State Issues

“The Shell Game Debunked” A Pro Rank Choice Voting Rebuttal

John

Recently, we at the Worcester Tea Party sent our monthly newsletter riddled with misinformation about Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), otherwise understood as the Fair Vote.  

Therefore, a rebuttal is prudent:

Claim #1:“The problem is people DO NOT participate!”
We do not need further turnout of voters who are ignorant of the issues and simply vote based upon the identity of the candidates.  RCV DOES turn out the vote of more people, but not just any voters as implied by the prior author.  RCV increases the turnout of educated people who understand the issues because now they have an opportunity to vote for the candidate they truly support as opposed to only the lesser of two evils.  

So in this respect, RCV does turn out more people to vote, but unlike today, these people are activated because they now have an opportunity to cast a ballot based upon the candidate they truly want as opposed to the lesser of two evils.  RCV allows people to make a logical decision without a concern they are throwing away their vote.  

The idea that we simply need more people to vote with no regard for their ability to make a rational decision will only lead to more bad leadership in Massachusetts.

Claim #2: “. . . under RCV the other candidates could rank up their votes until  a second place loser overtakes the original winner.”  
When people rank their votes, they rank them based upon their value system.  Therefore, the idea that someone would rank, say, Donald Trump first and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or any set of candidates that are complete opposites in political disposition) shows a complete lack of understanding of the very premise of RCV.  Therefore, no matter how “candidates could rank up their votes,” if the people do not share in the disposition of those candidates they simply will not rank them.  

Claim #3:“What is a proven fact is in elections you are choosing a winner over a loser.  A vote for candidate A is a vote against candidate B.  This is how elections work!”  
The idea that it is better to have to choose between an actual democrat over a slightly less democrat-like republican than to be able to actually vote one’s conscious is truly silly.  

To most honest voters, the choice in any election between, say, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, John McCain, George Bush, or John Kerry are all bad options, and this is how the Establishment wants it to be.  Why?  Because no matter who loses, the Establishment wins.  Ranked voting breaks this paradigm and places the power back into the hands of the voter because it is then impossible to make the options for office a choice solely between the lesser of two evils. 

Simply stating the elections are about picking a winner over a loser without consideration as to whether either option really represents the will of the people is dangerous.  With Rank Choice Voting, people can truly vote their conscious knowing that if their first choice is eliminated from the race their vote will still count. When such a mindset is put in place, elections become about ideas and not about money and parties, something the Establishment fear more than anything.

John Niewicki
Dean of Information Technology
Worcester Tea Party

The Shell Game-Rank Choice Voting

Christopher Maider

The interesting turn in the 2018 midterm elections wasn’t Democrat control of our House of Representatives, but rather how many of them came to be by a narrow margin and a lack of voter participation.  The recent recall and re-win of indicted Fall River Mayor Corriea underscores this.  Then again Massachusetts has a history of indicted, on trial and imprisoned Governors, Mayors and other representatives serving time while serving in government.

In the election of Cortez only 27,744 out of 214,750 registered Democrats showed up on election day.  In Fall River roughly 13,000 showed up to vote for five candidates.  Advocates of Rank Choice Voting (RCV) claim this will be avoided with RCV in elections.  Well, that’s all well and good if people actually showed up to vote.

The problem isn’t the system or a ‘plurality’ of parties.  The problem is people DO NOT participate!  RCV does not address this 800 lb gorilla in the room.  The Cortez and Corriea election victories  do not represent the majority of all voters.  It just represents who bothered to show up.  How does RCV solve this issue?  It doesn’t.  In fact, under RCV the other candidates could rank up their votes until  a second place loser overtakes the original winner.  In the case of Corriea the eventual winner would have won by even lesser numbers than the Mayor himself.  The entire thing is a shell game.

Under Arrow’s Theorem you pick your choices from best to worse.  You ‘manufacture’ the winner by taking second and third choices and running them up the scale. Essentially, you choose the steak.  But you would be happy with the pork if steak loses out.  In the final round you settle for the chicken in case you get niether steak or pork.  According to a Stanford U. paper published;   

“Nothing is necessarily wrong with that; the decision process can be perfectly democratic, and one person simply turns out to be on the winning side on all issues. “
(Hylland 1986: 51, footnote 10) 
Aanund Hylland 

Then there is Occam’s second Razor.  In order to claim something as fact it must be proven.  Any and all questions, deviations, secondary statements to such must also be proven.  Rank Choice Voting does not ‘prove’ this.  It simply says so.

