The folks over at The League have kindly given me a forum to talk about why I believe that the end result of increased fuel costs, fuel taxes, or road taxes will result in the strengthening of the suburbs at the expense of cities:

Peak Oil has been right around the corner for decades. Global warming requires a response that is going to make energy – oil in particular – more expensive. Commuters and drivers are subsidized with general funds. The solution to all of this is, of course, to stick it to the commuters. It’s nothing personal (ignoring everything negative we’ve said in the past about suburbanites), but we’ve got problems and it’s going to be up to them to change their lifestyles (which, coincidentally, we’ve never really approved of anyway). They’ll just have to take public transportation and live in walkable neighborhoods, like we do (or would like to, if it weren’t for the car culture making it nigh-impossible).

There seems to be an assumption, on the part of a lot of urbanists*, that solidifying our future (in terms of energy needs and/or the environment) or basic fairness (in terms of taxing negative externalities or subsidizing roads) will lead to a world more of their liking. If we just taxed gas or stopped requiring highways and parking (or if gas simply gets more expensive), the world will simply have to acclimate to their preferences.

As it happens, I do not oppose a carbon tax. I am in favor of increasing road taxes and fees so that the car culture subsidizes itself (though I do worry about it being regressive taxation). But I get off the train when we talk about the effect that these policies are going to have. Namely, while road construction and maintenance (for instance) subsidize suburban residents, they also subsidize downtown business. While the growth of suburbia was assisted by tax policy, now that people have gotten used to it, and now that our urban/suburban infrastructures have been built, I have enormous difficulty seeing mass conversion to smaller abodes, more restricted mobility, and so on. Not without a fight, anyway.

“But whether they want to or not, they’ll have to!”

Except that they won’t. Arguably, they will not be able to.

{Continue Reading…}

It has become a widespread belief in some circles that our smaller-population states are pampered with outsized representation in the Senate (and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College and the House of Representatives – though in actuality the best and least represented states in the House both have one rep). While this is true, without these mechanisms these states would be outright ignored. Even in the current system, the larger states arguably have undue influence. Even when a state like Montana or New Mexico is up for grabs, presidential candidates aren’t going to spend a whole lot of time there. Even though California and Texas are not up for grabs, Republicans will spend some time in the former and Republicans in the latter for fundraising reasons alone.

Of course, the complaints are not without merit. If you look at donor and beneficiary states, you see not only the red/blue distinction that many comment on, but an urban/rural distinction as well (the major exception being the rust belt). It’s a fair point. Also worth noting, however, is that in some cases it just costs more on a per-capita basis to service a large and sparse state than a primarily urban one. So if Wyoming is getting its mail, and New York is getting its mail, but on a per-tax-dollar basis the former costs a lot more than the latter, they’re not exactly getting a freebie. As Americans, they’re getting the same services as their urban counterparts because they, like their urban counterparts, are Americans and thus due the same services. The same goes for roads. It was Washington DC that drew the map for Montana. Should Washington then complain that it costs so much to service Montana’s roads in comparison to Rhode Island’s?

It also overlooks the fact that these states are often getting this money in return for a service. Surely, we wouldn’t consider a NASA engineer* to be the moral equivalent of someone getting federal food stamps, would we? But when people talk about beneficiary and donor states, they often fail to make these distinctions. Further, it’s advantageous not just to North Dakota’s economy, but also the United States government when we put nuclear silos there rather than upstate New York because it’s cheaper. The same goes for Nevada* and Utah accepting nuclear waste, because it’s safer (except for Nevada and Utah, that is). And military bases in Kansas instead of California. It wouldn’t save the government any money to put these in any of the donor states. It’s not unlike saying that my car mechanic is a “beneficiary” because I pay him for goods and services and he doesn’t pay me (directly) for any.

Of course, you can even put these aside and you’ll probably still also find a disparity. Partially due to per-capita income, but also because rural states do exploit the senate in order to get earmarks and the like. I am not wholly unsympathetic to the undemocratic nature of it.

But the big states gain from the fact that they have larger congressional delegations. And so they have natural alliances that they can then use to get outsized influence. It’s easier for eleven reps in Chicago to team up than the sole representatives from Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas to team up with the two reps in Idaho, the three in Utah and Nebraska even if they represent roughly the same population. Further, even under the current system, the big states get almost all of the presidents.

