Watching the Ten Percenters

I'm responding to this excellent Herald article by Hillary Chabot as a long-time lottery player.

I've cashed tickets at the Lottery offices for years.  Until 2004, I got the full amount of my winnings, and since then I've paid my 5% cut to the state.  (Quit laughing back there if you're thinking I'm financing Deval Patrick's junkets.  OK, maybe a nice lunch at a London restaurant.)  If you have nothing to hide and you won a substantial amount of money, you would go and cash in the ticket...

...unless you owed child support, back taxes, parking tickets, and the like.  Not only do you get the 5% haircut from the state (or, if you're over $5,000, an additional 25% to the IRS), whatever you owe to the Department of Revenue gets taken.  For instance, if you owe $100,000 to the state for child support and you win $250,000, all you get left is $87,500, as $75,000 is sent to the DOR and IRS for taxes and the $100,000 is sent to the ex who has been demanding payment.  Even if you win as little as $600, whatever you're in arrears gets reduced by your winnings.  If you owe $100,000 and you win $600 - sorry, no check for you, but you get your bill reduced to $99,400.

Enter the professional ticket casher, or the "ten percenter."  What a ten percenter will do is cash the ticket for you in his own name, take 10% for themselves, and then give the rest to the winner.  The result: the tax/child support cheat still owes money, but keeps his winnings out of the radar of the DOR and the IRS

If you're not in trouble and you still want to remain anonymous (or have relatives or collectors dial you night and day because they discovered your suddenly fattened bank account) a blind trust established by a lawyer would be better than giving it to a ten percenter.  That way, the lawyer can come forward and claim the prize in the interest of the trust; the members of that trust remain anonymous (well, except for those under 18).

So what to do about this loophole that's costing the DOR millions in back taxes and child support?


Appeal to the ten percenters to turn against the ninety percenters.  A back stabbing move?  Sure, but if the ten percenter knows that the cheat won't give them their 10%, nothing lubricates the skids more than a ten percenter entrapping his boss.

Here's how it would go: a tax cheat owes $50,000 in child support and $25,000 in back taxes.  The tax cheat wins $100,000 in Mass Cash.  His $70,000 net will be seized if he turns in the ticket, so he gives it to the ten percenter with a promise of giving him $10,000.  The ten percenter knows the tax cheat has screwed him in the past, so he works with the DOR and cashes in the ticket for the cheat. 

The catch: the $70,000 check the ten percenter receives gets deposited into a traceable DOR account, who is also monitoring the amount of money given to the tax cheat.   When the tax cheat discovers DOR and IRS agents at his door and arrests him for child support and tax evasion, he also will find out all of his assets are seized too, thanks to the help of the ten percenter.  The $60,000 that the tax cheat tried to evade gets applied to his outstanding liens, and the ten percenter still gets his 10% of the original winnings - plus 10% interest on what the cheat originally owed, which is $7,500.  A fairly nice bonus.

The program, which I would call "Operation Dime Time," would help the DOR get lost cash from their evaders through the work of the ten percenters, who would also get rewarded for their assistance.  The ten percenters themselves would shed their image as mules for tax and child support cheats.  Even better - children who have been suffering due to the selfishness of their parents would get the money they deserve.

Somewhere, Juan Williams is chuckling to himself

After months of controversy, Vivian Schiller, the head of NPR, resigned after one of her colleagues got into a foaming anti-Tea Party tirade, thanks in part to conservative activist James O’Keefe, posing as a Muslim group carrying a $5 million donation to NPR and a hidden camera.  Ron Schiller not only offered his opinion, he offered the rope to strangle funding for public broadcasting.  (Not only that, one of the hoo-hahs chuckled that NPR is actually National Palestinian Radio.  She's on adminstrative leave.)

The clincher in all of this?  Upper class white people have maintained their facade of tolerance for many years, but their unadulterated spleen and contempt for others not like them - in other words, their real opinion about minorities, poverty, etc. - comes behind closed doors.  They are every bit as bigoted, ignorant, racist, and intolerant as they proclaim their bete noirs to be.  The upper white class lusts for power even more than the ones who "cling to their guns and religion," only their guns are mobs of professional agitators and their religion is socialism-lite.


NPR will only have itself to blame when federal funding is cut off from public broadcasting, and their only crime was being too candid.

Juan Williams, who was dismissed for exhibiting his opinion at NPR, is somewhere chuckling wryly to himself.

UPDATE: Juan Williams responds in the New York Post.  Compared to his former NPR bosses, Williams at least has his shoes tied while they tripped over themselves.

Instant Monkey Business (or I voted for #1 but we elected #3?!?!)

Instant Runoff Voting is an alternative way of voting for candidates versus the usual method of voting for one person.  In a nutshell, people are ranked in preference.

