Liberal and Loving It

Caucus live blog

Senator Bennet better appreciate my being here – my wife is flying back after 3 days out of town and I'm here instead of going to the airport.

6:50 – Probably about 40 people here for I think 10 precincts. We are presently in the school auditorium waiting for the group speeches. I think these are a waste of time as everyone here is here because they support one of the candidates. But hey, democracy isn't efficient. There's a Bennet & Romanoff table at the back. Both have literature but the Bennet table has some kind of cookie/cracker (not sure what it's called but coffee shops tend to have them).

6:53 – Talked to Rollie Heath for a couple of minutes. He's a really nice guy. We had a friendly disagreement about was the Amazon & software sales tax bills the best thing ever or a pending disaster for small business.

7:02 – About to start and have mic problems. Want to feel young – go to a caucus. I'm 54 and I'm at the young end here.

7:09 – Read a speech from the Boulder County Democratic Chair – standard let's get it done. Read another speech from someone else about volunteers.

7:11 – Please donate money. This is a legit request – contribute something. I suggest $20.00.

7:12 – Rollie Heath for Michael Bennet: First talking about how critical this election is because a Republican majority in the legislature would make us all shudder in horror at the bills they would pass. Next talking about the devastating effect the 3 initiatives would have on Colorado (they would). Starting off saying both candidates are awesome – the best of the best (again true). Talking about Michael's focus on education and healthcare. Repeats again that he is here for Michael and has nothing negative to say about Andrew. That was it – nothing to differentiate Michael from Andrew.

7:18 – Someone (didn't catch the name) starts off with both are good candidates. Then in to the differences. First that Andrew is not taking PAC money which is an "act of great political courage" (or stupidity). Freudian slip!!! She said "Michael would do a great… I mean Andrew…) Second, that Andrew knows how to work effectively as a legislator. I think she did a good job of calling out the differences in a way that works well for everyone here.

7:20 – Someone speaking for Jared Polis. She's talking up a great party at her house to meet Jared. Talking up Jared's efforts to create the 5 schools for low income schools.

7:22 – Why do some people not understand turning off cell phones at events like this.

7:24 – Reading of the rules (short form).

7:30 – Headed over to the precinct meeting – Go mighty 161!

7:33 – Everyone is introducing themselves. This part is fun, especially how each person describes where they live.

7:38 – Discussing how we are going to select delegates (ie by preference for Senator).

7:44 – Straw poll – 9 for Bennet, 4 for Romanoff, and 3 undecided.

7:45 – Speeches for both candidates. Polite strong speeches for each.

7:50 – Got a speech from someone unhappy with Bennet and Obama for taking PAC money and not delivering on single payer. I replied back that in my interviews with Michael he has been adamant and emotional about his efforts to do what is best for the country on financial issues. Closed with Molly Ivins quote about "if you can't drink their booze…" Everyone loved that.

7:53 – A couple of additional speeches for Bennet. One bringing up the advantage of seniority.

7:59 – We now have someone going off on a rant about the feds killing wolves. Not sure what that has to do with anything here. He's gotten no real response from either Senators' office (according to him) – just generic form response not speaking to the topic at hand.

8:01 – The vote – 9 Bennet, 4 Romanoff, 4 undecided. So delegates will be 2, 1, & 1.

8:10 – I'm going to County!!! There were 2 of us that really wanted to go and 2 that sort-of wanted to go so that's how we got 2 delegates and 2 alternates.

8:20 – Someone introducing a platform planks about getting the "real truth" on 9/11. Rather than pointing out that they're in cloud cuckoo land, I left.

An Amazon loss would be very bad for Colorado

Remember the old adage be careful what you wish for - it may come to pass. If the state prevails over Amazon we are facing a significant hit on new business startups and job growth. This bill is a business and job killer - in the middle of a recession.

First off, I am not an opponent of adequate taxation. Nor am I opponent of taxes that hit me. In fact, I was one of those that was vocally upset when Jared Polis threatened health care over a tax increase on small business owners - like me.

Second, I agree it is unfair that Amazon does not have to pay sales tax while Target does. Clearly an unfair advantage (although many people, like me, buy from Amazon for convenience - not price).

Third, the state needs the money. We need it bad. And this is one of the few places we can go without a TABOR election (which our legislature is too chickenshit to ask for).

Ok, so why is this bad news? It's bad news for two reasons. The first hits all online businesses and the second hits those selling digital goods. (This is discussed in the context of what the state is trying to accomplish, for Amazon to collect sales tax.)

First the hammer of doom for everyone.

Determining the taxes owed by an address - pretty simple. There are services you can buy that do this and your system can calculate that just as it calculates shipping. That part's easy.

Now comes paying the taxes. Who do you pay? There are a gigantic number of taxing authorities in Colorado. Each has it's own system for tax payment, each has it's own rules. So we have to find out what is required for each area - what fees have to be paid, what forms have to be filled out, when they have to be filed.