The last 13 Presidents have come from Illinois*, Texas, Arkansas, Texas, California, Georgia, Michigan, California, Texas, Massachusetts. Kansas, Missouri, New York. Clinton is exceptional and Eisenhower’s base was the mighty US Army rather than sparsely-populated Kansas. All the others come from one of the 20 most-populous states.

So too do most defeated Presidential nominees. Since FDR beat Wendell Wilkie the losers have come from: Arizona, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Kansas, Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Georgia, Michigan, South Dakota, Minnesota, Arizona, California, Illinois, New York.

Note the paucity of small-state nominees. Arizona wasn’t a major state when Goldwater ran while Bob Dole (Kansas), Mondale (Minnesota), McGovern (South Dakota) and Humphrey (Minnesota) were each Washington figures. If it’s tough to win the Presidency from the Senate it’s even harder to do so as a former governor of a small state.

Clinton, again, is the only ex-governor to reach the White House from one of the 30 least-populous states. Those states account for roughly 25% of the population and, obviously, 60% of governors and yet they produce very few successful candidates.

There are some good reasons for that: what works in a small state may not scale to national level and, just as importantly, the governor of a small state lacks names recognition in major media markets and, rather importantly, in major media newsrooms. Sure, you might have done a good job in your tiny, empty state thousands of miles from Washington but that means nothing on the national stage and it certainly doesn’t earn you the right to be taken seriously by sagacious pundits and handicappers.

All of this is more than compensated for by Senate representation, of course, and the electoral college benefit the senate seats give the small states (Al Gore would have won in 2000 is the EC counts had been determines solely by House representation).

Now (leaving aside for the moment the Chicago vs UT-ID-MT-WY-ND-SD-NE equation), in a perfectly democratic system, the response would be “screw the small states because they’re such a pitiful minority. If you want more representation, move!” But while we live in a democracy, we do not live under one whose primary goal is to represent the view of a majority of the people to the exclusion of everyone else. The states were designed to mean something. Maybe you consider them anachronistic, and in a sense maybe they are. But while you can argue “the founders never accounted for the kind of population differential you see between California and Wyoming”, it’s also the case that the initial compromise did intend for their to be disparities.

Of course, I am not an unbiased observer in this, seeing as how I live in a small state with outsized senate representation. But the same “move!” argument made above can be made here. If it’s that important to you, you’re more than free to join me in Arapaho. If you are disinclined to because of the lack of job opportunities or city amenities, than just consider it a bone thrown our way: We get maintained roads and mail service, too.

* – Florida (NASA), Texas (NASA), and Nevada (nuclear waste) are actually donor states. You get the point, though.

Below is the entire conversation, but the part that I am pointing to is here. The case for Chris Christie or Haley Barbour running as fat men.

My own sometimes-defenses of the obese aside, I do think that there is value in being a role model, and so in that sense Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich provide a better role model of sorts (err, as it pertains to weight, in the case of the latter). But I do consider it sad commentary that Christie’s weight did become an issue in the campaign. Whether deserved or not, the reputation of fat men is that they are lazy or undisciplined. Both Christie and Barbour have entire biographies that disprove this as it applies to them (regardless of whether one agrees with their policy positions or not).

On a sidenote, it’s odd that all four candidates mentioned are Republicans. Are there any really fat – or formerly fat – Democrats out there? Montana has a governor a little on the hefty side, and Maryland has Barbara Mikulski, but nobody else really comes to mind and nobody is talking about them for president. Al Gore? Bill Richardson? Neither were huge when they were public figures, by my recollection (though Gore got pretty heavy for a while after he lost). But most that come to mind are Republicans. Denny Hastert. A local congressman back home. Coincidence, or something to do with the female vote in the primaries?

There was actually a candidate for congress back in Delosa whose web-site had clearly photo-shopped his head. Actually, it was a pretty good photoshop job that just didn’t survive scrutiny. Up to that point he was actually considered a serious candidate. He wasn’t even that overweight.

Slate is running a series this week on cases where the justice system got it wrong; somewhat spurred by the Illinois legislation abolishing the death penalty, partly just a good conversation.

