Republican families also feel the sting of our economy.
The wife of Maine Gov. Paul LePage has taken on a summer waitressing job near their Boothbay home. And she’s saving up for a Toyota RAV4.
Good for her. It’ll also give her more independence, and especially when her husband loses his job in the next election, I hope, that’ll give them some income to fall back on.
But of course it’s being politicized by Governor LePage.
Ann LePage had kept quiet about the gig, but her husband told a crowd at a recent town hall that his wife took a job to “supplement” his lowest-in-the-nation $70,000 salary. This year, the Republican governor unsuccessfully proposed to more than double his successor’s salary to $150,000.
Hang on, there. His wife quietly took on a hard, low-paying job to be able to afford some luxuries, and the governor is braying about it to justify getting a raise?
Look, he’s getting paid more than I do. You want to justify getting paid more? Do it by citing the work you do and how you deserve it for that, not by whining about how poor you are, when you aren’t. This is especially ironic coming from a governor who just had a tantrum over foodstamps, trying to end them because people who are really poor use them to occasionally buy a Twinkie. I guess he doesn’t see how similar that situation is to a well-off middle class family wanting more money so they can buy a shiny SUV.
Maybe when LePage shows a little empathy for the people he’s supposed to govern, it would be time to consider rewarding him for a job well done. I can’t see giving a raise to one of the worst governors in the country.
Side note: I don’t know how the rules have changed since I was a grocery cashier in the 80’s, but actual junk foods were not payable with food stamps unless I much misremember. The rule as I recall it was that if it was taxable (as junk food is in many states) then it’s also not covered by food stamps. Lobster, yes; Twinkies, no.
Maine used to be the last holdout of the sane conservatives. What an asshole.
Follow up to #1: I can’t easily confirm the rules in the ’80’s, but today snack foods are “food,” and hence covered. Hot foods or foods sold to be eaten on the premises are excluded, so no deli sandwiches, cooked chicken or salad bar.
I thought right-wing pols believed in people getting paid what they’re worth. If he’s the lowest-paid governor in the country, then that must mean . . .
A Masked Avenger @3:
Which really sucks for anyone who is unable to cook, whether due to disability or living circumstances. It also assumes a working refrigerator/freezer as well as a stove, oven or microwave.
@ A Masked Avenger:
The way it worked in my home state of OR was, I was allowed to buy any edible items in the store except hot deli foods and sandwiches. Potato salad from the deli, lunch meat, sliced cheese, yes, a roast chicken or tuna sandwich, no. Cold pre-prepared mac & cheese to be heated up at home, yes. Hot mac to be eaten immediately, nope. There was no prohibition on chips, cookies, candy, or any other high calorie consumable we call junk. I couldn’t buy toilet paper or diapers or cat food, but I could buy any people food so long as it didn’t come out of the hot case, because dog forbid poor working people don’t have to cook after being on their feet all day.
Now, whether I could afford to buy most of the things in the store was another matter. $195/ mo (or less, as the benefits started going away the quarter after I got my first paycheck) doesn’t go very far for two people, especially when one of them still eats baby food. WIC (which comes with a lot more restrictions) would have helped stretch the budget, but there was a waiting list and we never got to the head of the line before my kid aged us out of eligibility.
Addendum:
Ah, sorry, you already covered that while I was typing. Carry on!
Having been unemployed for a while, and having burned through all of my savings, I just recently applied for food stamps. It is “comforting” to know that our brave Texas Republican State Government, the ones who detest government telling us how to live our lives, have mandated that I can only buy ONE POUND OF CHEESE PER MONTH.
Never mind that I like to cook and cheese is a staple of many of my dishes. I could burn through that 1LB in a week. But because those hypocrites have determined that they know better than me, there all all sorts of conditions and restrictions on what I can buy to feed myself. Did I mention I could load up on craptastic dye-infused, sugar-laden, nutritionally-void breakfast cereal?
So, to those who think there should be restrictions on what one can buy on Food Stamps, I offer a hearty FUCK YOU to you and your Dietician Degree from Dunning-Kruger University.
I would love dearly to require all elected government critters (state and federal legislature and executive) to subsist upon food stamps for the duration of their terms.
FWIW, LePage is out next election anyway. Maine governors can only serve two consecutive terms, then they have to wait at least one term before running again.
https://ballotpedia.org/Governor_of_Maine
As a Mainer, and occasional local elected official who has been dealing with the LePage administration for several years, this governor’s departure can’t come to soon.
