On Special Report, Barone cited interest-group spending to explain defeat of conservative initiative, but not liberal one
SUMMARY: On Special Report, U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone asserted that an Oregon initiative that would have increased cigarette taxes to fund children's health care failed because Oregon voters did not want to pay higher taxes. Barone later claimed "the main reason" Utah voters rejected a statewide school voucher plan was "that there was a very big campaign put on against it by the National Education Association and other teacher unions." In fact, spending by an interest group also played a role in the Oregon vote -- tobacco companies reportedly spent $11.8 million in a campaign to defeat the Oregon initiative, nearly triple the $4.4 million reportedly spent by the "very big campaign" to defeat the Utah school voucher plan.
On the November 7 edition of Fox News' Special Report, during a report by correspondent Molly Henneberg about the defeat of several state ballot initiatives, U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone asserted that an Oregon initiative that would have increased cigarette taxes to fund children's health care failed because Oregon voters did not want to pay higher taxes. Later in the same report, Barone said "the main reason" Utah voters rejected a statewide school voucher plan was "that there was a very big campaign put on against it by the National Education Association and other teacher unions." He continued, "The teacher unions do not want to see teaching jobs go to people who are not their members, so they're strongly opposed to vouchers." But neither Barone nor Henneberg mentioned that spending by an interest group also played a role in the Oregon vote -- tobacco companies reportedly spent $11.8 million in a campaign to defeat the Oregon initiative, nearly triple the $4.4 million reportedly spent by the "very big campaign" to defeat the Utah school voucher plan.
According to a November 6 report on the Portland Oregonian's Politics blog, "The makers of Camel and Marlboro cigarettes contributed $11.8 million to two committees fighting the tobacco tax proposal, which called for using the 85 cents a pack to pay for children's health insurance and other health programs. The cigarette money paid for a heavy advertising campaign, which included television, radio and direct mail advertisements." The Oregonian report also stated that "[t]he tobacco money dwarfed the campaign supporting the measure. Yes On The Healthy Kids Plan reported spending $3.4 million, or less than a third as much."
By contrast, according to a November 7 Salt Lake Tribune article, "Most of the [Utah school voucher] opposition's $4.4 million came from the National Education Association and state teachers' unions from Florida to Alaska. Voucher supporters countered with more than $4 million, nearly three-quarters of that from [Overstock.com CEO Patrick] Byrne and his family."
From the November 7 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:
BRIT HUME (host): Voters around the country weighed in on a number of ballot initiatives Tuesday, and in several states made it clear they are keeping a tight hold on their wallets. Correspondent Molly Henneberg reports on issues in Utah, New Jersey, and Oregon where voters said no.
[begin video clip]
HENNEBERG: In Oregon, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have increased taxes on cigarettes by about 85 cents a pack.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cigarettes are too much already.
HENNEBERG: That money would have gone to pay for health care for about 117,000 uninsured children. So what could that signal? If liberal, blue state Oregon would vote down a children's health insurance measure, especially when Democrats in Congress are trying to override President Bush's veto of the SCHIP children's health insurance program and help pay for it in the same way?
One political analyst says, in the end, people vote their pocketbooks.
BARONE: When you ask voters, "Do you want to have a health children's health care measure?" they tend to say yes. When you ask them whether they want to pay for it or have higher taxes to pay for it, then, as we've seen in Oregon, they may say no.
HENNEBERG: New Jersey voters said no to the state borrowing $450 million in bonds to fund stem cell research. Democratic Governor Jon Corzine supported the measure, even spent $200,000 of his own money to promote it. And actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, taped a radio ad encouraging voters to approve it.
FOX: I urge you to vote yes on public question number two for stem cell research.
HENNEBERG: But in the end, New Jerseyans voted it down, perhaps not because of opposition to stem cell research, but, Barone says, because of the money.
BARONE: They've had tax increases in New Jersey in recent years, and they didn't want to shell out $450 million in bonds that they'd have to pay the interest on, even for a cause as popular as stem cell research is.
HENNEBERG: And in Utah, a school vouchers plan was voted down. It would have allotted $500 to $3,000 to each child sent to private school, with no restrictions on which kids could apply.
BARONE: The main reason that Utah voters rejected the voucher plan was that there was a very big campaign put on against it by the National Education Association and other teacher unions. The teacher unions do not want to see teaching jobs go to people who are not their members, so they're strongly opposed to vouchers.
HENNEBERG: So what can we divine from these '07 election results that may come into play in '08? Barone says taxes may become more of an issue than we've seen in recent years. He says if there's a tax revolt brewing in places like New Jersey and Oregon, it also may be brewing elsewhere.
