The world is really complicated, and therefore, figuring out the best government policies is very difficult. Emphasizing simplistic ideological purity, to the point of applying one idea to all problems and ignoring the knowledge of people who actually study each problem, is a bad way to approach the world's complexities. I mostly think, in the U.S., the left has been doing a better job at avoiding the mindset than the right. But the popularity of Bernie Sanders doesn't look good in that regard.
I watched his last debate (and he's debating again now), and pretty much any attack he makes on Hillary is essentially about ideological purity - very similar to Tea Party attacks on "RINOs" that liberals previously mocked. And his own logic for whether to support something seems to always go like this: "Is this on the side of 'corporate America'? If yes, I'm against it. If no, I'm for it." Should I expect that question will work really well as a substitute for what actually matters: the net effect on the quality of people's lives?
One of the worst ways this plays out is his stance on trade. He, like Trump, opposes free trade and doesn't want American workers to have to compete with poor foreign workers. For one thing, support for free trade, and understanding how it is a net benefit to America, is one of the most commonly used checks on a person's understanding of economics. And besides that, we are seeing a rapid rise from poverty in the developing world in the countries that have been able to tap into globalization the most. The absolute poverty in the developing world is far worse than the "stagnating middle class" that Sanders wants to protect here. What Sanders essentially wants to do is block one of the most proven routes out of absolute poverty by forcing us to buy more expensive products from comparatively wealthy Americans. That is redistribution upward, from the poor to the wealthy in the world, and would increase overall inequality. But I suppose it's worth increasing poverty and inequality as long as we're opposing "corporate America" while doing so.
The same problem applies to immigration. Although he wants to treat immigrants who are already here nicely, he's actually anti-immigration in other ways, similar to his opposition to free trade. He has voted against immigration reform and explained that he does not want to allow more immigrants because they'll lower our wages and take our jobs. It takes a false, zero-sum view of economics to think that is true as its net effect, but suppose we give Sanders the benefit of the doubt here. The poverty of the immigrant that he imagines in these scenarios is worse than being a "stagnating middle class American" who he is trying to protect. Using immigration quotas to prevent poor people from earning a living for themselves here is again redistributing income upward, both increasing poverty and inequality (unless you don't count foreigners as people). But as Sanders has said, "open borders is a Koch brothers proposal", and using government force to increase poverty/inequality is just the price you have to pay to keep your ideological purity of opposing rich Americans I suppose.
Even though free trade and immigration are overall beneficial to our economic growth and toward reducing poverty and inequality, it is true that some Americans can be worse off. If Sanders wants only those exact Americans to be in his circle of empathy, there's a much easier way to help their incomes without shrinking our economy and forcing foreigners into crushing poverty. Just propose redistributing more income through wage subsidies!
Instead he wants to do redistribution through policies that sound terrible to me, such as "free" college (this gets at the main reason I think that's really wasteful), and a $15 minimum wage. Maybe a $15 minimum wage would work in a high-wage part of the country. But that is above the median wage in some of our states. How would it not be disastrous to tell a whole state "it is now illegal to pay anyone the amount that the majority of you are currently getting paid"? How can I understand his support for that other than as ignoring the complications of real life when they are inconvenient?
You know how liberals (rightly) attack the GOP for ignoring what experts such as climatologists have to say? Is it now OK to completely ignore economics? Because Bernie, for many more reasons beyond the issues I already mentioned, just ignores mainstream economics and chooses to believe what is convenient for his ideology. On Twitter I mostly follow economists and musicians - it's funny how whenever Bernie is mentioned, it's always negatively by the former group and positively by the latter. For example, past Democratic CEA chairs have openly criticized him for undermining the Democratic Party's reputation on evidence-based economics. You should laugh at Ron Paul when he talks about the gold standard because the overwhelming consensus of economists laughs at that. But be consistent. Bernie chose an MMT economic adviser, which is kind of like the left-wing version of that. Etc.
Does Bernie seem like a sincere, principled person? Sure. But that's hardly enough to make someone a good president. What matters most is the actual effects of what you do. If you make the world a worse place, I don't care if you did so sincerely, or if you didn't take money from super PACs, or whatever.
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Friday, February 12, 2016
Brain dump on gun control, and why I'm skeptical of it
I've long been uninterested and agnostic on gun control. I'm not sure why it generally hasn't interested me, since I like politics. But I was agnostic largely because I had the impression that studies on it were really inconclusive. Then a couple months ago, the two widely covered shootings ramped up the issue. Obama even said inability to pass new gun control laws has been his "biggest frustration". This awesome NY Daily News cover happened. And I got a small burst of interest in the topic, looked into it a bit, but have ended up mostly where I started. Here's a brain dump on what I learned and what my thoughts are. If I feel like digging into gun control again in the future, this will help me pick up where I left off. Or maybe this will prompt a discussion that will help clarify some things for me.
In reality, the U.S. and the world has seen declining violence, both over the course of history and our lives. Here's gun violence over the past several years in the U.S., from the Pew Research Center:
Yep, gun homicides are down by half since 1993.
It is true, however, that homicide is unusually high in the U.S. compared to other developed nations. Check here for the numbers.
I don't know how to determine if that's true because there's not a clear line between "mass shooting" and regular shooting. Depending on where you draw that line, you can get very different results. Read this. Regardless, mass shootings are a very small share of all shootings. We should want to stop shootings because being murdered is bad. Five separate single-person murders are worse than one four-person murder. Giving all our attention to the latter case is a misleading distraction, and maybe a dangerous one. There's some reason to believe that our extra attention is part of what inspires deranged people to commit those shootings in the first place.
This seems like a wishful-thinking argument that attracts people on both sides of the gun debate. Some on the right would like this to be true because it means guns aren't the problem. Some on the left would like this to be the case because it's nice to believe all the world's problems will go away if we just provide more care to those in need. But... "only 3%-5% of violent acts are attributable to serious mental illness, and most do not involve guns." -- source
We have, by far, the largest and most funded military in the world. If for some reason I need to take up arms against the government, that will be why I will fail, not because of more stringent background checks or more limits on what types of guns are legal. Strangely, most people who use this argument also want to increase our military, which keeps me from taking this very seriously.
I don't even know what this means. "Nukes don't kill people; people kill people." Does anyone ever say that? Why not?
