David McElroy

When politicians want more money, their favorite words are, “It’s for the children.” Even those magic words didn’t work in Colorado Tuesday, as voters rejected a $3 billion “temporary” tax hike for government-run schools. Penn Pfiffner, chairman of the underfunded group opposing the tax, showed his joy last night at a celebration in the Denver suburb of Littleton.

Is this a preview of the 2012 election? Republicans hope so. Democrats hope not. I don’t think you can draw a conclusion other than saying that many voters are angry and don’t intend to vote for anything they see as a sacrifice for them. Conservative voters are going to reject even the most well-intentioned tax hike. (Check out this story if you want to know what the Colorado tax would have done.) Liberal voters are going to reject anything they see as being favorable to people who they believe already have money or privilege.

In other words, it’s going to be an especially polarizing election in 2012 in many places. In their anger, people aren’t going to be voting for someone as much as they’re going to voting against someone who represents something they hate.

Republicans will end up nominating one of the usual suspects (such as Mitt Romney), and Democrats will presumably stick with Barack Obama. Republican voters won’t love their nominee, but they will hate Obama and work passionately to defeat him. Democrats won’t love Obama, for the most part, but they will hate the Republican nominee, who they will see as a representative for “the rich.”

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Republicans in Congress talk big about cutting spending. They rail against the ridiculous pork that they’re going to cut from the budget. But when it’s time to put their words into action, these budget hawks become gentle as doves. The spending never stops.

It happened again Tuesday. Republicans in the U.S. Senate had a chance to show they were serious about cutting spending — in at least a small way. Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute points out that 32 Republican senators voted against cutting $1 billion in rural development subsidies. (If you’re in the United States, check here to see how your senators voted. Both of the chicken hawks from my state voted against the cuts.)

So if Republicans won’t even cut some money out of the budget that includes the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center, what cuts are they willing to make? It’s time to be painfully blunt. Republicans are only willing to cut things that don’t touch most of their constituents. Democrats are only willing to cut things that don’t touch most of their constituents. In other words, everybody is interested in keeping interest groups happy. Hardly anybody really cares about fixing the budget and the debt.

(If you’d like to know what those rural development subsides are used for, Cato had a great paper a couple of years ago that explains it nicely.)

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As a California state assemblywoman, Mary Hayashi is accustomed to taking things from people and companies because she wants to. She apparently just forgot that she had to get the rest of the Legislature to approve of the theft before she did it.

The Castro Valley Democrat came into a San Francisco Neiman Marcus store with two shopping bags, one from Neiman Marcus and one from another store. She picked up $2,500 worth of merchandise and left the store — passing multiple checkout registers along the way. Store security watched and recorded on video — and then confronted her after she left the store. San Francisco police arrested Hayashi and she’s charged with felony grand theft.

A spokeswoman for Hayashi says it’s all just a misunderstanding, of course. She said Hayashi was talking on her cell phone and simply left the store “without really thinking about it.”

Hayashi is part of an institution whose members simply take what they want from others and give those things to pretty much anyone they want. It’s an institution that believes it has the moral right to control people’s lives and take their property without compensation. My experience with politicians who have that kind of power get pretty arrogant about what they can have when they want it. My suspicion is that she thought she was entitled to the “five-finger discount.”

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