Political Game Time!

I've been meaning to try a new version of Monopoly. Here are the rules changes I propose. The goal is to give Monopoly some new options for the little guy, and fit a little more with reality. Of course, my ultimate goal is to make it more fun than the real game.

1. Players start with $100 (with one exception; see rule X).

2. When landing on an unowned property, a player may Go To Work. The player earns 10% of the property's value per turn while at work, but forgoes his die roll. After 3 turns, the player must either purchase the property or move on.

3. Player's may invest their money in the bank. A player may set money aside in an investment. Each turn they earn 5% of the investment's value. The invested money is still subject to tax, and may only be removed after taxes are calculated for the "year".

4. Voting
 Pick an unused piece of your choice (like the iron). It takes a turn like any other player, but has no money or interaction with the other elements of the game. It can roll again after doubles. It cannot go to jail. The game starts with a flat tax. When the iron passes Go, players pay their income tax, and may then vote on income tax.

5. Player's may vote to institute one of 4 tax systems:
 a. No Tax
 b. $100 Tax (a flat bill of $100 per player)
 c. Flat Tax (10% per player)
 d. Progressive Tax (10*log(current wealth)% per player)

6. Welfare Check.
When taxes are paid, the money is counted and 50% of it is redistributed amongst the players evenly, rounding down.

6. If the bank runs out of money, the economy collapses. Each player pays the purchase price of all their property, houses and hotels to bail out the bank.

7. Players may use money to influence the game.
 a. $100 - Ad Campaign. Player may buy an extra temporary vote. This can be done any number of times.
 b. $500 - Smear Tactics. Put the brothel marker on target property. Houses and hotels cannot be built there, until the owner pays $600 to debunk the claim (or evict the prostitutes).
 c. $1000 - Eminent Domain. Player may force another player to sell a property to them at its face value.

8. At the end of the game, the winning player writes down his total liquid assets. He passes those on to the player of his choice (himself included) the next time the game is played.

9. At the beginning of the game, players may vote on the estate tax. This tax will be applied at the beginning of the next game to the winner's wealth. Players may vote for 1 of 4 estate tax plans. This vote may not be influenced by Ad Campaigns.
 a. No Tax
 b. $500 Tax (a flat bill of $500)
 c. Flat Tax (10%)
 d. Progressive Tax (10*log(current wealth)%)
50% of this taxed wealth is evenly redistributed amongst all players.

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Immediately I can see some problems with these ideas. After the first game, the rich guy will have a consistent advantage. He will almost certainly be paying a Progressive Estate Tax of ~$4000, but will have in the neighborhood of $6-10k at the beginning of the game. With $5k invested, he will have an income of $250. He will be able to easily win elections by buying votes, setting the Income Tax to $100 (which hurts the other players a lot). He will be able to purchase every property he lands on, while the other players will need to make there way around to the high value red-blue properties and get to work. Depending on luck, they may make a few hundred, before they pass go, gaining another $200. They will then spend the next few turns purchasing crappy low-level properties. Any attempts to assemble a property group will be stymied by Eminent Domain. Once the rich guy has a property group, he will start picking off players (as in traditional Monopoly).

If the vote for Income Tax were immune to Ad Campaigns, we might have a better game. The rich guy would end up paying ~$4k per "year", and the other players would be getting a stipend of ~$500 per "year". This isn't enough to keep the game going forever, but it does give the other players some abilities to influence the game. Between all of them, they will be able to purchase enough properties to make it very difficult for the rich guy to eminent domain them all out of monopolies. He will either end up facing some enemies with property groups, or he will spend all his money on Eminent Domain.

I know this is a little off topic for this blog, but all this political research I've been doing lately has got me thinking of a lot of things from a progressive standpoint. Any thoughts? Suggestions?

Conservatives & Cutting Government Spending

This issue's been percolating for awhile. Bear with me.

I work for the government. I have for the last 5 years. I put in a 40 hour week, and I go home to my wife. I'm in IT, so I put up with a fair amount of crap, too.

A fellow IT professional, who is a conservative, thinks that we government workers are being painted poorly in public opinion. I can see what she means. Occassionally my mother brings up my overly cushy job, jibing me about my benefits. In 2010, Bakersfield passed measure D, reducing pension benefits for police and firefighters. When the Tea Party rails against government spending, one of the things they are railing about is my salary.

So, I see what my coworker means. People are out for blood. They need someone to blame in a time of economic crisis. Government workers have good jobs with good benefits. Let's take that away. The difference in my opinion is: I don't see this as a unique thing for government pensions. Let me explain.

My coworker is a conservative government IT pro. She is against wasteful school spending, corporate bailouts, and welfare checks, but doesn't see why we should take away her benefits.

