bad ballot measures
Nov. 16th, 2014 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrWhile politicians can screw things up, ballot initiatives can *really* mess things up.
Examples of a few here in Oregon (no particular order, just ones that spring to mind).
The one that will once again take effect this year. The famous/infamous "kicker tax". Under this one, if the tax revenue the state took in exceeds the expenses by 2%, they money is refunded to the taxpayers as a kicker check.
Sounds like a great idea. Only thing is, it's responsible for a lot of budget problems. It means that the state can't set aside money from a "good" year to cover bad years. A fact that was pointed out by the opponents at the time. But of course the voters went for the "we'll get money back" bit and ignored the fact that it was actually a really bad idea.
One of the *many* measures put forth by the rabid anti-nuke types. This one set a ridiculously low limit for radiation levels to qualify dsomething as a dump for "low level" nuclear wastes. One result of this was a company that extracts rare metals (from things like monazite sand) had it's waste ponds and sludge classified as nuclear waste. The stuff had never been near a reactor or the like. It's just that after you extract all the various rare-earth metals and other things from the stuff they worked with, the *natural* radioactive elements are concentrated in what remains.
The stuff wasn't remotely dangerous, but because of the anti-nuke agenda, they wound up having to relocate an enormous amount of harmless waste materials.
A few that failed were things like not counting pyrolytic breakdown of waste plastics into varuiious things that *can* be used as "recycling" the plastics. Never mind that "proiperly" (by their lights) recycling of some plastics is too expensive because of contamination of the plastics from use.
Basically, a lot of stuff that is pushing a particular sort of political agenda (often moisguided environmentalism, anti-nuke or anti-tech)
The folks pushing these things are quite willing to distort things greatly to get the voters to vote for them. I recall that from when I was out of work and wound up canvassing for them for a few weeks. Their scripts had stiufff I knew was BS. But I needed the money. I got let go because I wasn't getting enough signatures on the polls they were pushing.
Didn't break my heart.
Anyway, the bit in my previous post has all the earmarks of these folks on it.
Examples of a few here in Oregon (no particular order, just ones that spring to mind).
The one that will once again take effect this year. The famous/infamous "kicker tax". Under this one, if the tax revenue the state took in exceeds the expenses by 2%, they money is refunded to the taxpayers as a kicker check.
Sounds like a great idea. Only thing is, it's responsible for a lot of budget problems. It means that the state can't set aside money from a "good" year to cover bad years. A fact that was pointed out by the opponents at the time. But of course the voters went for the "we'll get money back" bit and ignored the fact that it was actually a really bad idea.
One of the *many* measures put forth by the rabid anti-nuke types. This one set a ridiculously low limit for radiation levels to qualify dsomething as a dump for "low level" nuclear wastes. One result of this was a company that extracts rare metals (from things like monazite sand) had it's waste ponds and sludge classified as nuclear waste. The stuff had never been near a reactor or the like. It's just that after you extract all the various rare-earth metals and other things from the stuff they worked with, the *natural* radioactive elements are concentrated in what remains.
The stuff wasn't remotely dangerous, but because of the anti-nuke agenda, they wound up having to relocate an enormous amount of harmless waste materials.
A few that failed were things like not counting pyrolytic breakdown of waste plastics into varuiious things that *can* be used as "recycling" the plastics. Never mind that "proiperly" (by their lights) recycling of some plastics is too expensive because of contamination of the plastics from use.
Basically, a lot of stuff that is pushing a particular sort of political agenda (often moisguided environmentalism, anti-nuke or anti-tech)
The folks pushing these things are quite willing to distort things greatly to get the voters to vote for them. I recall that from when I was out of work and wound up canvassing for them for a few weeks. Their scripts had stiufff I knew was BS. But I needed the money. I got let go because I wasn't getting enough signatures on the polls they were pushing.
Didn't break my heart.
Anyway, the bit in my previous post has all the earmarks of these folks on it.