The author, Brandon L. Garrett, is a bit pimping his new book but is also providing a good look at two of the most widely believed – but at the same time not entirely reliable – types of evidence on which many criminal cases rely. The first is eyewitness accounts and identification, the second is the confession of guilt.

Now that we know—with the benefit of the DNA tests—that Sterling is innocent, one wonders how an innocent man could have guessed at incredibly specific crime scene details? Sterling later explained it this way: “They just wore me down.” “I was just so tired.” “It’s like, ‘Come on, guys, I’m tired—what do you want me to do, just confess to it?””

In a pair of videos I link to very often, there’s a great answer to how someone “knows unreleased details” – the cops slip them to the accused in one form or another, or lead the accused into guessing until they have them “guessing right” on tape.

More interestingly to me, however – Garrett finally comes up with some hard numbers. I’ve chided the Innocence Project before about this, because they make a habit of releasing only their “number of innocent people freed” number, rather than giving us the chance to see the total number of cases they’ve examined. Will has said – and I agree – that even this may not be an exact figure, since IP only takes cases “likely to exonerate” on their early examination before proceeding all the way down the line, but it at least would give us something to work with.

Garrett, however, gives us a gem.

In 16 percent of the first 250 DNA exonerations, or 40 of the 250 cases I studied for my book, Convicting the Innocent, innocent defendants confessed to crimes they did not commit. (Additional DNA exonerees did not deliver confessions in custody, but they made incriminating statements or pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit).

The false confessions pose a puzzle. All but two of the 40 DNA exonerees who falsely confessed were said to have confessed in detail.

Now, this is not perfect. His study is only on those cases that are proven false convictions. But we at least have a hard number here – 250 cases of proven innocent, 40 cases of false confession, 38 of which are said to be an “in depth” confession. And every one proven innocent almost-definitively by DNA evidence. This leads to at least a reasonable suspicion that confessions in districts across the nation are contaminated or even coerced by the cops – perhaps by cops who don’t know what they are doing, or perhaps by the type of behavior we commonly associate with not-so-honest cops who start and stop the recording on TV shows, only recording the parts of the interview they want to be available in court.

The State of Texas is looking at raising speed limits to be the fastest in the nation:

The Texas House of Representatives has approved a bill that would raise the speed limit to 85 mph on some highways. The bill now goes to the state Senate, the Austin Statesman reports. {…}

Texas currently has more than 520 miles of interstate highways where the speed limit is 80 mph, according to the Associated Press. The bill would allow the Texas Department of Transportation to raise the speed limit on certain roads or lanes after engineering and traffic studies are conducted. The 85 mph maximum would likely be permitted on rural roads with long sightlines.

Texas is currently one of the only two states currently allowing 80mph speed limits on a few stretches. Utah is the other.

The two main groups against it are the insurance companies and environmentalists. Though I could have sworn I saw 80mph speed limits on my original move from Delosa to Deseret, I can’t find anything to back me up on that. So I guess I have never driven on an 80mph road. I would think that you would want to be careful about where you put them, but there are some stretches of road that are asking for it. Particularly in the great plains region. When moving to Deseret, I took a route that had me going north through (a tip of) New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming instead of the GoogleMaps approved route that takes you through Kansas, Nebraska, and so on. The main reason for the detour was the scenery, but if the great plains had 85mph speed limits, I probably would have gone that route.

The following are a couple of arguments for and against state lotteries. I often find that the best way to explore issues is to create arguments from the perspective of characters in my novel-writing. So that’s what I’ve done here. Neither BC nor RK are straight-line partisans, though they each have their histories and backstories. BC is coming from a more liberal perspective (particularly economics, he considers himself socially liberal but has a stubborn conservative streak on some issues). He comes from a Catholic, blue collar background, though he himself has gone to college and “made good”, so to speak, with a career in computers. RK comes from a thoroughly white-collar, WASP family. He went to law school, but is among those that had difficulty converting that into a sustainable legal career and instead works as a security/investigations consultant for a Pinkerton-like organization. He is a soft libertarian, but breaks to the right on some cultural issues.