In Washington, Molly Henneberg, Fox News.
Perfect example, MMfA. Well done.
Of course Barone held the two initiatives to different standards as to why they were defeated, he should correct himself.
But of course liberals cannot imagine that anyone would be opposed to tax increases because to many they are held in such high regard.......but Oregon voters rightly rejected a tax hike, not good news for Democrats who apparently are running on that platform in 2008.
Yeah try to change the subject if you want. Oregan voters made the decision, it means little except about Oregon and that is how it SHOULD play out. The ISSUE, remember the TOPIC, is Barrones dishonest framing of the issue. The Utah initiative is all about the money spent by issue groups but the Oregan initiative is about what the voters wanted even though Big tobacco spent WWWAAAAAAYYYY more money there.
I already addressed the issue and MMFA rightly calls Fox News out for it......did you miss that?
But you want to instead dismiss the fact that Oregon voters rejected higher taxes, even on cigarettes, because that flies in the face of your intense love for them. Well, too bad.
If you want to be a moron and starve children because of your worship of Ebeneezer Scrooge be my guest. I mean as long as we are going to misrepresent each others opinions and baselessly assign venal motives lets go for it. Meanwhile as I said the TOPIC is Barrone not your obsession with taxes. They go up they go down when the decision is made democratically I dont really care which the people choose.
- tommy / Friday November 9, 2007 04:36:41 PM EST
RJ Reynolds started early to lie on air, make up numbers, and send letters from people whom never endorsed them to be sent.
They spent $12 million dollars, compared to less than $3 million in adds from the sponsors of the bill. We heard these adds add nausea for months.
I suppose the bill was flawed by changing the constitution to introduce the tax, but they felt they needed to make it more difficult to resend. The conservative movement passed an amendment that requires a super majority to introduce a new tax. That super majority will change that amend it as time passes and things grow worse.
I suppose the lesson for all of us to learn is that a super rich minority can buy all the government it wants, or don't want, and those who can't gets what they paid for, or can't!
Welcome to the Republican version of America the not-so beautifull.
Happy Thoughts;
Dan Grady
You have really no clue what Oregon voted for. You're taking what you want from it.
I'm an Oregon Voter, who voted against Measure 50, the measure that would have raised taxes on Cigarettes in order to provide health care for children. I was not opposed to providing health care for children, or for raising taxes on cigarettes, in fact, if it had been statutory, I would have supported the measure. What I was opposed to was it rewriting the Oregon Constitution, for something that should have been religated to statitutory law.
The constitution should be there for the basic set-up for government, and to protect the fundamental rights of the people who live there. It is not there to put a specific tax, on a specific product, into the constitution.
I still support children's health care, and making it more costly for smokers to damage their own health.
I live in Oregon, and Philip Morris spent a bazillion dollars telling us that this was a dangerous initiative.
It might have passed if the ballot measure hadn't called for this tax to be written as a state constitutional amendment. That, more than anything, brought it down. All the anti commercials zeroed in on that.
I actually do think it was a poorly constructed measure. But the legislature was stalemated due to the same dynamic as the national congress. The Republicans oppose ANY measure that would bring in more revenue. As a result, our classrooms are overcrowded, our bridges and roads are in disrepair, our parks not well maintained, our state police, etc.etc.
Meanwhile businesse such as PGE and others pay only a minimum $10 a year tax! And corporate share of the tax burden has shifted drastically onto individuals.
And one could say that in California, where I live, Democrats oppose any measure that cuts spending.
Why is it when budgets are out of whack Democrats automatically want more of it's citizens money to balance it, if they had the cajones to make tough spending choices they wouldn't need tax hikes.
Federal mandates maybe?
No, principled politicians.
Is Oregon a Republican state? I can't speak for Republicans but conservatives are not against anything that will increase revenue. Conservatives do not like taxes that (1) fund programs not included in the scope of governments and (2) require government entities to become involved in private lives.
Sin taxes, (i.e. cagarette taxes) are only paid by those who use the product and carry the option of not participating. However those must be used wisely to benefit those who use the product being taxed. It would be legitimate to tax cigaretts to fund a program to aid quitting smoking. Therefore once the smoking declines, there is a lesser need for the declining revenue as cigarette sales slow.
However taxing cigaretts to fund childrens healthcare could easily create a long term problem. As cigarette smoking is on the decline, cities are banning it from practically everywhere, people are being encouraged to quit, cigarette sales will decline. Increasing the cost by almost a dollar a pack will provide incentive for more to stop smoking - which is a good thing. When the tax revenue declines to the point where it can no longer fund the programs it supports a shortfall will occur and the tax has to be shifted elsewhere.