A simple counter-example is grenades. It's not legal for us to buy grenades, for the good reason that we don't want it to be very easy for a person to kill a whole lot of people. And yet we don't see many criminals using grenades to commit mass murder. In recent mass shootings, where the attacker wanted to kill many people, they tend to use legally-acquired weapons. Making something illegal usually reduces its occurrence... otherwise I'm not sure there'd be any point to having laws.
However, the counter-counter-example is alcohol and drugs. Clearly, a restrictive government policy of a high-demand product (like the Prohibition) can create black markets, which can make the law ineffective as well as create even more problems (like better funded criminal organizations). So I do think this has to be in the "potential cons" list when considering any proposed gun law.
This is the idea that less murders would happen if more people had guns, because potential victims could defend themselves. This is a hard thing to judge because I don't think there are good numbers on how many murders are prevented because the would-be victim had a gun.
One starting point is the number of "justifiable homicides" each year, since the FBI keeps track of that. A "justifiable homicide" is when one person kills another, but is cleared from wrong-doing because it was in self-defense. That looks to be ~275 per year on average.
On the other hand, a good guy with a gun can also cause gun accidents. The CDC gathers data on gun accidents per year, and in the most recent year I saw, the numbers were 505 deaths and 33,636 injuries.
Another potential downside to good-guys-with-guns is escalating a crime. For example, an armed robber who only intends to rob a person without harming them may shoot the victim once realizing that the victim has a gun. I have no idea how to get an idea for how common this happens though.
So we have some positives and negatives to good-guys-with-guns. Surely many crimes are prevented by the bad guy's knowledge or just suspicion that the would-be victim is armed, so the number of crimes prevented by good-guys-with-guns has to be much more than just the number of "justifiable homicides". But I don't know how we'd get a very good idea of how big of a factor this is beyond that. Maybe it's enough to offset the negatives, or maybe not.
And if you want a funny take on this, here is a Daily Show correspondent who went through a simulated shooting to see how well he'd be able to stop the killer.
From a first glance at the U.S. compared to other developed nations, gun ownership and homicide look clearly correlated. The U.S. has more homicide than similar countries and way higher rates of gun ownership:
But from a first glance at states within the U.S., you see a small negative correlation; states with more guns have less murder:
Of course, since crime rates are influenced by a wide combination of things, this divergence shouldn't be too strange as long as you accept that gun ownership is just one small variable of many. So what do empirical studies in the U.S., which try to isolate the variable of gun ownership, say? From what I can tell, they are pretty mixed, and a quick overview can be seen here. That linked paper also talks about common problems with gun studies, and claims that the studies that do a better job at avoiding those problems are less likely to find a statistically significant correlation between gun ownership and gun violence.
But at Slate Star Codex there's a really interesting dive into one study that looks to be particularly good, which works out a framework for predicting homicide that works when run in different ways, and does find a (small!) correlation between gun ownership and homicide. And it's far more interesting than anything I can write about this, so you should probably just stop wasting your time here and read that instead.
Australian gun control measures did not produce a big black market with all the problems that can bring, like we currently have with drugs. But Australia passed their laws with widespread public support, as well as with a previous gun ownership rate of only 7% (compared to 32% here). Clearly, any change in America would have less widespread support, and guns are a much deeper part of our culture.
Consider the difference in gun ownership between the U.S. and Canada (getting the numbers from slatestarcodex.com which I already linked earlier). The U.S. has 4 times as many guns per capita as Canada. But our gun ownership rates are not nearly so different: 32% here and 26% in Canada. This must be because Americans who own guns tend to own many guns. The ease of access to a gun has more to do with ownership rates, not guns per capita. But gun control measures will tend to be working on guns per capita, and in the U.S. you could greatly reduce the guns per capita with basically no effect on ownership rates.
Even if, despite all these problems, gun control would be overall good, there's a good case that it'd be only a tiny bit of good relative to the effort and likelihood to make meaningful change. There's a theoretical list of all the things our government could do differently, and they should be fought for in an order prioritized by amount-of-good times likelihood-of-happening. Even if gun control is on that list, maybe the effort spent on it is keeping people from working on something higher up that list.
As touched on by the slatestarcodex link I provided earlier, the main reason for high homicide rates in the U.S., relative to other developed countries, is cultural. In particular, African Americans account for a disproportionately high amount of the violent crime. I believe in Steven Pinker's explanation of violence as explained in The Better Angels of our Nature. In the case of this topic, the applicable part of his ideas are that violence within a community is correlated with distrust of those who have a "monopoly on force" (the police). We have a particularly bad history in our country between the police and African Americans, and this explains the higher violence. It's easy to get stuck in a vicious cycle there where that higher violence brings a harsher police presence, which maintains the distrust of police, and so on.
If that is the case, then the most important thing to do is to rebuild trust, although that's not quick and easy. Arguably the biggest thing we can do toward that end is reduce unnecessary conflict with police by reducing the number of things the police should enforce. This is why I think ending the war on drugs would go a long way toward reducing violent crime. But if there were a very big effort to enforce much more restrictive gun laws, you can expect it to be enforced much more harshly in poor minority communities.
Earlier I linked to the CDC's numbers of accidental deaths by different causes. You know what had far more deaths than accidental shootings? There were 3,391 deaths by accidental drownings. Suppose we can reduce those with "swimming pool control" laws. Should we? Or would you feel like that's an encroachment on people's liberties that wouldn't be worth the lives saved?
Gun suicides kill twice as many people in the U.S. as gun homicides, so arguably this should be the focus when trying to determine the effect of gun control laws. And my impression is that there's a stronger link between the two in the evidence, but I haven't looked into it as much. So this is a point currently in favor of gun control, but I'm really not sure what sort of value to place on that relative to other things. Learning or thinking more about this could change my mind on the issue.
On homicide as well, learning more about evidence on that could definitely change my mind either way since I've barely scratched the surface. But I'm too bored to go on, and not optimistic about what value I'd get out of further digging.
Or maybe future evidence with better information that doesn't yet exist will clear everything up. Speaking of which... for political reasons the CDC has not been doing gun violence research for a long time. That's probably not helping.
There's also countless possible ideas that could be called a "gun control law" that this general overview doesn't address. Surely some would be good and some would not. I just don't know which is which, nor am I familiar with all the different types of gun control that have been proposed. Maybe looking at more specific proposals will sound convincing to me and not be prone to the concerns I have. Or maybe not.
The end.
Common misconceptions about gun violence
"Violence is getting so much worse!"