The role of a government in society is a subject of constant debate. Some believe that it is the role of society, through its government, to protect the least among us. Others believe that doing that interferes with the free market, which ultimately helps everybody or if not is otherwise more just. Whether we believe in the redistribution of wealth or not, one thing we should all agree on is that it should not be the business of the government to specifically target the poor and working classes for the benefit of the middle class and beyond. Ultimately, however, that’s precisely what lotteries do.

One of the jobs I had in college was working at a gas station and truck stop on the edge of town, right beside an industrial park. With the manufacturing sector struggling, I spent a lot of time serving people with generally poor economic prospects. Some of them worked in the industrial park, some stopped by just to go place to place in search for a job. Some worked part time. Some worked off the books for a meager income. One of my job functions was to cash checks. Often, very meager checks. Some days I would think that it is the responsibility of the government to help these people out. Other days I would think that the government already is often helping these people out and subsidizing self-destructive behavior. But even apart from the welfare quandary, the government already assists in their counterproductive behavior. Every Thursday and Friday, generally paydays, they would cash their checks and spend the first of their newfound money on three things: cigarettes, alcohol, and lottery tickets.

There aren’t any easy answers on what to do about cigarettes and alcohol. We could criminalize them, but that hasn’t really worked historically. We can tax them, but in addition to providing a (maybe needed) disincentive, it is also regressive. The end result isn’t that my patrons would buy less, but rather they would just end up spending that much more. But the third item – the lottery – is really extremely easy. Gambling is illegal in {BC’s home state}. While it still goes on, I’m sure, it’s made inconvenient enough that those that want to destroy their lives gambling will go to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or Louisiana. The fact that they can instead gamble at any local convenience store creates demand. Markets tend to do that, and for some things (like the City of Las Vegas) perhaps it is the free market at work. But state run lotteries are not. They are run by the state. The enemy isn’t some marketing guru in a Vegas high-rise that has determined that if you add this smell and take away the windows and clocks people will piss away more and more of their income. It’s the state. It’s us.

Lotteries are popular because they are generally instituted to pay for things that people like, such as education. Others like it because it “taxes stupid.” But aren’t the stupid taxed enough already? Not in the literal sense, but they will live their lives stupid. I have no delusions that my former customers would be a-ok but for the state lottery. They were often alcoholics or worse. Some of them maybe just need a good job to get back on their feet, but others would screw it up even if they had it. Their position in life is the result of their screwups. Due, in large part, to the fact that they are stupid. They lack impulse control. The odds against winning the lottery as so high that they can’t even wrap their heads around the numbers. They are (usually) the products of our public school system. It is the height of irony that our system takes money from the ill-educated to put right back into the system that failed to educate them in the first place. But even if the system can’t educate them, their own limitations mean that they will likely live their lives without financial or physical security. They will never be able to afford the lifestyle of the smart. They’ll never be able to achieve it. They’ll never be able to plan for it. While it may give us satisfaction to tax this, we’re aiming our barrels at people that cannot really take care of themselves or we’re contributing to the decisions that make it so they will not. One way or another, the state will end up taking care of them anyway.

Whether gambling itself should be legal is a difficult question. But even if we agree that it should, it shouldn’t be the government doing it. The only reason we might want the government to do it is if we believe that they will do it more ethically. But they see the same dollar signs that private industry does. {BC’s home state} recently fiddled with the rules to make already long odds of winning even more long. Because they, like any good marketing company, recognize that sales go up as jackpots rise. And jackpots rise when people don’t win. So less winners equals more money. They’ve essentially discovered the same scent that Las Vegas casinos push through their vents.

It’s a fact of life that very, very few of us will grow up to be rich. The more you redistribute income, the more you’re preventing people from becoming wealthy in the first place. The less you redistribute income, you’re supporting a status quo in which the wealthy get wealthier while the rest of us get by. Sure, there are people that find the magic formula to become the new rich, but that is exceedingly rare. It requires risks that few want to take. It requires smarts that few have. So you have those that already have money – and lots of it. You have those that have the smarts and gumption to risk it all to become rich. But that’s not most people. Most people just want enough money to get by and a savings to retire on. That’s hard enough. Making millions? That’s for other people. It may be a depressing thought, but it’s true.