Also - I assume you know that business never pays taxes - they are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
WC,
Wonderfully stated and well said.
Of course these tax raisers manipulate voters into believing some laudible earmarks for their tax hikes, strictly funneled towards some benelovent program that emotionally people can't possibly be against, in this case, sick children.
But liberals never see beyond the tax hike and the ramifications of it when it falls short and they claim ignorance and then trot out another reason to get their hands on more of somebody else's money......slick, but hardly unique in Oregon's case.
I am glad the voters saw through it and rejected it.
Oregon has a Democratic governor and has Democratic majorities (by a slim margin) in both house & senates.
Most people have views that go on both "sides" of the aisle. As I said before, the major reason this ballot measure didn't pass was the fact that the tax would be in the constitution. A mixture of Ds & Rs rejected that.
Many of the anti ads didn't even mention that the tax was to support childrens' health care.
I heard a statistic that each pack of cigarettes costs society more than the cigarettes actually cost in terms of health care. If more people actually do quit smoking because of it, then that's good, and will free up more money down the road. And if people don't, then shouldn't we actually stop substidizing something that's bad for you?
"Also - I assume you know that business never pays taxes - they are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices."
And I assume you've never taken an economics course. PRICE is set by supply AND demmand. Just because a business's cost goes up, doesn't mean they can just increase the price, unless there is sufficeint demand. Otherwise people don't buy - and they end up with surplus inventory and then the price REALLY goes down. Plus, as we ALL know, when business's costs go down, the price rarely changes very much, unless demand is really weak. (Or competition is high, but that's not the case in most industries in the US.)
The price will ALWAYS be as much as consumers are willing to pay and as LITTLE as companies will accept. Corporate taxes are only a very small part of that equation, and only in situations of near irrational demand can any tax (or any other cost) be passed onto the customer in full.
But conservatives never see beyond the tax cut and the ramifications of it when revenues fall short and they claim ignorance and then trot out another reason to give their corporate cronies an even bigger tax break......slick, but hardly unique.
Sorry...I couldn't resist.
That would be Republicans (in recent case) - not conservatives. Please do not confuse the two.
Conservatives do see beyond the tax cut - which is a real one like Regan requested 2 dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax cuts. Remember Tip O'Neil and the Dem's held the purse strings in the 80's.
And the reason we had the balanced budgets during the Clinton years, after '94 there was far more fiscal spending restraint than in the previous 40 or so years.
...and Bush is not a conservative (if that's where you were going)!
No, he is no conservative, he is a big spending Republican.
.... A Big Spending Republican....
One that Tommy and these other "conservatives" gleefully voted for twice. Thanks again.
WC4Me:
Conservatives do see beyond the tax cut - which is a real one like Regan requested 2 dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax cuts. Remember Tip O'Neil and the Dem's held the purse strings in the 80's.
Conservatives love to blame Congress if (1) there's a deficit, and (b) it's Democratic. They conveniently forget that, though Congress passes the budget, the President plays an equal role in it: first he proposes the budget, and then at the end he signs it into law.
If the vaunted Reagan didn't want the ballooning deficits of the 1980's, all he had to do was exercise his veto pen. Instead, he proposed and signed budgets with record deficits.
(That is, Conservatives like to blame Congress if [1] there's a deficit, and [b] it's a Democratic Congress.)
I love paying taxes soooo much. almost as much as spending other peoples money.
Just thought I'd give some support to the politics/economics for kindergarteners team.
Thanks for adding the liberal point of view.
Thanks for providing the 5-year-old point of view I was goofing on.
I do realize such simplicity may go over some heads but it may inspire some to think above thier level.
A charicatured liberal point of view. Do keep that in mind. On second thought nevermind.
Happy Freedate HB. What kind of prospecticals are those kids wearing/buying?
Eweston, we have a problem. You've lost me with that one. :-/
Nothing big, I was trying to give your dance partner a heads up, then saw it was futile.Then just a little free association, and a twisted word.
I can get more than a little obscure from time to time, Sorry.
I think that Barone missed the point completely. The people of a state, such as New Jersey or Oregon, have no problem supporting things like stem cell research or children's health care. But like a majority of liberals, they like them only when they can spend other people's money to fund them. If they could have funded these projects on the backs of taxpayers in other states, the proposals would have passed with overwhelming majorities. Much the same could be said for the Western WA public transit issue, or a myriad of other tax proposals on the table around the nation.
Blame it on lobbyists, but unless they put $ in your pockets, you still have the choice of how you vote.