RCV isn’t a better system; It is just another system.

What is a proven fact is in elections you are choosing a winner over a loser.  A vote for candidate A is a vote against candidate B.  This is how elections work! The concept of ‘spoiler’ candidates is a construct.  What the hell does that mean?  Is RCV insinuating others SHOULD NOT run for office?  How can RCV claim to open the process to better candidates, more parties, more openness while using such language?

Speaking about language; On  RCV sites you will constantly see the word ‘Democracy’.  Politicians who want to adopt this shell game will read from the script.  While local elections are based on a majority vote our Federal  Government is a Constitutional Republic.

If RCV cannot get our most basic form of government straight then how can we believe them to institute and ensure a more fair and equitable voting system?

And That Is The Diatribe….

Christopher Maider
Dean of Journalism
Worcester Tea Party

What At First Was Plunder

What At First Was Plunder

Ken
 

What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

 

In the Roman Republic, tax collection was done by private contractors called publicans. They bid on contracts to collect the taxes. The high bidder (i.e. the one who promised to collect the most taxes) was awarded the contract. If they collected anything above their bid, they got to keep it as profit. It was a system that was employed for centuries, but it was rife with corruption. Publicans often forced people to pay taxes above what they were legally required to pay. Under threat of violence, citizens paid the excess to the greedy publicans. It seems like many progressives in Massachusetts would gladly take the job of the Roman publican. They’ve come up with an ill-conceived scheme that exposes their greed.

Progressives in Massachusetts have proposed a 4% millionaires’ surtax that will appear as a ballot question in November. This is no ordinary ballot question though. It is a constitutional amendment. The Massachusetts State Constitution does not permit graduated income taxes, so supporters of the proposal had to craft an amendment.

In 2016, a billionaire hedge fund manager sent New Jersey’s budget into turmoil. How did one private citizen accomplish this? He moved to Florida. David Tepper was, until December of 2015, New Jersey’s wealthiest taxpayer. No one knows for sure whether Mr. Tepper was only seeking warmer weather, but we do know that New Jersey was soaking him for all it could get. Some estimates said that Mr. Tepper was paying as much as $300 million in income taxes to the State of New Jersey. The state has a graduated income tax that tops out at 8.97% for income over $500,000.

Massachusetts Proposition 80 has several serious flaws, beginning with the fact that many wealthy people already own homes in lower tax states and can often shift income from one state to another or, if necessary, shift their residency. The amendment requires that the taxes collected be spent on public education and transportation infrastructure. Apparently, the authors of this amendment have no idea how the Massachusetts Legislature works.  Tax dollars are fungible. Funds currently spent on education and infrastructure can be moved to other budget items, resulting in no increase in education and infrastructure spending.  The legislature can repurpose what they now spend on roads and education to other needs that they feel are more pressing like healthcare and courts. To believe that the Legislature will spend the new tax dollars as intended is naïve..

According to the Tax Foundation, the top 0.5% of taxpayers in Massachusetts accounted for 19% of income tax revenue in 2013. Just as with Mr. Tepper’s departure from New Jersey, the loss of just a few of these taxpayers will have a huge impact on state revenue. A report done for New Jersey found that the tax loss from losing a single $1 million taxpayer filing with single status is equal to 59 taxpayers earning $50,000.

Voters in Massachusetts have a long and proud history of rejecting tax increases via referendum. Six previous attempts for a graduated income tax have been defeated by the voters. We can’t depend on this history to defeat Proposition 80 though. So far, there is no organized committee against this question. Supporters have already raised almost $2,000,000. Three polls done by WBUR in 2017 found that Mass. voters support this tax by a 3 to 1 margin. There is a lot of work to do before November.

Last month, the Worcester Tea Party leafleted the Republican State Convention in Worcester to publicize Proposition 80. We need to keep spreading the word about this destructive amendment to the state constitution. We will be looking for you help as we continue to educate voters on this ill-conceived referendum question.

 

Dr. Punya Kishore: Addictions. Accusations, Recovery

Matt O'Brien

February 2017 Free Education Event:

The Worcester Tea Party and The M&P Conservative Media Network have teamed up again to welcome the controversial Dr. Punya Kishore.  He spoke about his work on treating addiction and his incarceration for performing the work he loved so much. This was an educational and highly charged evening!