Lotteries circumvent that. They provide a way for anybody with a dollar in their pocket to become wealthy. Almost none of them will, of course. The numbers are out there for everyone to see. And even the innumerate among us know that the odds are longer than we can possibly imagine. But as they say, you can’t win if you don’t play. And if you can’t win, you can’t dream of becoming a millionaire. When you buy a lottery ticket, you’re buying more the long odds at a jackpot. You’re buying a ticket to dream.

This is particularly true when it comes to the working class and below. Not only will these people never be wealthy, but they will probably never be comfortable. They’ll likely never have a comfortable retirement. They’ll probably always be living from one paycheck to the next. The lottery doesn’t change this. This is the way of the world. But the lottery provides them the ability to imagine a different life. A better one. We’re talking about a lot of people who don’t have anything to look forward to. Even if it’s almost entirely illusory (and even if winners lives don’t actually improve), the lottery is a little, quiet voice that says “it could happen to you.” It’s a reason to get up in the morning. It’s a form of entertainment. We spent all kinds of money watching people throw balls of various sizes and shapes around. That’s a game we have no stake in. If our team wins, we don’t materially benefit. There is no material benefit at all, no matter what happens.

If you look at the lottery in this way, it’s no less counterproductive productive than paying $3 to drink a beer so that you can watch the game on the bigscreen or spending $50 a month for cable so you can watch a game on TV. Most members of society have their basic material needs met. Even the losers who used to come to BC’s convenience store most likely had a roof over their heads and were (statistically) more likely to be overweight than not eating enough. So what do you do with the rest of that money? There’s really no right answer. But the lottery is, itself, not really the wrong one. I remember reading a comic strip once that said “Leo forgot to buy his lottery ticket, so he decided to play the home version” and shows him burning a $1. But isn’t it worth something to have that ticket in your pocket, to turn on the TV and watch the news for the winning numbers, and for some portion of the day to imagine how life could be if you won? But almost nobody expects to win. It’s all part of a carnival roller coaster. It’s living.

And if we’re going to allow for this sort of thing, then why not have the state do it? The state may be no more responsible than private industry (something “my side” has been saying for years). But it’s profits to the state that would otherwise go to someone else. And, though this argument doesn’t appeal all that much to me, if you’re concerned about gambling, it makes the state less likely to legalize it writ-large, because it would cut into the state’s profits. Allow people to bet on horse-races or drop their quarters in casinos, then they will will devote less money to the system that the state profits from. And given the short time horizon on horserace bets and slot machines (which don’t even make you pull down a lever anymore), you run the risk of the dumb population throwing a whole lot more money a whole lot more quickly with just about any major form of gambling than a daily lottery outside of the stock market.

I know that Mike Hunt, Dave Hackensack, and others have suggested that there shouldn’t be any laws against drunk driving. Well, your cause has a champion!

When first tipped to the video, I thought that I might actually agree with him because he was against some new DUI law and I think we already have enough on the books (unless we’re talking about a new law to differentiate between buzzed driving and drunk driving). I don’t typically respond to political stuff on Facebook (or I try not to) anyway, but it’s sometimes after a fair amount of kvetching over what, if anything, I would say in disagreement with the Facebook Friend. I find it interesting that in this case, there was simply no way that I was going to say anything even though I thought I might agree with the video in question. The stigma against “defending drunk drivers” is really that great.

In any event, the law in question is actually a new law I can support. They want to extend prior act consideration from five years to ten. Apparently, Montana’s law currently says that a judge can consider previous offenses in the last five years and this would extend that to ten. I think that extending it to ten is probably a good idea. Caught once and you might have just been unlucky. Caught twice and there’s a good chance that you do it with alarming regularity. I can’t remember the exact statistic, but something like two-thirds of single-DUI arrestees meet the definition for being an alcoholic and when it comes to people twice caught, the number is north of 90%. Those really are the people that we need to be worried about.

Unfortunately, I can’t link to the original article, but a long while back Joan Didion wrote a blockbuster piece on the creation of HOV Lanes. From Jon Last:

Caltrans decided that it would prefer to eliminate 7,800 of those vehicles—that was, literally, their precisely-stated goal—by forcing people to carpool. Thus the Diamond Lanes reserved 25 percent of the available highway space for 3 percent of the vehicles. As you might imagine, pandemonium ensued.

