Voteview is an amazingly simple model for behavior of legislators. It takes as input the votes of the legislature and assigns each legislator a score. These scores are, surprisingly, quite stable. Surprisingly, legislator’s behavior is dependable and predictable. It takes only two numbers to model legislators with surprising accuracy. Two numbers mean we can draw scatter plots with one point for each legislator. That reveals natural coalitions.

The math doesn’t tell us what the scores mean. To puzzle that out you need to look at what the votes were about. When this technique was first discovered the first score measures the left/right (economic) political spectrum. That means things how the government aids small vs. large economic entities. The second was left/right (social); primarily civil rights, but also broader issues such as the franchise. But the two score means can vary from one legislature to another and can shift over time. The first score is a more powerful predictor and if you add a third score it hardly improves the accuracy.

Here, for example, is the vote to reduce the food stamps program. The letters indicate the legislators. The line shows how the bill partitioned the space.

This bill was nearly perfectly aligned on the economic left/right spectrum.  With the left wanting to aid the small players in the economy.   The right panel shows the errors in the model’s fit.  You can notice how there is no overlap between the Democrats and the Republicans.  That is unusual from a historical perspective.  This model was the first clear way to show that the congress was growing extremely polarized over the last decades.

The meaning of the vertical score has become less clear over the last few years.  As for various reasons social left/right issues have tended to condense into the economic issues.   It is interesting, and somewhat rare, to see an example vote where the 2nd score has a lot of power.

But what the heck is “Approve the Journal”?  Well you can read all about it here.  It is the a record of what the house has been up to (votes, conference reports, vetoes, etc. etc.).  The voteview community tends to believe that the vertical axis is now measuring some they call insider/outsider – that the people with lower scores are in the outsider group.  If so, what we are seeing here is a sort of protest vote by the outsider group.

Remember the second score adds only a little to the model’s quality.  I wrote about voteview a decade ago.  There you can see how little the second score adds to the model’s fit in that post. I’m not aware of any published data on how that has changed over time.

The voteview blog always gives an interesting clean perspective on current events.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s marked one of the very very few major shifts in the politics of this country.  I.e. the racist southern whites switched from the Democratic to the Republican party.  Those southern Democrats had some redeeming value, i.e. politically their loyalties lay with the little guy.  So at the time the Democrats were pro-little guy v.s. the Republicans tended to like big institutions (particularly commercial ones) more.  From today’s perspective it’s hard to see how civil rights and your preferences for large vs. small economic entities would be orthogonal.

Both parties, at the time, were split internally on the issue of civil rights, and battles. The national battle civil rights resorted things.  Don’t gloss over how vicious these battles were.  We are talking riots, murders, etc.  Nothing in modern American politics comes close; even if it ought to.

Civil rights won.  But, the Republican party came infected with a severe case of racism.  An ugly hybrid emerged from this. The pro-little-guy attitudes was driven out of the new southern Republican party was driven  out of the party.  Later the entire party went in insane.

The insanity is principally about the big/little guy debate, but it’s always flavored with a large dose of spiteful prejudice.   That used to be focused on black people, but these days it’s has a broad spectrum.  In part because if as you become more committed to the big guys in the big/little debate you trend toward demonizing all the little guys.

Yesterday’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the supreme court is a direct decedent of those battles, and of the civl war before them.  It will disenfranchise a tremendous number of people.  It political consequences will be very ugly, we know because we ran voting with a large dose of voter suppression in the century following the civil war.   It is a tragic development.

Your stupid.  At least according to U. Chicago Economist Steve Levitt.

DUBNER: So Levitt, how can you in your life, when you wander around, tell the difference between a smart person and a not-so-smart person?

LEVITT: Well, one good indicator of a person who’s not so smart is if they vote in a presidential election because they think their vote might actually decide which candidate wins. . . . there has never been and there never will be a vote cast in a presidential election that could possibly be decisive.

Presumably he believes that utterance increases his reproductive fitness.  I guess some mates find it sexy when a man signals his brilliant intent to defect from the social norms and undermine the commonwealth.  Though I suspect it’s just a maladaptation – the alpha male behaviors repurposed for dominance in graduate seminars.  Possibly membership in his tribe requires that he sing from this particular hymnal.  The  Omeratà  always requires that one not cooperate with the authorities; prisoner’s  dilemma  and all.

The little dose of voter  suppression just adds spice to this foolishness.