Based on the job description, Maine’s chief executive is substantially underpaid. Based on actual job performance, the current incumbent is IMO grossly overpaid.
LePage is a pretty good argument for switching to Instant Runoff Voting rather than First Past the Post. In an IRV system he never would have become governor; he was only elected because there were two candidates splitting the non-GOP vote. On an IRV ballot he would have been last choice for most of the people voting.
For national elections, IRV could let Bernie Sanders-style candidates run as independents without risking throwing the presidency to Trump. In 2000, George W. Bush probably could not have won Florida on the backs of Nader voters.
Or you could try a parliamentary system and stop voting directly for the executive.
@12 Sili: Parliamentary systems have the same problem, just with vote splitting happening at the level of representatives. That was one of the reasons Canada had a Conservative government for so long – the Liberals and NDP split the liberal vote in many districts, allowing Conservatives to win with a minority of the vote. A better system than first-past-the-post is IMO necessary in either parliamentary and non-parliamentary systems.
I would love IRV. Keep in mind, voting is essentially done by the states, and any state can implement it. I doubt if the sitting pols would vote for it, but many states allow for voter referendums. That is how you can change from FPTP to IVR. Circulate petitions and get the idea on the ballot. Then inform the rest of the voters of the advantages.
Infophile #13:
Yes: proportional representation. Abolish voting districts, they are nothing but bother.
Then how do you vote FOR the person who is representing you?
@Onamission5 #6 – It is worth noting that SNAP benefits (what used to be called “food stamps”) allows you to buy seeds and edible plants, with the idea that you would grow your own food. When my mom was raising four kids on food stamps, we were lucky enough to have room for a large garden so we grew our own tomatoes, peppers, onions, lettuce, cabbage, carrots and radishes. By paying in sweat for a lot of our produce, we were able to afford the occasional luxury item, like a beef roast or package of bacon.
$70,000 a year is about what I was paid as a programmer in the financial sector… with ten years of experience under my belt. Unlike LePage, I did not get to live rent-free in a mansion with a staff paid for out of the public purse: I had to pay my own rent, and utilities, and phone, and internet. In Seattle.
Given the very large number of things he is not having to pay for, I have to wonder why his wife has had to get a second job to get a new car. Where is his salary going?
Nerd,
People are already voting for parties anyway. The idea that one needs a local representative (for local people) is antiquated. If enough seats are available, it’s possible to impose some geographical distribution in larger districts. But single seat districts are utterly stupid.
And yes, proportional representation was implied. Sorry.
Citation please. And show that proportional representation doesn’t lead to other problems, like the inability to form a majority government on a regular basis, or gives too much power to very minor parties in forming a coalition government. Example, Israel.
And what about the abuses of majoritarian systems? The US House where a combination of natural demographics and gerrymandering means the Democrats need about 54-55% of the vote relative tpo the Republicans, in order to get a majority? The UK where the Liberal Democrat party and UKIP both outpoll the Scottish Nationalists, but due their votes being diluted rather than concentrated get 8 and 1 seats respectively, compared to 56, while the Tories turn 36% of the vote into a majority which they use to hold a sordid referendum because they can’t sort out their internal divisions, and now the UK is out of the EU?
How about my country, New Zealand, where FPP led to our Parliament being a rubber stamp for the executive’s wishes, and we had a succession of elected dictatorships and then neoliberalism thrown at an unsuspecting populace? We switched to proportional represenation for a reason after that, and the results have been good.
Proportional representation can lead to bad outcomes, and majoritarian systems can lead to good ones. That’s true, more generally, of democracy and dictatorship. But I’m sure we can both come up with systems both ways, and go around in circles. I don’t think you’ll find that proportional representation leads to worse governance. What we do know is that it allows minorities to be represented fairly. Given the general tendencies of commenters on a blog like this, I would consider that most of us should consider this a positive thing.
@#11, jheartney
Okay…
1. Bush didn’t win Florida. The count was eventually completed, and Gore won Florida by a tiny majority. What Bush won was the Supreme Court case.
2. People who voted for Nader, total, including both Democrats and non-Democrats, made up a group which was one twentieth the size, according to exit polls, as registered Democrats who voted for Bush. Those people said Gore was so far to the right that they didn’t see any difference. If you’re really trying to win elections, then the key isn’t to try and bludgeon Greens, it’s to nominate Democrats who are discernible from Republicans — which means no more DLC members like Clinton.