Sounds great in principle...but in this article by Brendan O'Neill (editor of spiked!) it really isn't that bright and shining pearl of democracy its supporters purport it to be.  I've included some parts here, and as it's written mainly in British English, I've put some words in braces {example} for an American approximation.  Anything bolded is also my emphasis.

AV is a form of super-technical majoritarianism. The way it works is through insisting that a candidate secure more than 50 per cent of votes before he is declared winner. So it asks voters to list their candidate choices in order of preference, marking them as 1, 2, 3 and so on. If after the first count no single candidate has 50 per cent of votes, then the candidate with the least number of votes is kicked out and those who voted for that candidate have their second-preference votes counted instead. This continues until one of the candidates – through a combination of his own first-preference votes and less keen voters’ second-preference votes for him – finally reaches the 50 per cent mark. So someone eventually wins, even if many of ‘his’ votes were cast very half-heartedly for him.Instead of voting for one person, you select people in terms of preference.  When the voting is closed, the person who receives over 50% of the vote wins.  If no one gets to the magic 50%, the person who has the lowest percentage is eliminated and the votes get passed around until someone hits 50%.

[AV] would make things less democratic, in two important ways: firstly through its impact on the act of voting, which would turn from being an impassioned statement into a watered-down listing of candidates you like, kind of like and dislike; and secondly through its impact on the act of deciding, which would more and more become a post-election, closed-off process of sifting through people’s preferences to try to decipher which candidate sort of represents the electorate’s desires.

AV would weaken the vote by implicitly inviting people, not to stamp their ballot paper with a heartfelt X for their party, but to scribble numbers next to various candidates, regardless of whether they feel very much for them. Voting would become less a declaration of belief and more a hedging of political bets.

The pro-AV lobby often points out that you will still be able to vote for only one candidate (or just two, or three, or four… it’s up to you). However, the knowledge that your first-preference vote might swiftly be discounted, and that second- or third-preference votes could become key in deciding the outcome of the election, will put moral pressure on voters to play the AV game, effectively to list their feelings about all the candidates rather than attach their flag to one of them. In keeping with our era of ideology-lite, where strong political convictions are seen as weird, voters will be tempted away from their so-called ‘tribal allegiances’ towards the expression of a more relativistic sentiment.

This could impact on what kinds of candidates are put forward for elections in the first place. Which political party will risk {campaigning} a hardcore individual[...]when it knows that if its candidate fails to secure 50 per cent of the vote in the first count then the views of other parties’ voters may become key? Today’s {weaker} parties rarely {campaign} risky candidates these days anyway; but with the introduction of AV we would likely see the party leaders exerting even more influence over which individuals are permitted to {campaign}, with the elbowing aside of those with possibly controversial beliefs in favour of more acceptable, politer and blander candidates who might not only pick up lots of [#]1's from said party’s traditional voters, but also some [#]2's and [#]3's from the other parties’ voters, too. AV would implicitly encourage the homogeni[z]ation of political life.

The new way of voting would also create enormous scope for {mischief}. The knowledge that second- and third-preference votes could become key will invite opportunistic lobbying between the various candidates and their minions. Under AV, the emphasis will inevitably shift from politicians appealing directly to the public for their outright political support and towards candidates cosying up to each other, striking deals, saying ‘get your people to give me their second-preference votes, and I’ll get mine to give them yours…" AV has a built-in tendency towards oligarchical relationship-building over direct, passionate, people-oriented electioneering.

Finally, AV would transform the traditional act of counting votes into a political form of tea-leaf-reading. Elections will be decided through the laborious process of sorting out preferences, expelling failing candidates one-by-one and subsequently spreading their supporters’ votes to other candidates. The people’s will would become something that is not so much clearly expressed in the election itself, in the act of voting, but rather something that is worked out after the election by officials and experts. Politics would become less open, less forged in the public realm, and more an act of elite deciphering of what ‘the people’ seemingly prefer rather than want.  We could easily end up with representatives that no one truly, passionately, wants.

In short, AV will both weaken The Vote and strengthen electoral bureaucracy. It will encourage even more candidates not to stand on a platform of ideas or policies that they are prepared to live and die by, but rather to take fewer political risks and always to keep one eye on the lowest common denominator of appealing to as many people as possible. And AV will strengthen the hand of that expert caste of middle-class negotiators and well-connected, well-educated political players who already dominate much of the modern political sphere. It will be a travesty for democracy.

Which may be the reason why some people, who despise the current, yet imperfect electoral system, would love to have IRV up and running.  Or maybe not...if IRV were active during the 2010 Mass Gubernatorial elections, and Tim Cahill and Jill Stein were eliminated, the 9% of the votes would have gone to Charlie Baker rather than Deval Patrick, and Baker would have been governor.  And, for the reasons listed above, vote pandering and dealing would dilute the very idea of voting in the first place - and dilute the votes themselves.