Part I

Part II

Back to School 2016

Matt O'Brien 
Public School Stone Column
It is estimated that more than 50 million students are enrolled in elementary and secondary public schools this fall. Another 5 million are enrolled in private schools and more than 20 million are enrolled in post-secondary schools. All this adds up to more than 75 million students entering classrooms in the next couple of weeks.
 
Hundreds of thousands of families have chosen to opt out of the standard education system though. This year, more than 1.5 million students will be homeschooled. More than an act of love and concern for their own children, homeschooling is a brave act of defiance to a statist system of indoctrination and conformity. Staying outside of the perceived “norm” of society, these families are trailblazers. They are defining a new way of thinking about some of society’s most influential institutions.
 
Another group of families has gone even further by unschooling their children. Unschooling lets education be directed by the interests of the child. It sounds radical to those of us who are products of the factory schools, but it has proven to be effective for some children. A recent study discussed in Psychology Today looked at adults who had been unschooled. It found that they had higher rates of completing advanced degrees than conventional students.
 
Participants in the unschooling survey “wrote about the freedom and independence that unschooling gave them and the time it gave them to discover and pursue their own interests. Seventy percent of them also said, in one way or another, that the experience enabled them to develop as highly self-motivated, self-directed individuals.”
 
The idea that school is not for everyone or that it is a prison is nothing new. In Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates says; “…Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body, but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. “
 
H.L. Menken said; “The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.”
 
Unschooling works for some children, homeschooling for others, and, for many, a conventional public or private education is best. We should not understate the great work being done every day by dedicated public school teachers. They often struggle in a seriously flawed system, yet still manage to deliver a valuable education to America’s youth. There is a downside to mass education though; a sickness of staleness and conformity. In the market of ideas, it is likely that the unschoolers and the homeschoolers will lead the way out of dark side of the public factory education. In our battle for freedom, we must protect those who are leading us to a better way.
 
In Liberty,
Ken Mandile
Senior Fellow
Worcester Tea Party
Mass Highways Cost 5 Times National Average, Rank Low in Quality

Mass Highways Cost 5 Times National Average, Rank Low in Quality

Ken

Some interesting data.

Massachusetts administrative costs per mile of highway is $74,855. National average? $10,579.

We spend $675,312 per mile on our highways, second only to New Jersey.

National average? $160,202.

Despite spending 5 times the national average, this same report shows Mass. roads and bridges to be among the worst in the U.S.

And they wonder why we don’t want to give them more gas tax dollars.

 

http://reason.org/files/21st_annual_highway_report.pdf

 

Worcester Tea Party to Picket Arne Duncan

Worcester Tea Party to Picket Arne Duncan

Ken

              Area citizens opposed to federal government influence in local public school curriculum will be picketing a visit by U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.  Duncan is an advocate for the recently implemented and highly controversial Common Core standards.  He will be participating in a town hall-style meeting on career and technical education at Worcester Technical High School on Wednesday, March 12 at 9 a.m.

               Common Core is a one size fits all set of education standards.   These standards are being implemented in 45 states, though several states are rethinking their participation because of resistance from parents, teachers, and administrators.  The un-proven, un-tested and under-funded standards will cost state and local governments billions of dollars to implement. 

               If fully implemented, Common Core will federalize public education.   Local control will be transferred to a bureaucracy in Washington.  Common Core standards are replacing the very successful Massachusetts standards that have made the state’s public schools the best in the nation.   Ironically, Massachusetts, a leader in standardized student test results, will spend millions to LOWER its standards. According to concerned teachers, it will undermine their autonomy and their creative ability to help students learn. 

 

               Just last week in Worcester, the Worcester School Committee voted to support parental rights by giving them the option to OPT out of the standardized pilot PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.) associated with the Common Core.  This parent lead movement has also gained the support of the EAW (Educational Association of Worcester) teachers’ union in Worcester by voting “NO CONFIDENCE” in the implementation of PARCC.

 

Common Core is also committed to building massive student data bases by gathering over 400 data elements on each student, including religious affiliation, medical information, and family income – well beyond what is currently captured.  These databases are designed to track children from preschool through college.

               Picketers will gather at 8:30 am at the corner of Skyline Drive and Belmont Street in Worcester prior to Secretary Duncan’s visit to Worcester Technical School.  Worcester Technical High School is located at 1 Skyline Drive, Worcester.