My mother is a conservative corporate office manager. She is against government pensions, wasteful school spending, and welfare checks, but doesn't see why we should take away the money her company needs to stay afloat. (This is a random guess. As previous posts show, my mother will not discuss religion or politics with me)

My sister is a conservative elementary school teacher. She is against government pensions, corporate bailouts, and welfare checks, but doesn't see why we should take away funding for schools.

My mother-in-law is a conservative senior widow taking care of her disabled mother. She is against government pensions, wasteful school spending, and corporate bailouts, but she doesn't see why we should take away her stipend to care for her aged, dying mother.

See, everyone's against the government spending money on other people. When the government spends money on a project that doesn't help you directly, there is a tendency to see that as your money paying for someone else's welfare. But when it comes to your programs, it's a lot easier to see the benefits.

Oh and I forgot about the fifth person in our hypothetical. He's a billionaire CEO. He's against all 4 of these programs (even the bailout; if the company goes under, he still gets paid), because he doesn't want everyone else taking his tax dollars. He earned them fair and square by being born into a wealthy family, using his money and family connections to get into expensive schools, joining elite fraternities with other billionaires, and being offered the CEO job by a frat brother. If everyone else wants money so much, why don't they just work for it?

And the thing about conservative economic policies is that they don't just stop with the other guy. You can start by denying welfare to "lazy" widows, purging "extravagant" retirement plans, and placing restrictions on "greedy" labor unions, but eventually the slope leads to removing that "cushy" 40 hour work week, and cutting those "restrictive" child-labor laws. Eventually, your program will be on the chopping block. Unless you're the billionaire CEO, in which case... carry on, good sir.

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

    - Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

The Estate Tax - Punishing the Rich for their Success

My mother-in-law said something this weekend that really made me sit up and take notice. We were discussing the tax deal that President Obama and the Republicans had brokered. I think it's awful that Obama has to give the Republicans the tax cuts for the rich that they're after, but it's a political compromise. If everyone were happy with it, it wouldn't be a compromise.

My mother-in-law mentioned the estate tax and how she feels that it's wrong for them to tax the dying more like that. I mentioned that it was only going to affect the very rich, that the estates of most Americans wouldn't be affected. She responded that it's basically theft and that small businesses would be hurt by it. She claims that she's in support of the tea-party. That the government can't keep spending the way it does, but then she's in support of tax cuts for millionaires.

Is it just me or is there something wrong with ordinary people when they start worrying about the tax situations of multi-millionaires. Does it really count as a small business when you're worth $5 million?

Right now, the estate tax exempts the first $1 million and has a top rate of 55%. The currently proposed change would exempt the first $5 million and have a top rate of 35%. This will increase the deficit by hundreds of billions over the next 10 years.

When she says things like this, I hear parroting of conservative ideals. "Don't punish the rich for their success." "The poor need to work harder." "If I ever got rich, I wouldn't want to be taxed more." But the thing is, the rich already get the advantages of wealth. The rich own the businesses, the second homes, the yachts. The rich have the opportunity to invest in their retirement and hire the best doctors when their kids are sick. The rich live in the safest neighborhoods, and their kids go to the best schools. Asking that some of that wealth go back into the public coffers after they die doesn't seem like the worst punishment I can think of. It seems like a way to balance the system, so that all the wealth doesn't keep pooling in fewer and fewer individuals. And an estate tax seems like an especially good place to do that. That way we're not actually "punishing" the person that did the work. We're reclaiming the money from the rich guy's ex-wife's shiftless son from her second marriage.

Low and middle income Republicans make my head ache. It's like they think that the rich deserve wealth and happiness more than they do. They've had these notions of fairness and the free market drilled into their heads for so long that they forget the most important detail. The free market isn't fair. Give me a world in which everyone comes from identical cloning pods, receives the same educational, and monetary opportunities, and has the same physiology and psychology and then I'll endorse the idea that those who work hardest should get the most rewards. In the meanwhile, we have people being incubated in mothers that think that one more shot of heroine is more important than their embryo's development. We have children being educated in run down schools with out of date texts, until they have to drop out because their family needs them to go to work picking grapes. We have people who've been saddled with every health problem imaginable and on top of it a healthy dose of mental problems exacerbated by childhood emotional abuse. Tell me that some rich kid from Beverly Hills deserves more than one of them simply because of where, when and to whom they were born and you've lost my vote.

The funniest thing about this whole story is that my mother-in-law is a mooch on the state. She receives federal aid and medical coverage for herself, her aging mother and her grandkids. If she wants to cut government spending and get the government away from the purse strings of the rich, I'm sure that the Republicans will help her with that. Somehow, I don't think she'll really be happy with the results.