Depends on whether getting rid of federal taxes would accompany the loss of federal funding (which is a huge part of the DC budget).
Lobbyists to receive 35% raises overnight!
Actually, thinking that through more, that would do something fierce to the DC housing market. You think it's getting gentrified now, wait till you turn it into the Caymans on the Potomac
Is there no DC-level income tax?
Seems like a truly horrible idea. Unless you want DC to go all-white, majority Republican.
MY and some of the other Dem media bloggers seem to be feeling startlingly olive branchy toward the right today. Was there Communist march in DC yesterday?
This is, no doubt, a terrible idea. But an amusing one.
The thing I find most interesting is Yglesias's question about how many other people/places would be willing to give up their franchise in exchange for not paying an income tax. I wonder at what price people would be able to give up different rights.
Gotta be the purest expression of Republican policy intellectualism yet: golly, it turns out that the best way of solving this problem is to eliminate federal income taxes for Heritage pundits (and a few random black people who probably aren't paying any taxes anyway).
6: But once DC is all-white, majority Republican, there will be no opposition to statehood!
(Unless it would bring back the income tax.)
how many other people/places would be willing to give up their franchise in exchange for not paying an income tax.
You mean trade an almost infinitesimally small chance of affecting an election for an immediate 20-30% increase in your income? I'll bet a whole lot of people would take that offer.
The inconsistency of course is that the voters would then vote back taxes on the non-voters.
The thing I find most interesting is Yglesias's question about how many other people/places would be willing to give up their franchise in exchange for not paying an income tax.
DC's a bad place to try and answer that question, because many of the people who would flood into DC have some things that are better--and more protective of the rights they care about--than a vote: access and influence. Gawd knows where Bill Kristol lives and whether he bothers to vote, but he has a lot more effect on policy, even when the Republicans are the minority party, than every person who reads Unfogged combined.
Gawd knows where Bill Kristol
Zaba says he lives in McLean, VA, and Zillow says it's a 5 bedroom worth about $1.5M.
OT: what the heck is wrong with the commenters on this MY post?
Nick, I didn't even have to click the link to know it was about feminism; Yglesias's commenters are horrid on anything about women. It's kind of strange, since Matt is generally good about it.
15: I only glanced at the post, but, as it's is another male/female issue, I'll guess: most of them are youngish and male-ish, and therefore stupid-ish. The claim about women having shit taste was--at least when I was younger--pretty standard, and of a piece with women not being funny. It's hard to believe that some of the commenters are denying that. I don't know anything about music or Pitchfork, so I have no idea how well founded that specific complaint is.
I don't know anything about music or Pitchfork
SCMTim is a woman?
16,17 -- I know that the discussions of gender at MY are frequently inexplicably bad, but that one struck me as bad even by those standards.
As you know, as C3PO is to languages, I am to prejudices, and I'd never heard the one about women having bad taste in music. But I think your explanation of Yglesias's commenters is probably right.
It's also a very specific topic, so nitwit antifeminists can attack, but it's hard to respond intelligently unless you are an Insufferable Music Snob yourself. I'd generally wade into that sort of thing, but IMSery is not within my scope of expertise.
Roberta is very knowledgeable about music (we both were DJs at UNC's student radio station, and she did it during her masters program at UArizona as well), and while our tastes have significant overlap, we both have stuff we love that the other one can't stand. Or at least that the other is highly indifferent toward.
I'm pretty sure we both think the other's exclusive set is made up of silly music.
15: I thought the comment thread was pretty good -- variety of opinions, well expressed. Too much agreement is boring. There were plenty of people on both sides of whatever the hell was being discussed...which was pretty unclear to start with.
whoops, OK, I take it back. I think I was skipping over the most trollish posts and focusing on the good ones. There's five minutes of my life I'll never get back.
I do think MY has a number of good regular posters.
In the last thread about Steve Albini, someone linked to him giving a particularly obnoxious version of the "women have no taste in music" stereotype.
