Voter ID: two views of fraud

A presentation by the League of Women Voters St. Peter Chapter on problems with Minnesota's Voter ID amendment drew cheers from the downtown Kiwanis Club at its Monday meeting.

Mostly because of the argument that there is very little voter impersonation fraud that has ever been uncovered and the amendment therefore is an unnecessary infringement on voting rights.

North Mankato City Council candidate and budget watchdog Kim Spears brings this story to my attention: "Maryland democratic congressional candidate drops out of race after allegations she voted in two states."
Officials of the Maryland Democratic party asked candidate Wendy Rosen to withdraw from the race after they investigated themselves the allegations of voting fraud and were confident they were true.

So we find ourselves with two points of view on the idea of the Voter ID amendment.

The St. Peter LWV outlined in a leaflet that it opposes the Photo ID/Elections Amendment.

Spokeswomen Lynn Solo and Helen Baumgartner made the case, and they emphasized their presentation was intended to be factual not political.

They lay out in a kind of flow chart the amendment language, then the language in the statute and then raise questions about the questions left unanswered by the language.

Essentially, the league's position is that the change in voting laws sought by the amendment will be "extreme and unnecessary changes" that it will "create hurdles" to voting for absentee and military voters, that it will be "harder for seniors  to vote," and end "election day registration as we know it."

They say it's another "unfunded government mandate" and will create a new system of provisional balloting that increases property taxes and other vital services as a result will be cut.

Spears says the Maryland case is "an interesting situation bearing on the upcoming ballot initiative."

Certainly, the Maryland case will be a high profile kind of media-attention getting case that will focus on the issue of voter fraud and impersonation, though the Washington Post said it was unclear if state Voter ID laws would prevent this kind of multi-state voter fraud.

I also don't consider the Downtown Kiwanis Club a bastion of liberalism, so the applause for the LWV was a bit surprising.

The Free Press has written two editorials on the Voter ID amendment, basically arguing there are a lot of questions and how they are answered could very well cost taxpayers more money to solve a problem that may not be as big as we think.

It all comes down to how one wants to solve problems in an imperfect voting system. Budget hawks should of course be willing to apply a strict cost/benefit analysis, the cost being the expenses associated with photo IDs and the benefits being the prevention of fraud. But there also may be a cost in preventing legitimate people from voting.

I will say this: If the amendment passes and it becomes law eventually, there will be plenty of stories on how legitimate citizens were denied their right to vote through some government snafu.

Those stories will be rampant because almost every news organization in the country is going to find one or two cases - easily - with the way this will be set up.

Medicare costs need to be controlled

Both Obama and Romney campaigns don't want to tell seniors the ugly truth: Medicare costs have to be reined in. They're not sustainable. And we either need to cut benefits or raise taxes to pay for it or change pretty significantly the way Medicare services are delivered.

We might have to do a little of each.

There's a great explanation on the claims of each campaign and how they're deceptive on Medicare at FactCheck.org. They also give great background on the history of Medicare.

It's not surprising that Congress and the president have raised Medicare payroll taxes several times over the years to help keep the health care benefits flowing to in important voting constituency.

But after reading it, you can't come to any other conclusion that we either need to rein in benefits or raise taxes to pay for care that's costly and inefficient and will eventually consume a greater share of GDP.

But the good news is we know how to cut Medicare costs. We only have to have the courage to do it.

Obama's plan was to reduce payments to health care providers and make them share the pain of cost reductions. Critics argue it might not be enough, and some providers might stop taking Medicare patients. He also planned to cut subsidies to private insurance plans offering Medicare.

Romney and Ryan want to allow more private insurance into serving Medicare patients as well as leaving traditional Medicare in place, figuring competition will drive down costs. But that only works if we have a lot of medical providers competing. And more and more, the health care market is consolidating and getting fewer competitors. Some worry that the private insurers will pick the healthiest seniors and leave the really sick ones for the government to serve through traditional Medicare.

Seniors today and those of the near future, Baby Boomers, have to get realistic about all of this and realize they are not going to be able to go to the doctor for every little ailment and have the government mostly pay for it.

They're going to have to go to a more managed care system, where they learn prevention, where they learn they can see a nurse instead of a doctor.

This is not Medicare as we know it. It has to change.