Now multiply this by 47 states (3 have no sales tax). A company could be looking at 500+ entities it has to file with. This is not that big a deal for Amazon because it can be spread across so many sales. But for a small company just getting started, where they make 1 sale into a state, and suddenly get pulled into this mess for that state - that is a business killer.

For some it will mean the difference between success and failure. For the rest it means slower growth due to the significant effort on this rather than on growing the company. And both cases mean fewer jobs. A lot fewer because it's the small companies that provide the vast majority of job growth in this country.

Second is the anvil for companies that sell digital goods.

I asked both the City of Boulder and the State of Colorado who gets the taxes under the specific scenarios of most of our sales. These were not hypothetical, these were existing scenarios.

First off, I still don't have answers to half of them from the state Department of Revenue (motto - "we're not doing anything"). Second, about half the ones I did get answers on, the state answers differ from the City of Boulder answers (Boulder has been very responsive - if Bill Ritter wants a competent director for the Department of Revenue - hire Boulder's).

So companies selling digital goods now face getting guidance from 500 taxing authorities. And those authorities will conflict where 2 or 3 will all claim they get the tax on a given sale. We can't collect it 3 times, and if we wait for them to work it out, the sale will go elsewhere.

Sales tax was designed around a physical good being sold at a physical location. Two people set up a coffee shop and they have a total of 2 taxing authorities. The nexus where they sell is very clear cut as the product is delivered there.

If Internet sales pay sales tax, then opening 1 coffee shop has the tax filing overhead of opening 500 - but it still has the profits of just 1.

I look back to when my company started about 5 years ago. If each new sale required discovering and then filing with the relevant taxing authorities. And many of them had been held up as we got a determination as to who got what part of the sale, we would not be in business today.

We can afford it now. But it will cost. And that cost is probably a couple of new jobs each year. Now a couple of jobs isn't much - unless you're one of those new hires and you now have a job.

I understand that the state is desperate for tax revenue. But killing all new online businesses, harming existing online businesses, and forcing software companies out of state - that's not worth the small amount of money this generates.

The determination, collection, and payment of taxes should have as little impact upon people, businesses, and job growth as possible - not the most. Kill this and put a measure on the ballot to raise income taxes on the rich - I'll fight for that. Because even if you collect twice as much from me in additional income taxes as you would get from the sales tax - it's still less money out of my pocket.

And for all of you looking for a job, or looking for a better job - cross your fingers that Amazon wins.

The future of Colorado

We face a number of problems right now from a minuscule budget to a constitution tied up in knots to a state bureaucracy that is in places flat-out incompetent. All that and more are very serious problems.

But our long term prospects are determined almost solely by the education we provide our children. If our populace does not have the education required to compete in the 21st century then we become a 2nd world state, mostly used as a place to extract resources from and ski in.

We are presently straight on the road to ruin with 30% of our K-12 students not even making proficient and the number able to attend and graduate college even lower. We face the very real prospect of the percentage of adults having a college education dropping - at the very time we need it accelerating.

It's time for this state to get serious about improving K-12. Not provide lots of sturm und drang, but actually effect significant improvement.

How do we do that? Pretty simple actually. From the N.Y. Times

When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school's control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students' test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others' students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half's worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

So why some claim this is a complicated issue requiring addressing numerous issues - it isn't. The key issue is a single very simple issue, the quality of the teacher. But that does lead to a giant question.

But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try.

Read the above article for a number of projects that are being tried to improve the effectiveness of teachers to move them up to that effective range. (The most efficient way to address this problem is to teach our existing teachers to do better. The alternative is to fire those doing lousy, bring in new people, measure them for a couple of years, and fire the poor performers in that group - much less efficient & effective.)

How important is this? President Obama is a superb politician. He knows what taking on the teacher's union means to his base of support. Yet when it came to the district in Rhode Island firing all teachers & administrators at a failing school, again from the N.Y. Times

But neither the president nor Education Secretary Arne Duncan backed off his support for tough action, including dismissing teachers en masse, to improve learning conditions in chronically failing schools. At the high school in Central Falls, a poor community with a large immigrant population, only 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests last fall. And if the administration's posture was undermining its support among teachers, it was earning unusual praise from conservatives, as well as from supporters of an overhaul of the nation's schools.

And the reaction of the teachers unions? No surprise:

Officials at the two unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, were so angry in the hours after Mr. Obama first endorsed the firings that an irreconcilable break with the administration seemed possible, perhaps bruising Democrats' electoral chances in November.

So why did Obama come out so strongly & publicly? Because he knows that what is at stake here is the future of our country. And he is putting our country's and out children's future ahead of the political advantage of putting the union first.