20: I'd say it's a pretty well-established one. Albini -- arguably the king of the misogynist IMS -- was straightforward on this point (something like, "Straight chicks can't like good music") in that (fairly amusing) "Ask a Music Industry Micro-Celebrity" thing he did.
I have never gotten a laugh out of Yglesias's posters. I can't even taunt them. They're no fun at all.
OT, but I have another story about my sociopathic ex-brother-in-law. To this day his mother remains proud of the fact that he was screwing his eight-grade teacher. Hawaiian culture is different. (Age of consent used to be 12). In the Mary Kay LeTourneau case, the 13-year-old boy was also of Pacific Islands background.
Indeed, the boy in that case was Samoan. Relationships between early teen boys and adult women are not standard or approved of in Samoan culture.
Ogged said it once and I've never forgotten it: this is the only blog where you should read the comments.
20 is the most egregious violation of the analogy ban to date.
31: LB, the boy just wasn't that into you.
34: Me too! So you're going to steal my wife, Catherine's going to steal my kids, and I'll have the television all to myself again!
I really, really like your television, apo.
22: I meant to tell you, apo, that your funk mix was a huge hit during my c/o/o/p shift the other day. It's hard to come up with music that everyone likes for 2.5 hours of packaging cheeses, but between your mix and some other stuff I have, I managed to fill the time. (And if you don't have good music, someone will put on NPR, or insist that you have a self-righteous conversation about something enwhitled and boring.)
Hawaiian culture is different. (Age of consent used to be 12).
Umm, I think that has more to do with not being big on putting people in jail and being OK with teenagers screwing each other than being OK with adults screwing young teens. (There is an ethnic group that's commonly stereotyped that way, but it's not Hawaiian and it's not generic local.)
21: I don't think you need to be an IMS to enter that discussion. There's really nothing in the blog entries or comments that requires a lot of music knowledge to address, it's just super low-level bitching on both sides and people oh-so-originally bashing Pitchfork.
I agree that there's almost certainly institutional blocks to more girls entering the music performance and criticism scene, but Amanda's blog entry didn't contain anything remotely approaching insight. So any discussion based upon that entry will be pretty worthless.
Hawaiian culture is different. (Age of consent used to be 12).
According to E! True Hollywood Stories, this is correct. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson lost his virginity when he was around twelve to an older woman in Hawaii.
Is that the first earnest mention of The Rock at unfogged? There's one non-earnest one about Labs (and how could it be otherwise?), and a couple mentions of the movie...
your funk mix was a huge hit during my c/o/o/p shift
Hooray!
I have a crush on Roberta, too, but I'm highly susceptible to peer pressure.
42: The reason the comments suck so much is because they don't know anything about IMSes. Everything Amanda said in the linked piece was true. The only problem with Amanda's piece is that wanting to be accepted by IMSes is a serious character flaw, one that she is unable to shake.
Is it possible to mention The Rock earnestly?
40: That mix is indeed dope. Sifu's was great, too.
Women in music: Chrissie Hynde got her start as a music critic. Apparently she actually knew what she was talking about. She also affirmed her right to be a cunt to the extent necessary.
Unfortunately, she's now in PETA. Another idol smashed.
PETA's looking better to me these days.
Why do people get so worked up about DC? It was specifically carved out of both MD and VA so that it would not be a State, and therefore would not have the issues that a State would have, like electing Senators. Everyone who lives there has chosen to, for good or ill.
Apo, a friend of mine told me about a fake organization called PETA, which I think you'd like: People for Eating Tasty Animals.
If we are not suppossed to eat animals, why do they taste like meat?
PETA has always been a good source of very high quality soft porn, but that's not good enough. The medical labs where I worked were a target, and their spokesman's statement was slick, egregious, Intelligent Design quality bullshit.
53: "That's just the deal" isn't really much of a defense. Times change, circumstances change, and sometimes stuff was just screwed up to start with.
53: a lot of people are born there, and not every 200-year-old constitutional contrivance looks good today. It's not like habeus corpus.