In reality, the U.S. and the world has seen declining violence, both over the course of history and our lives. Here's gun violence over the past several years in the U.S., from the Pew Research Center:
Yep, gun homicides are down by half since 1993.
It is true, however, that homicide is unusually high in the U.S. compared to other developed nations. Check here for the numbers.
"But mass shootings are increasing, and that's what's most important!"
I don't know how to determine if that's true because there's not a clear line between "mass shooting" and regular shooting. Depending on where you draw that line, you can get very different results. Read this. Regardless, mass shootings are a very small share of all shootings. We should want to stop shootings because being murdered is bad. Five separate single-person murders are worse than one four-person murder. Giving all our attention to the latter case is a misleading distraction, and maybe a dangerous one. There's some reason to believe that our extra attention is part of what inspires deranged people to commit those shootings in the first place.
"All this gun violence is really about mental illness"
This seems like a wishful-thinking argument that attracts people on both sides of the gun debate. Some on the right would like this to be true because it means guns aren't the problem. Some on the left would like this to be the case because it's nice to believe all the world's problems will go away if we just provide more care to those in need. But... "only 3%-5% of violent acts are attributable to serious mental illness, and most do not involve guns." -- source
Common Facebook-level pro-gun arguments
"We need our guns to defend against the government."
We have, by far, the largest and most funded military in the world. If for some reason I need to take up arms against the government, that will be why I will fail, not because of more stringent background checks or more limits on what types of guns are legal. Strangely, most people who use this argument also want to increase our military, which keeps me from taking this very seriously.
"Guns don't kill people; people kill people."
I don't even know what this means. "Nukes don't kill people; people kill people." Does anyone ever say that? Why not?
"Criminals don't follow laws, so laws restricting guns won't reduce gun availability for the bad guys."
A simple counter-example is grenades. It's not legal for us to buy grenades, for the good reason that we don't want it to be very easy for a person to kill a whole lot of people. And yet we don't see many criminals using grenades to commit mass murder. In recent mass shootings, where the attacker wanted to kill many people, they tend to use legally-acquired weapons. Making something illegal usually reduces its occurrence... otherwise I'm not sure there'd be any point to having laws.
However, the counter-counter-example is alcohol and drugs. Clearly, a restrictive government policy of a high-demand product (like the Prohibition) can create black markets, which can make the law ineffective as well as create even more problems (like better funded criminal organizations). So I do think this has to be in the "potential cons" list when considering any proposed gun law.
"The only person that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
This is the idea that less murders would happen if more people had guns, because potential victims could defend themselves. This is a hard thing to judge because I don't think there are good numbers on how many murders are prevented because the would-be victim had a gun.
One starting point is the number of "justifiable homicides" each year, since the FBI keeps track of that. A "justifiable homicide" is when one person kills another, but is cleared from wrong-doing because it was in self-defense. That looks to be ~275 per year on average.
On the other hand, a good guy with a gun can also cause gun accidents. The CDC gathers data on gun accidents per year, and in the most recent year I saw, the numbers were 505 deaths and 33,636 injuries.
Another potential downside to good-guys-with-guns is escalating a crime. For example, an armed robber who only intends to rob a person without harming them may shoot the victim once realizing that the victim has a gun. I have no idea how to get an idea for how common this happens though.
So we have some positives and negatives to good-guys-with-guns. Surely many crimes are prevented by the bad guy's knowledge or just suspicion that the would-be victim is armed, so the number of crimes prevented by good-guys-with-guns has to be much more than just the number of "justifiable homicides". But I don't know how we'd get a very good idea of how big of a factor this is beyond that. Maybe it's enough to offset the negatives, or maybe not.
And if you want a funny take on this, here is a Daily Show correspondent who went through a simulated shooting to see how well he'd be able to stop the killer.
The Evidence
So if you want to know what affect gun control actually has in the real world, it's probably best to look at empirical studies done on... gun control in the real world (actual academic studies, not "studies" from political groups with a pre-determined agenda). It turns out that most studies focus on gun ownership rates. They are a simple way to measure the size of the change from a gun control law. And most gun control arguments largely boil down to the idea that making it harder to get a gun would reduce gun deaths; if that's true you'd expect to find a correlation between gun ownership and gun violence.
Australia
I started by looking at the studies on the gun laws that passed in Australia after their mass shooting in 1996, because that's what I've always heard about as the most drastic change in gun policy, and presumably that means its effects on gun violence should be easiest to detect. It did lead to a significant decrease in gun ownership (30%!), and a lot of research has been done on its effects on gun violence.
Here is the most recent study, which also gives an overview of previous studies. Its methodologies do not find a statistically significant change in homicide or suicide rates from the law. And here is the study most commonly cited that does suggest the law reduce homicide and suicide (it finds the reduction on suicide is much bigger/clearer than the reduction on homicide).
I'm not smart or knowledgeable enough to judge which of those are better. And from what I can tell, researchers themselves are fairly split on it as well (otherwise I would just go with the consensus of the experts). I have gotten the impression though that there's a bit more agreement that the evidence gives good reason to think it reduced suicide by a decent amount.
I'll go with the average of the expert opinions here and take this as evidence for a small positive effect from the gun control law in Australia on homicide. It's worth noting that the divide between the researchers/studies are between "good" and "neutral" effects; nobody is seriously looking at the evidence and finding that Australia's gun control made violent crime worse.
The U.S.
From a first glance at the U.S. compared to other developed nations, gun ownership and homicide look clearly correlated. The U.S. has more homicide than similar countries and way higher rates of gun ownership:
But from a first glance at states within the U.S., you see a small negative correlation; states with more guns have less murder:
Of course, since crime rates are influenced by a wide combination of things, this divergence shouldn't be too strange as long as you accept that gun ownership is just one small variable of many. So what do empirical studies in the U.S., which try to isolate the variable of gun ownership, say? From what I can tell, they are pretty mixed, and a quick overview can be seen here. That linked paper also talks about common problems with gun studies, and claims that the studies that do a better job at avoiding those problems are less likely to find a statistically significant correlation between gun ownership and gun violence.
But at Slate Star Codex there's a really interesting dive into one study that looks to be particularly good, which works out a framework for predicting homicide that works when run in different ways, and does find a (small!) correlation between gun ownership and homicide. And it's far more interesting than anything I can write about this, so you should probably just stop wasting your time here and read that instead.