I took a call from a guy today who said he didn't rape his daughter

I took a call from a guy today who said he didn't rape his daughter.

Now you know the kind of calls newspaper editors get.

Not always pretty. Not always pleasant. Hard to say if they're real.

This man wanted to know if we wanted to do a story about a wrongly accused person who was going to prison and whose life and reputation would be basically ended because prosecutors were charging him with said crime.

I told him we follow these kinds of stories through official court actions. If there's a trial, we would report the defense's case.

We don't however, sit down with those accused and try to do what it takes investigators, prosecutors and defense lawyers hundreds of hours to do: determine a verdict.

We wouldn't have the resources nor the desire, nor is it our purpose, to be judge, jury and jailer.

Still, for some reason he must have thought the newspaper could help.

It's not unheard of that people are falsely charged with a crime. For all I know, he may be innocent.

And if he is, the news will be: He was charged with a crime. A heinous crime perhaps. And he was acquitted.

We always report the verdict. An if he's innocent, that gets in the newspaper.

In the end, we'd be willing to tell his side of it, but we we're going to do the justice system's job. He didn't seem satisfied with this answer.

He said never mind and hung up.

Naked bean bagger escaped identification

Many people I talk to say they would rather not admit to some of the things they did in college or when they were young.

I suspect that will be the case with the "Naked bean bagger" we wrote a story about a few weeks ago.

Police were called by neighbors who reported the young gent was playing a game of outdoor bean bag, or "corn hole" by some, in his birthday suit.

The original story is better than I can tell it, so if you hadn't seen it, here it is.

Suffice it to say, the gent attempted to hide from police, leaving his clothes, and importantly his I.D., behind. The police showed up but couldn't get him to answer the door. They thus secured his clothes and I.D. as "evidence."

In the news business, the story of the "Naked bean bagger" is what we call a bona fide "talker." It's a story that is not terribly important in the scheme of things. It's certainly not a public safety hazard or crime spree, but it is nonetheless, something we know from all our Google web analytics will drive traffic at our website through the roof.

It will bury the needle on our "Chartbeat," a service we subscribe to that measures activity on our website in real time.

We were not disappointed. With a little help from the nationally known weird news website Fark.com, that story generated about 70,000 page views. Fark seeks weird news from websites and then creates a link from their website to the news website.

Fark also provides a bit of commentary on just how funny a story might be.

Of our story, the website said "Headline about police responding to naked bean bag game is okay, but could have been true Fark gold if they'd used the other name the article gives for the game"

Our headline: "Naked bean bag game turns into hide and seek with suspect."
Fark's suggested head for "gold status" "Naked corn hole game turns into hide and seek with suspect"
 
Fark has thousands of followers to catch all the weird news from around the country and so when you are "farked" you get a lot of traffic to your website.

The story and all the details were part of the public record. That means name of person, address is included.

However, we chose not to name the young man in a good-hearted attempt to protect him from embarrassment. He's not really a criminal the public needs to fear, at least in our minds. In the news business, there's not a compelling reason to name him.

We suspect there may have been some alcohol involved here and it was an awfully hot day, in the young man's defense.

We know people know who this young man and is and it's probably all over someone's Twitter account, but we try to give people the benefit of the doubt.

We here at The Free Press were all young once too.

Violence, white supremacy and the American mindset

Another day, another shooting.

Random acts of violence seem to be occurring on a regular basis recently, and once again, the country asks itself what are people thinking in the wake of the murder of six Sikh church goers in Milwaukee, by  a white supremacist.

Well, these perpetrators are obviously not thinking very much, and if they are, they've somehow logically concluded that hate is a legitimate mindset and violence is a legitimate solution.

I always ask myself: "How did they get this way."

You can go through the list of usual suspects. Bad parents, bad neighborhoods, bad friends, bad education, society in general, genetics.

But it's worth considering given that most babies don't start out violent. Most kids don't start out violent. Somewhere along the way, something happened that helped reinforce the idea that violence worked as a coping mechanism.

And there's not much one can do about any of the above in any kind systematic way.

Small things can be done along the way. Kids can be taught tolerance at school. They can be taught to settle conflict without violence, without bullying.