3. In most scenarios, IRV doesn’t help third-party candidates. Approval voting does. IRV also does not improve almost any other problem with FPTP — for many definitions of “most popular”, the most popular candidate can lose easily with IRV — and the only guarantees IRV makes about the winner apply only if every voter is required to rank all the candidates. (Think how much fun it would be to convince the average Republican that they had to “vote for” either Sanders or Clinton!) None of the governments which have adopted a form of IRV actually do this, which means nobody who is using IRV is sure of getting any better results than FPTP anyway. Considering how much more difficult IRV is to count, people interested in voting reform ought to give up on it and push for approval voting instead, which can produce an objectionable winner* but at least is easy to follow and implement correctly.
*It is possible to have a contest with approval voting where the winner received votes from less than 50% of the population. This is somehow considered by critics to be worse than IRV, where the winner of an election may be the second-to-last choice of a majority of voters, or FPTP, where in such a contest most people would have been required to vote for a candidate they did not actually like if they voted at all.
Nerd,
I wasn’t aware that personal opinion required a bibliography.
But a system that (in principle) allows 51 % of the electorate to take 100 % of the seats, does not strike me as fair.
Or in reality 51 % of the seats for 37 % of the votes. While 13 % of the votes yielded one (1) seat.
I’m not denying that Israel is fucked up, but I doubt winner-takes-all would do much to change that.
I don’t understand this sentence. I’ve never seen this happen in real life, which is why I was asking for examples.
Israel is exactly why I find proportional representation just so much hype. A real life example, not theory. Small religious parties are needed to be able to form governments. Therefore, they wield power far outside of their size in the general population, and make sure any religious policies follow their ultraorthodoxy. Without proportional representation, they wouldn’t get the same number of seats, and wouldn’t be a thorn in the side of most people.
Such as my second paragraph? Or is that not disproportionate enough?
The way disenfranchising the 13 % UKIP voters worked out so wonderfully, you mean?
@I’ve never seen this happen in real life, which is why I was asking for examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensland_state_election,_2012
The Labor government went from a majority to 7 seats. The LNP opposition had 49% of the first preference vote, 62-38 relative to Labor, and won 78 out of 89 seats, in a instant-runoff election. (Labor then went on to win the next election in 2015. You can’t tell me that’s a healthy system).
I believe there have been total 100% votes in a Canadian province or two (possibly Alberta?) in the past, but haven’t managed to dig it out specifically.
Of course there’s nothing as specific as a 100% vote with 51% of the vote. But in places where most seats are within plausible reach of either party, such as Queensland with its relatively uniform demographics in terms of political views, you can get results that start to approach it.
The Vicar #22
I don’t know where you got these ideas, but Wikipedia sez:
In case you doubt Wiki, Bush winning Florida by about 500 votes is what I remember the news reports of the time saying.
Also, if you really think 20 times 1.635% (32.7% of all votes cast) of Bush’s total came from registered Democrats, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell to you.
Vicar #22
This is not the usual objection to approval voting for something like a presidential election. The usual objection is that it violates later-no-harm. That is, there are situations in which voting for your acceptable but less-preferred candidate leads to a less good outcome for you than failing to do so. The result is that voters will be discouraged from filling out an honest ballot, especially where there is heavy campaigning, and in many cases the whole system pretty much just devolves to FPTP. It’s a shame, because approval vote does have the advantages you mention.
Comment on Israel, re. Nerd of Redhead’s comments above. Proportional Representation can be done, and has been done, many different ways… every country that uses it has tinkered with the details. Israel has the whole country as one district with (IIRC) 100 seats to be divided proportionally among the parties. This means you only have to have a little more than half of one percent, certainly no more than one percent of the vote, to win a seat. This allows lots of tiny parties, which makes coalition-building difficult. Other countries have guarded against this problem, some by setting thresholds — “your party must get at least 5% of the vote to be included”– and some by dividing the country into districts with, say, ten seats per district, which means that a party must get at least 5% of one district to win a seat. You can jigger the rules so that the equilibrium number of parties is less than ten, and governing coalitions can be formed from half of those.
For a good overview of the different ways Proportional Representation has been done in real life, in real countries, I recommend the book REAL CHOICES, NEW VOICES by Douglas j. Amy. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/OrderDesk/bookhtml.htm
I have invented my own version, “Candidate List”, which IMHO combines the advantages of Party List and the Single Transferable Vote.
http://atheistnexus.org/profiles/blogs/proportional-representation