Things I worry about
All the above makes me lean toward believing that less guns would mean a little less murder, while still mostly being agnostic. But there are things that make me worry that trying to legislate/enforce our way there would backfire...
1. Trying to pass gun control can increase the number of guns.
Whenever there is even the perception that new gun control laws are likely to pass, gun purchases go up. So if politicians try and fail to pass new gun laws, they have caused the opposite of what they hoped. And even if they succeed, the increased purchases may be more than the decrease that the law brings into effect.
2. The U.S. may be more prone to a black market if restrictions get too tight.
Australian gun control measures did not produce a big black market with all the problems that can bring, like we currently have with drugs. But Australia passed their laws with widespread public support, as well as with a previous gun ownership rate of only 7% (compared to 32% here). Clearly, any change in America would have less widespread support, and guns are a much deeper part of our culture.
3. The U.S. already has too many guns to make any difference without a drastic change.
Consider the difference in gun ownership between the U.S. and Canada (getting the numbers from slatestarcodex.com which I already linked earlier). The U.S. has 4 times as many guns per capita as Canada. But our gun ownership rates are not nearly so different: 32% here and 26% in Canada. This must be because Americans who own guns tend to own many guns. The ease of access to a gun has more to do with ownership rates, not guns per capita. But gun control measures will tend to be working on guns per capita, and in the U.S. you could greatly reduce the guns per capita with basically no effect on ownership rates.
4. Gun control would take effort that'd be better spent elsewhere.
Even if, despite all these problems, gun control would be overall good, there's a good case that it'd be only a tiny bit of good relative to the effort and likelihood to make meaningful change. There's a theoretical list of all the things our government could do differently, and they should be fought for in an order prioritized by amount-of-good times likelihood-of-happening. Even if gun control is on that list, maybe the effort spent on it is keeping people from working on something higher up that list.
5. Enforcing stricter gun control laws could increase tension between the police and African American communities, and thereby increase crime
As touched on by the slatestarcodex link I provided earlier, the main reason for high homicide rates in the U.S., relative to other developed countries, is cultural. In particular, African Americans account for a disproportionately high amount of the violent crime. I believe in Steven Pinker's explanation of violence as explained in The Better Angels of our Nature. In the case of this topic, the applicable part of his ideas are that violence within a community is correlated with distrust of those who have a "monopoly on force" (the police). We have a particularly bad history in our country between the police and African Americans, and this explains the higher violence. It's easy to get stuck in a vicious cycle there where that higher violence brings a harsher police presence, which maintains the distrust of police, and so on.
If that is the case, then the most important thing to do is to rebuild trust, although that's not quick and easy. Arguably the biggest thing we can do toward that end is reduce unnecessary conflict with police by reducing the number of things the police should enforce. This is why I think ending the war on drugs would go a long way toward reducing violent crime. But if there were a very big effort to enforce much more restrictive gun laws, you can expect it to be enforced much more harshly in poor minority communities.
6. How much value should freedom be given?
Earlier I linked to the CDC's numbers of accidental deaths by different causes. You know what had far more deaths than accidental shootings? There were 3,391 deaths by accidental drownings. Suppose we can reduce those with "swimming pool control" laws. Should we? Or would you feel like that's an encroachment on people's liberties that wouldn't be worth the lives saved?
What could make up my mind?
Gun suicides kill twice as many people in the U.S. as gun homicides, so arguably this should be the focus when trying to determine the effect of gun control laws. And my impression is that there's a stronger link between the two in the evidence, but I haven't looked into it as much. So this is a point currently in favor of gun control, but I'm really not sure what sort of value to place on that relative to other things. Learning or thinking more about this could change my mind on the issue.
On homicide as well, learning more about evidence on that could definitely change my mind either way since I've barely scratched the surface. But I'm too bored to go on, and not optimistic about what value I'd get out of further digging.
Or maybe future evidence with better information that doesn't yet exist will clear everything up. Speaking of which... for political reasons the CDC has not been doing gun violence research for a long time. That's probably not helping.
There's also countless possible ideas that could be called a "gun control law" that this general overview doesn't address. Surely some would be good and some would not. I just don't know which is which, nor am I familiar with all the different types of gun control that have been proposed. Maybe looking at more specific proposals will sound convincing to me and not be prone to the concerns I have. Or maybe not.
The end.
Monday, November 2, 2015
Texas Property Tax Exemption for Surviving Spouses of Disabled Veterans Amendment, Proposition 2
This is the last post of the series where I struggle to understand and think through the 7 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution that we can vote on 11/3.
The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for an exemption from ad valorem taxation of all or part of the market value of the residence homestead of the surviving spouse of a 100 percent or totally disabled veteran who died before the law authorizing a residence homestead exemption for such a veteran took effect.
For a while, we've had a law where a "totally disabled" veteran that owned their home could be 100% exempt from property taxes. Then, in 2011, we passed an amendment making it such that, when these veterans died, their property tax exemption remained for their spouse, as long as the spouse stayed in the same home and did not remarry. Due to legalese wording reasons, that law has unintentionally only been able to apply when the veteran died after 2011, when it came into law. This amendment makes it apply retroactively to cover veterans who died before 2011.
Also, there are already extra homestead exemptions if you are elderly or disabled (regardless of veteran status), which already apply to a surviving spouse (still in the same home and not remarried).
The same oddities of homestead exemptions I explained for prop 1 apply here. This is the state government mandating a cut in taxes that are only collected by local governments. It's unclear how this will affect local government revenue, especially around military bases where there may be a high number of people eligible for this exemption. Some state this as a reason to oppose the law, but others point to the bill HB 7 which they say should make state taxes cover the difference. I don't know to what extent that will actually happen.
This would apply to an estimated 3,800 people.
I've seen support for this purely based on the fact that it's a "tax cut". But making selective exceptions to tax law is, in effect, no different from writing a check to those people for that amount. Whether we call this welfare or a tax cut is really just semantics. It should be evaluated on whether it's a good use of public money.
It will give money to people who likely would highly benefit from it, and for the most part we wouldn't have to worry about a disincentive to work.
A large part of the harm this addressed in 2011 is a sudden increase in property taxes after a spouse dies, which the surviving spouse didn't anticipate and can't handle. Because this year's amendment applies retroactively for deaths that occurred many years ago, this is helping people who already faced that sudden increase in property taxes and have remained in the same home, unmarried, all that time anyway. By selecting who gets financial assistance this way, we are likely specifically helping only those who need it least (out of the category of surviving spouses of fully disabled veterans). Because presumably, the surviving spouses who are hurting for cash the most had to sell their home or did not own a home in the first place.