Just to be clear there is a powerful rational economic reason for voting.  No doubt we all believe that our fellow citizens, our society, will be better off if our guys win.  What’s that worth to me (not to them, but to me)?  Let’s put a tiny value on that.  Say a dime for every US citizen and a penny for every world citizen.  That’s about 73 million dollars.  So even if I set aside my strong believe that it is a sacred duty to engage in the democratic process the act voting is, effectively my purchasing a lottery ticket who’s prize is a 72 million dollar gift to charity.

I’m not surprised that Paul Ryan is selfish twit as well.  I’ve long suspected that some politicians run for office entirely as a  business  raise money, pocket money.  Which would seem to be the only rational  explanation  for why Ryan is spending time raising money in states that don’t matter.  He is not trying to win, he’s building a nest egg.

It must be hard running a political party where the core value is that individuals should be  maximally  selfish.  Though I guess if what your selling is regulatory capture of the banking and resource extraction industries and the abandonment of the weak in exchange for lower taxes then it is pretty good branding.

I wish the right would stop complaining  about how unfair the tax system is to the rich.  That’s a lie.  The tax system is regressive.  The well off pay a smaller percentage of their income than do the poor and the middle class.  It’s a lie and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this lie.

The recently released video of Romney’s at fund event at the home of the infamous sex party hosting hedge fund manager holds few surprises about what the far right actually believes.  E.g. that Democrats are  indistinguishable  from welfare queens. That the nation is drifting toward a democratic take over.  That the underclasses spend their day in  leisure,  sucking the life force from the helpless upper classes.

That polarizing view has been a core value of the far right forever.  And recently it has become a core believe of the Republican party.  They went off the deep end a long time ago.    Low (even medium) information voters are still unlikely to realize this. Still.

Some of press have called this a “gaff.”  You know … falling off message is one thing and revealing your honest beliefs is another.  This was  the latter.

The tax system is not progressive.  It is not Robinhood.  It does not tax the rich more than the poor.  In fact it taxes them less.

I have found the press coverage frustrating.  The counter point to his remarks has been weak.  The meme he was repeating was that 47% don’t pay takes and just take from those that “make.”  He obviously believes this.  The counter point has been in order:  Try to go all technical an point out that he is confusing the listener by a narrow definition of taxes and then highlight other taxes.  Then there is the appeal to emotion response – were we mention the elderly, children, students, and  military.  Finally there is more sophisticated technical point that this situation was engineered by Republicans, as part of the reegineering they did to the poverty programs over the last decades.  For example they introduced Earned Income Credits so that firms could offer low paying jobs and with the help of the credits people could barely survive doing those jobs – assuming they can figure out how to do the paper work.

What frustrates me is that these reports don’t bother to mention the core lie.  It is a lie that the tax system is punishing the rich and transfering money to the poor.  It is not.  The tax system is not Robinhood.  If you think so then you are misinformed.  The rich pay a smaller portion of their income and wealth into the system than do the poor.  If we embrace the victum/parasite framing Romney is using – well then – it’s actually the other way around.  They are the parasites and the lower and middle class are the victums of their free riding.

I rarely do this, but here is a very old posting that explains the details.

I suspect a lot of people believe that their state has a progressive tax structure.    That belief is wrong.    The well-off do not pay a larger percentage of their income and wealth than do the poor.  There are a very few exceptions, Delaware for example – at least in 2002.  Here’s what it really looks like.

Here for example is my state.

That shows how the mix of taxes effect things.  In Massachusetts it’s the sales tax that really does the damage.  The mix of taxes that implement this lovely situation for the parasitic well-off varys from state to state.  New Hampshire manages to be extremely regressive; using a different mix.

If you want to screw the poor then here some hints:

• Avoid an income tax
• If you have to have an income tax be sure it’s flat. (that’s what we do in Massachusetts)
• Adopt a sales tax and some excise taxes
• Use property taxes
• Exclude capital gains from income
• Use tax credits to counteract progressive taxes; say on federal taxes or certain property taxes
• Be sure your sales/excise tax includes groceries, smokes, beer, and gas
• Don’t index to inflation if forced into tax brackets, exemptions, or earned income payments
• Empower local governments to raise funds using regressive means

No doubt there are much more creative schemes for assuring your tax system screws the poor.  I certainly can think of quite a few without much effort.  This posting is based entirely on the original edition of what is currently  this report, from  www.itepnet.org; you can quickly  find your own state here.

This is Washington state, which makes me wonder how those Microsoft and other high tech winners feel about this.