"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability," Mr. Obama said. "And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week."

This will require a brutal battle with the teachers unions and the teachers themselves. Why? Because they have spent their entire adult life in an environment where a teacher is never held accountable, where a teacher can never be fired, where showing up delivers the paycheck. Changing this is a wrenching change and one that introduces insecurity to their job. A superb example of the mindset of teachers today is:

Anthony J. Mullen, an instructor at the Arch School in Greenwich, Conn., who is the national teacher of the year, said he supported the notion of establishing more accountability in schools. "But what kind of accountability are we talking about?

Well Anthony, it's accountability as anyone outside of the K-12 system understands it - if you can't perform the job and you can't improve, then you're fired.

We need for our legislature to step up and get this done. It needs to be done thoughtfully & fairly. But it will require a brutal battle with the teachers unions because they are not going to give up ironclad job security gently.

What I think the legislature should put in place this year (alongside the new measurement systems that will be a big help) is a system to identify what makes for an effective teacher and to train our existing teachers to use that approach.

Second, the law needs to be changed that all future teacher contracts must be written to allow for firing teachers who fall below set criteria (awful level) or who fall below a higher level (bad level) and improve at too slow a rate. This needs to go in now so that in 2 - 3 years, as we have the results of the better measurement and can track improvement (or lack thereof) in teachers doing a substandard job, action can then be taken.

For Republicans, this needs to be approached not as a chance to hammer the teacher's unions, but as a way to improve as many of the teachers as possible.

For Democrats, this requires saying no to one of our most powerful constituencies. But we are doing so to advance the interests of an even larger constituency - all parents & children in the state. (I will also remind the Democrats that while they talk about the Republican base voting against their own interests, what do they think of the Democratic base who desperately needs quality schools voting for legislators who keep things as is for the sake of the unions?)

And to the legislature, the future of the state is in your hands.

 

What if the state measured the cost and return of each program?

Something has hit me as I've looked at a number of different things the state has done. And I think one large thing we are missing is that the state does not measure the cost and result of each program. Equally critical, it does not list out projected results and then compare that to actual results as we go forward.

Let's take a couple of examples:

1. The cost of higher ed has increased at twice the rate of inflation since 1980. Having 1 kid graduated and 1 at CSU, I don't see any real difference from when I went. Yet the costs keep climbing. Why don't we look at what we got in 1980 and then compare both the costs and outcomes we have today? From that determine what we think makes sense to spend on higher ed, what we think we should see from that over the next 10 years - and then check against actual results each year.
2. We should be doing the same for every program of significance (K-12, transportation, prisons, healthcare). What are we spending on, what do we expect to get from it, then compare with actual results over the next 10 years.
3. In criminal justice we should be measuring the cost of incarceration against the cost to society of the percentage who re-commit crimes when determining prison sentences. We should also be measuring the cost effectiveness of alternative approaches for classes of crimes. And we should be upfront about the cost of making the mental health issue of drug addiction a crime.
4. We should measure the cost to individuals/companies and to the state for each tax stream vs the money raised. The business property tax is universally detested because it costs businesses and local governments both a lot of money to calculate it - in some cases more than the tax amount itself. The state should be listing the cost to individuals/businesses and to the local/state revenue departments for each dollar raised via each tax mechanism.
5. We should measure the efficiency & effectiveness of each government department. When a department like OIT lays out a proposed budget and timeline for a project like CBMS, then that project should be tracked. And if it fails beyond a certain pre-set metric, then the department needs to be fixed. At present the price of failure in any department is an increased budget - that is not a route to success.

If we don't do this then we will continue to flounder, especially when the economy sucks. Money will be poured in according to "need" with no real effort made to insure that it is being use efficiently & effectively. The Republicans will continue to scream about all the wasted money (they're right). The Democrats will continue to scream about all the people who need our help (they're right).

But no one will be focused on fixing a broken system. And while the private sphere continues to deliver more for less, the public sphere will continue to deliver less for more.

Leading by example - update

I've updated Leading by example to include the most recent responses.

This investigative journalism thing takes work. In the movies they just go question someone, they break down crying, and then they tell you everything. I'm starting to suspect that the movies might not be 100% accurate.

A couple of things I've learned so far.

• Senators are much more responsive than Representatives.
• An incredibly high percentage (so far) don't shop online. (Note: your credit card is safer making an online purchase than buying dinner at a restaurant.)
• One person (Rollie Heath) understood the law. Some were asking me for guidance on what falls under this.
• Stan Garnett paid this for his business - but he didn't know that till he asked his accountant. So Stan is the only one (so far) who has paid the use tax.
• No one has said they will pay their past 3 years taxes - but they are due.
• Some Republicans answered with various themes of they think the law is bad so they don't expect people to pay it. Guys - if you only obey the laws you agree with, that's not a democracy, that's anarchy.