As I already hinted at right above this, and explained in more detail in my previous post on prop 1, I really dislike homestead exemptions in general. It'd be much better to give surviving spouses, or any person in need, some sort of tax rebate that is not dependent on their owning a house.
I wonder if there are other unintended side effects of the weird selection process for who receives this money. For instance, if an old veteran dies, leaving his old wife behind, it may be best for the children to help her sell her house and move nearby. Could the fact that she could lose a full exemption on property tax lead people to not make such a move? Would someone not remarry, despite wanting to, because they would suddenly see their cost of living shoot up?
Undecided!
I believe public policy should financially help those who really need help. And this would surely help some people who do really need that help. However, this seems like a really bad way to do it. Whether someone deserves help is not dependent on whether their spouse was in the military, or if they have chosen to not remarry after that spouse died, or if they owned a home and have not moved. This amendment strikes me as a really bad way to financially help those in need. I want my vote to acknowledge that there are many problems with this proposal, but I also don't want to make the perfect the enemy of the good. So I don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll just not vote on this one.
Ballot Title
The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for an exemption from ad valorem taxation of all or part of the market value of the residence homestead of the surviving spouse of a 100 percent or totally disabled veteran who died before the law authorizing a residence homestead exemption for such a veteran took effect.
Helpful Links
- Ballotpedia
- Page 15 of the "Analyses of Proposed Constitutional Amendments" by the Texas Legislative Council
- Page 8 of the 2015 ballot "focus report" by the Texas House of Representatives
- Page 2 of progresstexas.org's ballot guide (for a progressive perspective)
- Page 4 of the Texas Libertarian 2015 Voter Guide (for a libertarian perspective)
What does this do?
For a while, we've had a law where a "totally disabled" veteran that owned their home could be 100% exempt from property taxes. Then, in 2011, we passed an amendment making it such that, when these veterans died, their property tax exemption remained for their spouse, as long as the spouse stayed in the same home and did not remarry. Due to legalese wording reasons, that law has unintentionally only been able to apply when the veteran died after 2011, when it came into law. This amendment makes it apply retroactively to cover veterans who died before 2011.
Also, there are already extra homestead exemptions if you are elderly or disabled (regardless of veteran status), which already apply to a surviving spouse (still in the same home and not remarried).
The same oddities of homestead exemptions I explained for prop 1 apply here. This is the state government mandating a cut in taxes that are only collected by local governments. It's unclear how this will affect local government revenue, especially around military bases where there may be a high number of people eligible for this exemption. Some state this as a reason to oppose the law, but others point to the bill HB 7 which they say should make state taxes cover the difference. I don't know to what extent that will actually happen.
This would apply to an estimated 3,800 people.
I've seen support for this purely based on the fact that it's a "tax cut". But making selective exceptions to tax law is, in effect, no different from writing a check to those people for that amount. Whether we call this welfare or a tax cut is really just semantics. It should be evaluated on whether it's a good use of public money.
Why would this be good?
It will give money to people who likely would highly benefit from it, and for the most part we wouldn't have to worry about a disincentive to work.
Why would this be bad?
A large part of the harm this addressed in 2011 is a sudden increase in property taxes after a spouse dies, which the surviving spouse didn't anticipate and can't handle. Because this year's amendment applies retroactively for deaths that occurred many years ago, this is helping people who already faced that sudden increase in property taxes and have remained in the same home, unmarried, all that time anyway. By selecting who gets financial assistance this way, we are likely specifically helping only those who need it least (out of the category of surviving spouses of fully disabled veterans). Because presumably, the surviving spouses who are hurting for cash the most had to sell their home or did not own a home in the first place.
As I already hinted at right above this, and explained in more detail in my previous post on prop 1, I really dislike homestead exemptions in general. It'd be much better to give surviving spouses, or any person in need, some sort of tax rebate that is not dependent on their owning a house.
I wonder if there are other unintended side effects of the weird selection process for who receives this money. For instance, if an old veteran dies, leaving his old wife behind, it may be best for the children to help her sell her house and move nearby. Could the fact that she could lose a full exemption on property tax lead people to not make such a move? Would someone not remarry, despite wanting to, because they would suddenly see their cost of living shoot up?
Verdict
Undecided!
I believe public policy should financially help those who really need help. And this would surely help some people who do really need that help. However, this seems like a really bad way to do it. Whether someone deserves help is not dependent on whether their spouse was in the military, or if they have chosen to not remarry after that spouse died, or if they owned a home and have not moved. This amendment strikes me as a really bad way to financially help those in need. I want my vote to acknowledge that there are many problems with this proposal, but I also don't want to make the perfect the enemy of the good. So I don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll just not vote on this one.
What would it take to change my mind?
Don't know.
Texas Homestead Exemption for School District Property Taxes Amendment, Proposition 1
This is part of the series of posts where I struggle to understand and think through the 7 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution that we can vote on 11/3.
The constitutional amendment increasing the amount of the residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxation for public school purposes from $15,000 to $25,000, providing for a reduction of the limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for those purposes on the homestead of an elderly or disabled person to reflect the increased exemption amount, authorizing the legislature to prohibit a political subdivision that has adopted an optional residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxation from reducing the amount of or repealing the exemption, and prohibiting the enactment of a law that imposes a transfer tax on a transaction that conveys fee simple title to real property.
There's basically 3 parts: 1. increase in homestead exemption, 2. increase in extra exemption for the elderly/disabled, and 3. banning of sales tax on home sales. You can ignore 2 because it basically just keeps things the same with regard to an extra amount of homestead exemption for elderly/disabled. Same with 3; we already don't collect sales tax on home sales, and doing so would require its own constitutional amendment. So mostly, to decide whether to support this change, we just need to understand part 1.
This change applies to the property taxes collected by your local school district. Basically, every year you pay a percent of your property's value to the school after the amount of the homestead exemption, which is currently $15,000. As a simple example, pretend you own a $35,000 home, and your school district has a property tax of 5%. You'd have to pay 0.05 * (35,000 - 15,000) = $1,000. With this amendment, the exemption would change such that you'd have to pay 0.05 * (35,000 - 25,000) = $500. Since homes are generally much more expensive than this, the actual tax cut will be much smaller than these simple examples.