Traffic on the Santa Monica ground to a halt. The number of accidents increased by about 400 percent. The public flipped out. Lawsuits were filed; people scattered nails in the Diamond Lanes in protest. Apparently, people thought that Caltrans was trying to surreptitiously make their lives harder to achieve some statist social-engineering target. Why would they have ever gotten that idea?

Well, for starters, Caltrans leaned on the municipal engineer of L.A.’s surface streets. They didn’t have jurisdiction over these local roads, so they wanted him to create a “confused and congested situation” (their words) on the surface roads so that drivers would be forced onto the gridlocked freeways. And Caltrans knew that the freeways would be gridlocked, because that’s the way they wanted them.

From the other coast (and thirteen years ago), Joe Sharkey wrote:

In New Jersey, many motorists are annoyed because they’re suddenly faced with longer commutes on Routes 80 and 287 and in the newly opened stretch of the Turnpike where the HOV lanes opened in December. But often, their ire is directed at the next lane, not the highway planners.

”People punish others for using the HOV lane,” Mrs. Sanchelli said with a nervous laugh. ”In the HOV, you’re all the way over in the left. And a lot of times, they won’t let you back in. They’re brutal! Usually, I get off at the Morristown 287 exit on 80, but when they don’t let me over, I have to go down to the Lake Hiawatha exit a mile down, which throws me off by 10 to 15 minutes.”

She said she would join a real car pool but, ”I don’t know anybody around me whose hours fit. I couldn’t even car pool with my husband, who goes in at 7 A.M.”

Which really is the biggest problem with carpooling. Especially sprawling cases like Colosse where husbands and wives leave in different directions at different times. Back when I was living in Cascadia and commuting through awful traffic to get from Soundview to Enterprise City, I seriously considered looking into joining a carpooling club. But ultimately, I couldn’t because my hours varied too much. Even in jobs with more standard hours, sometimes I would want to hang around work city a while before going home. There are a whole lot of reasons that our lives cannot revolve around carpooling.

There has been a recent shift away from HOV to HOT (High-Occupancy Toll) lanes. Combining the two seems like a pretty good fit. Allowing those willing to pay more to get through quicker seems like a reasonably good “voluntary tax.” When I was working at Wildcat back in Colosse, my commute involved either driving on a toll-road or sticking to the free access road. Most of the time I did the latter, though when I was running late or in a hurry, it was really nice to have the former option. I am pretty indifferent to the notion of HOV lanes, but if we’re going to have them, stuffing them in with toll lanes seems like a good way to go.

Are Amazon’s days as a (mostly) tax-free merchant coming to an end?

Retail analyst David Strasser, a managing director at Janney Montgomery Scott, suggests that they could be. “There’s a lot of momentum building,’’ he said Friday. “(Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos has built a company strategically around avoiding sales tax. But they’re going to have to deal with this,” he added.

Wait a minute. Hasn’t Amazon successfully fended off pesky state tax collectors for 16 glorious years? Yes, but the battle has entered a new stage as Amazon builds warehouse/fulfillment centers in more locations, states grow hungrier for revenue, and a rising sales tax rate (it now averages 9.64% nationwide) puts retailers who do collect tax at an ever bigger disadvantage.

There was a time when I would have scoffed at the notion. And truthfully, I think that it’s great that online retailers got that benefit when they were just starting out so that we would get used to buying things online (which was once considered scary by some and foolish by others). Besideswhich, it seemed that what you saved in sales tax you lost in shipping (wherebouts). These days, though, you can almost always get something cheaper online with or without sales tax. When I lived in a state that did collect sales taxes from Amazon sales, I still purchased from Amazon.

But what started off as a perhaps-needed inducement to get people to shop online has basically become a tax loophole. It has also incentivized inefficient behavior, purchasing something from across the country rather than from down the street. And it puts some states at a real disadvantage. People who live in Pullman, Washington, for example, have to pay the sales tax while people who live six miles down the road in Moscow, Idaho, do not. And whenever I am on eBay, I remain glad that I am not a Californian because it seems that most of the stuff I order is from California. And, of course, Barnes and Noble’s early online push had to compete with Amazon while the former (generally) had to collect sales tax and the latter (generally) did not. Does it make sense to punish B&N for having storefronts and reward Amazon for not having them?