And second, the reason nothing's been done for so long is that there are too many blacks and too many Democrats there.
If DC were a state, it would be the second-smallest (bigger than Wyoming).
To me folding it into Marymand would make the most sense.
53: also, wasn't it carved out so the capitol wouldn't be in any particular state, thus avoiding favoritism to that state?
Also annoying: any argument that is based on "well, someone who set this arrangement up had a plan, so we can't make changes."
Far be it from me to try and dissuade Unfoggers from sniping at the wisdom of the Founders, but having a seperate Federal District for the capital is not exactly unheard of because of the power that the Senator or Rep from the District would have, as pointed out in 59. But I'm sure we could convene a constitutional convention and do much better. Get rid of that pesky Second Ammendment for starters.
I think its because males have fewer acceptable outlets for emotion, so they are more likely to turn to music.
Mostly it's because of the bigotry, TLL. By now all the other purported reasons are pretty much moot.
Nobody is against the idea of having a small nonresidential federal district so that Congressmen can't be harassed by state police (or whatever), but having half a million unrepresented people stinks.
Jim Crow lives on a little bit here, because it has a hook in the constitution WRT DC. Our Southern brothers and sisters have very resourceful in figuring out ways to degrade our great nation as much as possible, and while keeping half a million people disenfranchised is low on the list, it's still on the list.
We are risking the wrath of B by talking about politics, however.
Speaking of how Jim Crow lives, has no one an Opinion on the Jena 6? Nooses in a tree seem pretty imflammatory to me, and the Powers that Be at the school and the parrish don't seem to have handled this too well.
Thanks, Apo. I was sure that Unfogged couldn't be as clueless as some. that's what i get for being out of the loop.
I'm all for real representation for DC. At the very least Norton should actually get a vote.
Parts of DC were carved out of Maryland, and parts were from Virginia, I believe. The Virginia bits went back to Virginia. Thus Arlington which is basically an extension of DC, because it's got so much Federal stuff in it. It's also got all the tall office buildings that DC's not allowed to have.
Barring that, I think that DC ought to find a way to tax some of those Virginians and Marylanders who use all of their resources. DC has to maintain roads and provide police protection, and it doesn't have the tax base to support that stuff, so its income tax is insanely high.
The Federal Government is supposed to contribute to some of the costs of the DC government, but they don't do enough. (They do like to meddle in local government a lot. Republicans always want to take away the District's ban on handguns.) My favorite way that the Feds contribute to the District's governmental costs is by housing all DC prisoners in Federal prisons. (The District's prison in VA was on nice real estate in Fairfax county and got developed.) So, all the prisoners get shipped away from their families.
34: Who can resist a gal who can appreciate a fine pair of tits?
And with a highly individual concept of the number of tits in a pair, too.
The other one's even prettier, LB.
be willing to give up their franchise in exchange for not paying an income tax
I don't think this is quite right when it comes to D.C. The "no federal tax" position had long been one of the proposals of the progressive Statehood Party (which died several years ago, before, I think, most of the DC'ers on this list were around).
Right now, when there seems to be a possibility that D.C. could actually get a vote in the House (though not full representation without senators), and with gentrification under full swing, it's a bad idea. But for a long time it made some sense: We weren't "giving up the franchise"; we didn't have it and didn't think we'd get it anytime soon. Drawing middle-class folks back into the city was a widely supported policy (eventually helped along by the $5,000 federal tax credit for 1st-time buyers). And letting D.C. folks keep more of their income, and spend more of it locally, would have been a needed boost to the economy.
*And* the federal government is already getting a ton of in-kind revenue by not paying property taxes on any of the land it occupies. Plus, as BG notes, D.C. is federally barred from levying a commuter tax on suburbanites.
Shorter: If you fuckers aren't going to let us vote--even when you get to boss us around--then stop taxing us, and, p.s., exempt us from the draft, too.
Sorry for the long history lesson.
Given the current situation, it's a bad idea. There's a reason Heritage didn't get on board until now.