One weird thing is that this is a cut in local taxes being mandated by the state government. What will the school districts do about the lost revenue? The state government will cover the cost with its own taxes. Now you might start to see why, even though this is described as a tax cut, the Libertarian Party opposes this amendment. The House originally wanted to cut the state sales tax, but the Senate wanted to make this change instead, and we ended up with the Senate's proposal. So from state and local taxes combined, this isn't necessarily cutting taxes, since the cut in the local level is made up by increased spending at the state level which was originally supposed to be a cut at the state level. Also, as property values go up, property tax rates can always be "cut" without losing revenue, and it's quite possible that many local governments will choose to delay inevitable property tax cuts to offset the forced exemption increase from the state government. And there's some entertaining irony for state politicians who strongly oppose the federal government meddling in state affairs to be meddling in local government affairs.
Another weird thing about this is that state gas taxes will be used to cover part of the new increased state spending on local school districts. Why is that weird? Because prop 7 is about looking for more ways to fund our highways since the gas tax isn't raising enough money for our roads. So why are they, in this amendment, wanting to divert more of the gas tax revenue to other things? I don't get it.
It cuts property taxes a little, even though it's arguably at the expense of a state-wide sales tax cut. Also, I suspect that it's good for the state to take a larger share of school funding at the margin, because it can help smooth out funding across schools rather than rich areas having a lot of school funding while poor areas have a little. However, I don't know that this is what the state will actually do; this is a potential improvement.
I think homestead exemptions distort the market and should be eliminated rather than increased. I'd prefer a sales tax cut. And I'd prefer any property tax cuts to come in the form of rate decreases, not exemption increases. First, you pay the property tax regardless of whether you own or rent. Property taxes must be paid on apartments, for instance, and all of an apartment's money comes from rents, so it is therefore reflected in the price of rents. But homestead exemptions only reduce property taxes for home owners, which effectively is a state subsidy of home ownership versus renting. Not only that, it is on top of additional federal subsidies to home ownership (like the mortgage interest deduction). I don't want to further distort the free market's pricing of buying-versus-renting property, especially since this disproportionately benefits the wealthy (who are more likely to own than rent). Also, you may have recent memories of serious economic problems that were arguably caused by a distorted market that over-encouraged home-buying...
I plan on voting no. Because I'm more confident in the cons of expanded homestead exemptions (as opposed to the originally proposed across-the-board tax cuts) than I am confident in pros of the changes in education funding.
Ballot Title
The constitutional amendment increasing the amount of the residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxation for public school purposes from $15,000 to $25,000, providing for a reduction of the limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for those purposes on the homestead of an elderly or disabled person to reflect the increased exemption amount, authorizing the legislature to prohibit a political subdivision that has adopted an optional residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxation from reducing the amount of or repealing the exemption, and prohibiting the enactment of a law that imposes a transfer tax on a transaction that conveys fee simple title to real property.
Helpful Links
- Ballotpedia
- Page 3 of the "Analyses of Proposed Constitutional Amendments" by the Texas Legislative Council
- Page 5 of the 2015 ballot "focus report" by the Texas House of Representatives
- Page 2 of progresstexas.org's ballot guide (for a progressive perspective)
- Page 3 of the Texas Libertarian 2015 Voter Guide (for a libertarian perspective)
- This analysis by the "Center for Public Policy Priorities"
What does this do?
There's basically 3 parts: 1. increase in homestead exemption, 2. increase in extra exemption for the elderly/disabled, and 3. banning of sales tax on home sales. You can ignore 2 because it basically just keeps things the same with regard to an extra amount of homestead exemption for elderly/disabled. Same with 3; we already don't collect sales tax on home sales, and doing so would require its own constitutional amendment. So mostly, to decide whether to support this change, we just need to understand part 1.
This change applies to the property taxes collected by your local school district. Basically, every year you pay a percent of your property's value to the school after the amount of the homestead exemption, which is currently $15,000. As a simple example, pretend you own a $35,000 home, and your school district has a property tax of 5%. You'd have to pay 0.05 * (35,000 - 15,000) = $1,000. With this amendment, the exemption would change such that you'd have to pay 0.05 * (35,000 - 25,000) = $500. Since homes are generally much more expensive than this, the actual tax cut will be much smaller than these simple examples.
One weird thing is that this is a cut in local taxes being mandated by the state government. What will the school districts do about the lost revenue? The state government will cover the cost with its own taxes. Now you might start to see why, even though this is described as a tax cut, the Libertarian Party opposes this amendment. The House originally wanted to cut the state sales tax, but the Senate wanted to make this change instead, and we ended up with the Senate's proposal. So from state and local taxes combined, this isn't necessarily cutting taxes, since the cut in the local level is made up by increased spending at the state level which was originally supposed to be a cut at the state level. Also, as property values go up, property tax rates can always be "cut" without losing revenue, and it's quite possible that many local governments will choose to delay inevitable property tax cuts to offset the forced exemption increase from the state government. And there's some entertaining irony for state politicians who strongly oppose the federal government meddling in state affairs to be meddling in local government affairs.
Another weird thing about this is that state gas taxes will be used to cover part of the new increased state spending on local school districts. Why is that weird? Because prop 7 is about looking for more ways to fund our highways since the gas tax isn't raising enough money for our roads. So why are they, in this amendment, wanting to divert more of the gas tax revenue to other things? I don't get it.
Why would this be good?
It cuts property taxes a little, even though it's arguably at the expense of a state-wide sales tax cut. Also, I suspect that it's good for the state to take a larger share of school funding at the margin, because it can help smooth out funding across schools rather than rich areas having a lot of school funding while poor areas have a little. However, I don't know that this is what the state will actually do; this is a potential improvement.
Why would this be bad?
I think homestead exemptions distort the market and should be eliminated rather than increased. I'd prefer a sales tax cut. And I'd prefer any property tax cuts to come in the form of rate decreases, not exemption increases. First, you pay the property tax regardless of whether you own or rent. Property taxes must be paid on apartments, for instance, and all of an apartment's money comes from rents, so it is therefore reflected in the price of rents. But homestead exemptions only reduce property taxes for home owners, which effectively is a state subsidy of home ownership versus renting. Not only that, it is on top of additional federal subsidies to home ownership (like the mortgage interest deduction). I don't want to further distort the free market's pricing of buying-versus-renting property, especially since this disproportionately benefits the wealthy (who are more likely to own than rent). Also, you may have recent memories of serious economic problems that were arguably caused by a distorted market that over-encouraged home-buying...