Of course, there are three things stopping us. First, people like the idea of tax-free and so it’s often an unpopular thing to do. I don’t think I am completely alone in coming around on this, though. And there has been movement in many states to see if they can find a way to collect it. That brings us to the second problem:

The back story is well known: In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Quill v. North Dakota, that only sellers with a physical presence (“nexus” in taxspeak) in a state are required to collect that state’s sales taxes. Just shipping into a state by say, FedEx or UPS, isn’t enough to establish nexus. Consumers still owe “use” (meaning sales) tax to their states, but few bother to pay.

Several years back, there was a big to-do in Delosa when the State Treasurer went after the State Insurance Commissioner (both were expected to be vying for the same job in the next election) for not paying sales taxes on some furniture he bought from abroad. It was expected that the Treasurer was trying to make his potential future opponent look bad as a “tax-dodger” but instead it just reminded everyone that they’re “tax-dodgers” too, in this regard. About the only place this is regularly enforced is with cars, because they can easily verify what they need to when you go to register it.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. So the second problem is that there is a jurisdiction problem. I guess it’s hard to make a company that doesn’t have so much as a business license in your state pay taxes to it, though I’m not sure how this differs from income taxes. I know that as the resident of a state with an income tax and as an employee of a company without one, my employer is still legally bound to take withholdings for my home state. It’s one of the things that has been holding up my contract. I suppose they make some sort of distinction between collection and withholdings, or employees and customers. But the courts have spoken.

So then we have to the third problem, which is that the entity in the best position to do anything about it is not the one that would reap the benefits. Congress would be essentially seen as “raising taxes”, which is a political liability, without actually getting any of the revenue that comes with it. If they’re going to be tax-raisers, they might as well have an interstate sales tax that they collect themselves, if that’s constitutionally permissible (just about everything else is under the commerce clause).

So what happens now? Amazon relies pretty heavily on its affiliates. When one or two states threaten to collect sales taxes, Amazon can write off that state’s affiliates. But when every state does it, they could lose all of their affiliates and a lot of their utility. That would leave an opening for an affiliate-based rival to offer nearly as wide a selection as Amazon, but with sales tax. Amazon might indeed win such a war based on price, but it would hurt. Or Amazon and Affiliazon could both lose to eBay, which has an amazing selection, good prices, and is nearly impossible to tax, though also has a chaotic marketplace (hard to find what you want) and trust issues.

Of course, even if Amazon itself throws in the towel, the overall inefficiency problems are not solved. It still makes sense to order something from across the country on eBay than buy something across the street. It would ultimately just put Amazon in similar footing with B&N, Walmart, and so on. Which would be good for the competitors, though it doesn’t really solve this problem:

State officials have long lamented the shortfall and sought ways to collect a bigger portion by using a mix of education and threats. California, for instance, expects to be shortchanged $1.15 billion in 2010 from e-commerce and catalog sales, according to estimates from the state Board of Equalization.

Amazon is surely responsible for some of that, but so are a lot of others, who are not such easy targets.

Arapaho is considering a vote on whether or not to do away with Daylight Savings Time. As a critic of the custom, I mostly hope they do it. I say “mostly” because, while it would be nice to do away with spring forward and have earlier sunrises, it would also be decidedly inconvenient if Arapaho did it alone. That would mean that every time we crossed state lines, we would have to deal with a time change. We go to Deseret and Shoshona periodically. More importantly, though, the last time we flew, we flew out of Deseret and decided that it might be more advantageous to drive five hours to the major airport to get a non-stop flight versus driving a couple hours to Alexandria (Arapaho) and making a two-legged flight. It’s pretty easy to imagine us forgetting that Deseret is an hour ahead of us and missing a flight.

Most likely, the vote will fail. Apparently it has been proposed before. They nipped and tucked it this time around to satisfy some of the objections (Shouldn’t the people get to vote? What if the federal government mandates DST?). But I’m a proud citizen of one of the few states applying scrutiny to this DST madness.