Want to expand on two recent Facebook interactions that have gotten some criticism from my more conservative friends.

First one was about a tweet, my comment on a recent Krugman article:

Krugman’s column about California sounds about right to me. Our perception of taxes is warped by Republican spin: http://is.gd/DOOE

140 characters is a tough limit, and I think some things get misunderstood. Couple of clarifications are necessary. First, I’m not claiming there that Republicans are to blame alone for all of California’s problems. My point is that the Republicans have convinced a great many people that our taxes are high. They’re simply not, especially for the wealthy. They’re low by international standards, and they’re low by historical standards. That was the point of the second sentence.

The rest of my responses in that comment thread were to the idea that California’s budget is unsustainable due to a welfare state and regulations. Nothing I’ve read suggests that the budget is completely unsustainable. What I see, instead, is a property tax policy that has crippled that source of income (we can debate whether this is a good policy or not, but the revenue effect is pretty clear). This is combined with a income tax policy that makes it impossible to raise taxes as long as one party refuses to even consider that possibility.

I remain unconvinced that taxes are too high in CA, or that a $30-40 billion deficit is the fault of out of control spending. For example, here’s one of the editorial I’ve read that lay out some of the issues. There are better articles, but this is the only one I found that I read before.

Ok, that’s item one.

The second one isn’t actually from my tweets, but from a comment I received from a friend and my high school debate partner (yes, really!) about a religious freedom case out in San Diego.

Perhaps this is showing that I should use the blog more, where I certainly have more room to be more nuanced and clear. To that end, addressing the issue raised on Facebook, I really do want to mention this one thing:

While the ACLU isn’t perfect, I find them to be more consistent and more true to their mission than many other organizations. Their mission is to defend the Bill of Rights. They do this far more consistently than conservatives would like to admit. If there is some systemic bias you want to accuse them of, I’ll need to be convinced with more evidence than just an accusation.

And, on the note of bias, one other general point. I’m opinionated, and I’ve thought about a lot of issues I write about quite a bit. So, to the extent I have any ‘biases,’ I’m up front about them and generally quite conscious of them. I don’t need to be reminded of them, or that they exist. The thing is, I’m much more interested in getting policy right than in being right or being ideologically pure. So, while I’m certainly on the liberal side of the American political spectrum, I’m willing to consider ideas that challenge my starting positions on issues. Give me a chance.

Update: Some more information on the CA budget situation makes it seem like I may not have captured the full picture of CA’s spending situation. Kevin Drum addresses the editorial I linked to above and points out spending is up 23% since 1997. The editorial looked at the budget from 1999 on, but a couple of big spending increase years were 1997 and 1998. As Drum says, spending went up during the dot com boom and never cycled back down. There’s more to this, so it’s worth reading his post. It’s short, anyway.