Verdict
I plan on voting no. Because I'm more confident in the cons of expanded homestead exemptions (as opposed to the originally proposed across-the-board tax cuts) than I am confident in pros of the changes in education funding.
What would it take to change my mind?
I'm not sure. But this was a pretty confusing amendment to learn about, so there is much more likely to be some "unknown unknowns" that I could still discover that would change my mind in ways I can't anticipate.
Texas Sales and Use Tax Revenue for Transportation Amendment, Proposition 7
This is part of the series of posts where I struggle to understand and think through the 7 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution that we can vote on 11/3.
The constitutional amendment dedicating certain sales and use tax revenue and motor vehicle sales, use, and rental tax revenue to the state highway fund to provide funding for nontolled roads and the reduction of certain transportation-related debt.
Overly-simple summary: it requires a portion of general tax revenue to go toward roads for the next 10 years.
Currently, roads are primarily funded through gas taxes rather than other taxes. This has the benefit of, to some extent, targeting the tax toward people who use the roads more, as well as encouraging less traffic and gas consumption. But since fuel efficiency for many cars has gone way up, current levels of the gas tax are no longer sufficient to fund state highways. So if we were to keep using our gas taxes in this way, the rates would need to be raised, and most state politicians do not want to sign any kind of tax rate increase into law. To avoid that, Texas has been building up some debt for highway work. This amendment seeks to divert existing general tax revenue toward highways so that we can pay for what we need without having to raise the gas tax.
The first question that came to my mind was: why this strange constitutional amendment forcing them to dedicate a portion to highways in this way for a while, when they can just choose to divert those funds in this way year-by-year? But from what I can tell, there's actually a fairly good reason for that. Most highway work requires years of funding to be dedicated to a project, so it's good to have something that forces the revenue to be consistent.
To know the practical effect of the law, we'd need to compare it to what would happen if this law did not get approved. Basically, there would be a portion of general tax revenue that would be free to do something else, which leads to a few different possibilities:
I am undecided-leaning-no.
Ballot Title
The constitutional amendment dedicating certain sales and use tax revenue and motor vehicle sales, use, and rental tax revenue to the state highway fund to provide funding for nontolled roads and the reduction of certain transportation-related debt.
Helpful Links
- Ballotpedia
- Page 39 of the "Analyses of Proposed Constitutional Amendments" by the Texas Legislative Council
- Page 17 of the 2015 ballot "focus report" by the Texas House of Representatives
- Page 4 of progresstexas.org's ballot guide (for a progressive perspective)
- Page 7 of the Texas Libertarian 2015 Voter Guide (for a libertarian perspective)
- This analysis by the "Center for Public Policy Priorities"
- This Texas Tribune article
What does this do?
Overly-simple summary: it requires a portion of general tax revenue to go toward roads for the next 10 years.
Currently, roads are primarily funded through gas taxes rather than other taxes. This has the benefit of, to some extent, targeting the tax toward people who use the roads more, as well as encouraging less traffic and gas consumption. But since fuel efficiency for many cars has gone way up, current levels of the gas tax are no longer sufficient to fund state highways. So if we were to keep using our gas taxes in this way, the rates would need to be raised, and most state politicians do not want to sign any kind of tax rate increase into law. To avoid that, Texas has been building up some debt for highway work. This amendment seeks to divert existing general tax revenue toward highways so that we can pay for what we need without having to raise the gas tax.
The first question that came to my mind was: why this strange constitutional amendment forcing them to dedicate a portion to highways in this way for a while, when they can just choose to divert those funds in this way year-by-year? But from what I can tell, there's actually a fairly good reason for that. Most highway work requires years of funding to be dedicated to a project, so it's good to have something that forces the revenue to be consistent.
Why would this be good or bad?
To know the practical effect of the law, we'd need to compare it to what would happen if this law did not get approved. Basically, there would be a portion of general tax revenue that would be free to do something else, which leads to a few different possibilities:
- They may simply fund highways in this way anyway in year-to-year budget. This would be less desirable due to the uncertainty of a steady revenue stream, as I explained a bit earlier. But it probably wouldn't be too bad, and I'm guessing this is the most likely alternative.
- They may have to raise gas taxes (and maybe raise other transportation fees) to pay instead. IMO this would be better. Because not only do we need more and better highways for our growing population, but paying for them with gas taxes gives extra incentive to drive less, which solves our problem at both ends: we'd need to pay for less road work if people drive less. Taxes on gas are also a classic example of Pigovian taxation, and I'd like to shift more of our tax burden onto pollutants for that reason.
- Or, they may simply not increase funding for highways. My basic understanding is that this would definitely be bad: we are building up debt in that area that needs to be paid off, and we really do have increasing needs here as our population rapidly grows without the gas tax paying for as much as it used to.
- For the last two possibilities, it would leave open the question of what is done with the general tax revenue that would otherwise go to highways? That also needs to be considered:
- They may cut general taxes. This seems likely given the ideology of our state, and especially if they are left having to raise gas taxes or fees in some way, a cut in other taxes would be the only way the politicians may be able to save face.
- They could fund something else. The two other major areas of state government spending are health care (medicaid) and education:
- Texas spends the absolute minimum on medicaid, and at the margin extra spending would receive additional federal funding, so arguably there's a lot of bang-for-buck here. But I think there's no chance our state government will increase medicaid funding.
- More likely (but I would guess less likely than tax cuts), the money could be used on education. But I would argue we shouldn't expect much benefit per extra dollar here, because despite conventional wisdom, once you adjust for demographics, Texas ranks very highly in education. And that should make us skeptical that we have a lot room for improvement.
Verdict
I am undecided-leaning-no.
Basically, I do think we need increase state road funding. I want to vote yes to the extent that it would make sure that happens. But I'd prefer to vote no to the extent that it encourages them to fund it differently (I very much think gas taxes should pay for it).
What would it take to change my mind?
It really comes down to how much likelihood we should assign to the alternatives, and honestly I don't have a good idea of how to do that accurately. So solid data toward that end could easily cause me to choose one way or the other.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Texas State Capital Residency Repeal Amendment, Proposition 3
This is part of the series of posts where I struggle to understand and think through the 7 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution that we can vote on 11/3.
The constitutional amendment repealing the requirement that state officers elected by voters statewide reside in the state capital.