But at some point, and this is the scary part, the volume of at-risk kids overwhelms the system. More fall through the cracks. They end up in groups like the white supremacists.

At the growth in at-risk kids to a society that seems to be less willing to deal with them year after year, only building more penitentiaries.

We won't stop crazy incidents like those in Milwaukee or Aurora, Colo., with any program. But we've got to have solutions in place that at least reduce the risk of more and more people falling through the cracks.

The odds will only get worse if we don't.

Would you like some ethanol with your meal?

I covered farming when crop prices were never above cost and always too low.

As years went on, ethanol, of course, was heralded as the savior for low corn prices. In the ensuring decade or so, it worked like a charm. Market prices for corn were solid, and the government subsidies went down.

Now, apparently, we think ethanol is the culprit for corn prices being too high. And we want the government to fix that too.

Where are we? 1984. George Orwell would be proud of how good has become bad and bad has become good. Unispeak reins.

Livestock groups have corralled some lawmakers into asking the EPA to grant an exception to the ethanol mandate in fuel, meaning less ethanol would be made and less corn used, thereby lowering the prices for livestock producers who buy corn for feed.

Some say high corn prices are killing the livestock industry and companies that make and sell meat.

Of course, the corn industry and ethanol promotion groups argue the waiver should not be granted and the market should be allowed to work.

The first government policy on ethanol worked. It became an industry that consumed millions of bushels of corn, now almost 40 percent of U.S. domestic production.

Why is this a problem?

The proposed new government policy aims to turn back the one that actually worked.

The livestock industry should like, uh, buck up, and pay higher prices or reduce their consumption, kind of like the rest of us have to do when prices get high.

It's called the free market system.

Views on news: tax breaks and jobs

For years now it seems, the left and the right have diametrically opposed views on if tax cuts to the wealthy or business help create jobs.

It's an argument about 32 years old, and one on which Ronald Reagan was elected. Of course, Reagan endorsed the idea of tax cuts to create jobs and won over Jimmy Carter with the country hoping he was right. His Republican primary opponent, George H.W. Bush famously called it voodoo economics.

The debate tends to evolve into a social argument versus an economic one. The social one, of course, gets much more media play because it's simple to understand and easy to sell with buzz phrases, like tax the rich, class warfare, the 99 percent talk as well as job killing talk.

My old master program economic professors would be amused at the ability of politicians to abscond with reason and replace it with vitriol.

Even today, there's a little bit of pseudo economics running around. The left or even center left tends to point to the record of how we cut taxes with the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and we actually lost jobs the next five or six years in the aggregate, across the country.

While that looks like the tax cuts didn't work, it may be only partially true. It's true that employment went down, but that doesn't mean SOME employers didn't hire because they got a tax cut.

The real point here is that if we pronounced our policy will create jobs, we should expect people will measure that across the board, throughout the country. But even my most liberal professors would admit that there are many factors that influence job creation including wages, demand for products, imports, exports, the interest rate and the value of the dollar.

Unforunately as we've come to learn, bizarre, unregulated things like credit default swaps also influence job creation.

And anecdotally, we can find stories that prove both points. I know a high-earning hedge fund manager who pays the low 15 percent rate on the vast majority of their capital gain income. This person told me if they got a tax break, they would not likely buy a new car (they already have one) a new house (already got a nice one of those) or really would expend too much more income, except may go out for dinner a little more.

Of course, they would have more money to invest, which shouldn't be discounted, but it doesn't give the same bang for the buck as consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

At the same time, I know a small business person who said if they got a $3000 tax break on their property tax bill, they probably would hire a new employee.

Both have circumstances that direct their decision. And we should know that if we think a general policy will affect everyone the same, we are simply kidding ourselves.

The key, (if you've hung with me this long, congratulations for caring about this stuff , and you're among the top 10 percent at least) is we have to understand how a policy might affect the "aggregate." In other words, how will it affect most people or a large enough share to make a difference in job creation.

And we should ask our politicians who are espousing these economic theories this crucial question: Tell us of a study, an example or data that suggest at the most your theory about the policy is true? And if they can't give a good answer to that, we ask: So are we just supposed to take your statement on faith, just believe you that it will happen?

So do tax cuts create jobs? The answer is basically, "It depends.'

And if they end up concluding we should just believe them. Buyer beware!