just wrote on the War on Drugs, which I feel represents a pretty typical attitude among my age and social position:

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Senseless Motives, Senseless War

 

            In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” marking the beginning of a series of far-reaching and extravagant solutions to a non-problem. Like many wars, this one had its roots in politics, misinformation, and racism; these factors are particularly true here in terms of which substances must be warred against and which ones must be protected as American cultural values (tobacco, alcohol, etc). For example, marijuana’s criminalization came to a head in the 1930s due to its association with Mexican immigrants and jazz musicians; federal restriction on cocaine resulted from the influence of Southern senators who claimed that the drug turned black men into “beasts” and made them systematically rape white women; LSD’s association with youth counter-culture in the 1960s made it a target of Nixonian lawmakers who thought that dissent of their policies would stop if hallucinogens were removed.

 

            Aside from its uneven and bigoted selection of which substances should be controlled, the War on Drugs is also unjustified from a legal standpoint. True to its Lockean origins, the US Constitution clearly defends the right to property when that property does not infringe upon the rights of others, from the Second Amendment’s defense of gun ownership to the Fourth’s insistence of the privacy of one’s person. Our country’s brief and ill-fated prohibition of alcohol required the passing of a new Amendment; substance prohibition through federal act alone treads a fine line in governmental power.

 

            In its implementation, the War on Drugs proves itself not as a tool of justice but as yet another avenue for the government to impose institutionalized racial discrimination. As is widely known, minorities are targeted and arrested for drug use wildly out of proportion of their numbers (blacks make up a whopping 27% of defendants in marijuana possession cases). A common answer to this criticism suggests that perhaps this racial disparity exists because minorities simply use more drugs than whites. This argument ignores the facts of drug use, as it has been established that whites are arrested significantly less for drug crimes in proportion to their use, while the opposite is true for minorities; for more on this, look up our Editor-in-Chief’s piece from last semester, in which he lays out these facts with personal experience to reinforce them. And if all that wasn’t enough to prove the institutional racism of the Drug War, look at sentencing for the possession of powder cocaine, which is more commonly used by whites, and crack cocaine, which is more commonly used by blacks: in terms of punishment, 1 gram of crack is treated as the equivalent to 100 grams of powder cocaine.

 

            The cost of the Drug War has been hard to pinpoint, thanks to the sprawling budget, social damages, and the actual wars fought for its sake, but the price tag has been well into the trillions for decades: enough to provide years of universal health care to all Americans. The next time a conservative lectures you about fiscal conservatism and why we shouldn’t waste money on social programs, ask him if the unjustified, ineffective and immeasurably expensive Drug War counts as one of them.

California Standard or Bust

I’m admittedly very uneducated regarding environmental issues, but hey, I’ve got to write about what I’m assigned. This piece is centered around the years-long struggle over the so-called “California emissions standards” for automobiles.

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The Planet’s Causes Are Our Causes

 

            Lately, it has become in vogue for politicians to pay lip service to environmental issues and causes such as emissions control and alternative energy. All of the presidential candidates from both parties pretended to be interested in ethanol while campaigning in Iowa, and even Bush rarely gives a State of the Union address without making some oblique reference to far away technologies such as hydrogen fuels and nuclear fusion. But like with many popular issues, verbal support for vague generalities tends not to coincide with policies and actions; in the case of carbon emissions, many politicians (particularly conservatives) who voice support for conservation will balk at any actual efforts that may prove inconvenient for industry.

 

In the past few months, we’ve seen this all too clearly in the case of “California emissions standards,” which refers to that state’s (and many others’) attempt to enforce greatly reduced tailpipe emissions and set the minimum gas mileage for all new cars at 43 MPG by 2017. This goal is not unrealistic; in Europe, most of the conditions set by the California standard have long since been met. California has often been the trailblazer when it comes to setting new bars to protect the environment and our wallets, and this time was going to be no different: over a dozen states expressed support for copying the California standard for themselves, a big step towards national regulation.

 

One would think that this proposal would be accepted, if not embraced, by the nation; after all, even if you disagree with such a “drastic” increase in emissions standards, the state of California had made its own decision on the matter. Unfortunately, those fair-whether environmental allies mentioned earlier have blocked the state’s right to self-determination and prevented it from passing the new standards at all. Namely, the Bush administration has ordered the EPA, the organization established to work as a force of environmental justice, to block California’s attempts to clean its airways at the behest of US automakers. The big auto companies fear that higher standards for their new cars would deal a fatal blow to a domestic industry already struggling to compete with Japanese and European firms; however, they somehow fail to realize that one of the major reasons for their plight lies with this sluggish advancement in technology they are trying so hard to maintain. As people increasingly look to smaller and more efficient foreign cars, the American automakers will continue to suffer if they fail to innovate in the future.

 

Critics of environmental causes tend to paint issues of conservation as cases wherein people attempt to put “the land” or some random endangered owl over the concerns of regular folks. However, cases like this highlight an important fact: the causes of the planet are also the causes of all of us living on it. We all stand to gain from the future of more efficient and clean cars; the only ones who stand to lose are the stagnant forces of corporate welfare and corruption championed by Bush and the auto executives.