Currently, all state-wide elected officials must live in Austin. Not even a suburb of Austin is OK. This repeals that requirement for some positions: the Agriculture Commissioner, Land Commissioner, Comptroller, Attorney General, and Railroad Commissioner.
Because current requirements were passed when people had to come to work by horse, whereas today you can drive in each day from the suburbs and easily communicate with people remotely. Unnecessary requirements for a job reduce the number of people who want to have that job, which can prevent you from getting someone who you would want. It's also just nice to not force a person to do something that may be a great cost to them, unless you have a particularly good reason. It's also worth noting the most states don't require their officials in these positions to live in the capital.
A lot of the reasons to oppose this seemed pretty meaningless (people like to be old-fashioned), but here are the potential problems that give me pause:
I plan on voting yes.
Ballot Title
The constitutional amendment repealing the requirement that state officers elected by voters statewide reside in the state capital.
Helpful Links
- Ballotpedia
- Page 23 of the "Analyses of Proposed Constitutional Amendments" by the Texas Legislative Council
- Page 10 of the 2015 ballot "focus report" by the Texas House of Representatives
- Page 2 of progresstexas.org's ballot guide (for a progressive perspective)
- Page 4 of the Texas Libertarian 2015 Voter Guide (for a libertarian perspective)
What does this do?
Currently, all state-wide elected officials must live in Austin. Not even a suburb of Austin is OK. This repeals that requirement for some positions: the Agriculture Commissioner, Land Commissioner, Comptroller, Attorney General, and Railroad Commissioner.
Why would this be good?
Because current requirements were passed when people had to come to work by horse, whereas today you can drive in each day from the suburbs and easily communicate with people remotely. Unnecessary requirements for a job reduce the number of people who want to have that job, which can prevent you from getting someone who you would want. It's also just nice to not force a person to do something that may be a great cost to them, unless you have a particularly good reason. It's also worth noting the most states don't require their officials in these positions to live in the capital.
Why would this be bad?
A lot of the reasons to oppose this seemed pretty meaningless (people like to be old-fashioned), but here are the potential problems that give me pause:
- It's good for everyone to be working in the same place, so staff and voters have easier access. However, maybe everyone will still work in the place - plenty of people physically work in a city different from the one they live in. One alternative suggestion was to allow living within a 50-mile radius of Austin rather than just saying "you don't have to live in Austin." Maybe that'd be better, but it's not the choice we're voting on. I also just don't know, for the positions affected, how important it even is to be in the same place as everyone else most work days.
- It could help politicians get away with corruption. If they get tried for some crime, they'll be prosecuted in their home county, which may be friendlier than in Austin. A progressive group stated this as a reason to vote no, citing that Travis County is more more Democratic than most of Texas, and Republican politicians would prefer to get tried in more Republican counties. However, you can see how this argument goes both ways. If a Republican county may go too easy on a Republican politician, so may a Democratic county rule too harshly on a Republican politician. And it's worth noting that this amendment had bipartisan support.
- This could cost more money if politicians live further from the capital, because of state-reimbursed travel. However, I did not see any data cited to give an idea of what kind of costs would be possible here.
Verdict
I plan on voting yes.
Basically, I should let people do what they want unless I have good reason not to. And I don't have a very good reason to force those few politicians to live in Austin. And if their new "freedom" here is taken too far, hopefully there will be another amendment to refine it, such as having a certain distance from Austin where the politicians must live. Either way, clearly the status quo on this, where they can't even live in an Austin suburb, is outdated.
What would it take to change my mind?
More data that suggests the potential downsides are more likely to be a bad problem.
Texas Right to Hunt, Fish and Harvest Amendment, Proposition 6
This is part of the series of posts where I struggle to understand and think through the 7 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution that we can vote on 11/3.
The constitutional amendment recognizing the right of the people to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife subject to laws that promote wildlife conservation.
Wins the award for being the most Texas of all the proposals. Yee-haw! Beyond that, it does nothing as far as I can tell. We already have a right to hunt/fish/harvest, just as I already have the right to discuss politics on this blog without the Texas Constitution directly stating it. Also, unlike the U.S. Constitution, changing our state's Constitution is fairly simple - it's pretty much how all state laws are passed. And most of the proposals we're voting on this Tuesday go into effect by removing and replacing existing pieces of our Constitution. If somehow Texas becomes anti-hunting and tries to outlaw it, it'd have to do so with a constitutional amendment regardless of whether this amendment passes. And if the federal government outlawed hunting, it really wouldn't matter whether we allow it in our state Constitution.
I suppose you could think of this as reducing the odds of losing the right to hunt/fish/harvest by something like 0.0001%. It at least won't hurt in that regard.
Our constitution would be slightly longer, and therefore take slightly longer to read.
I plan on voting no.
Ballot Title
The constitutional amendment recognizing the right of the people to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife subject to laws that promote wildlife conservation.
Helpful Links
- Ballotpedia
- Page 35 of the "Analyses of Proposed Constitutional Amendments" by the Texas Legislative Council
- Page 15 of the 2015 ballot "focus report" by the Texas House of Representatives
- Page 4 of progresstexas.org's ballot guide (for a progressive perspective)
- Page 6 of the Texas Libertarian 2015 Voter Guide (for a libertarian perspective)
What does this do?
Wins the award for being the most Texas of all the proposals. Yee-haw! Beyond that, it does nothing as far as I can tell. We already have a right to hunt/fish/harvest, just as I already have the right to discuss politics on this blog without the Texas Constitution directly stating it. Also, unlike the U.S. Constitution, changing our state's Constitution is fairly simple - it's pretty much how all state laws are passed. And most of the proposals we're voting on this Tuesday go into effect by removing and replacing existing pieces of our Constitution. If somehow Texas becomes anti-hunting and tries to outlaw it, it'd have to do so with a constitutional amendment regardless of whether this amendment passes. And if the federal government outlawed hunting, it really wouldn't matter whether we allow it in our state Constitution.
Why would this be good?
I suppose you could think of this as reducing the odds of losing the right to hunt/fish/harvest by something like 0.0001%. It at least won't hurt in that regard.
Why would this be bad?
Our constitution would be slightly longer, and therefore take slightly longer to read.
Verdict
I plan on voting no.
It doesn't seem to matter either way. I just find pure political theater annoying.
What would it take to change my mind?
Maybe $5. But I'm guessing it's illegal to sell your vote, so let's go ahead and say I'm just joking.
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