Meh, over here - we held the senate and house seats that were up (though yikes, Dick Durbin, who’s the minority whip, only won by 52 percent!).
But the Illinois fair tax failed. This would have meant that IL would have a graduated income tax system in which higher earners pay a higher percent of their income in tax. Essentially, we’d have tax brackets, like federal income tax does. We don’t currently have that, everyone pays around 5 percent whether they’re low income or a billionaire.
It seems people just heard the word “tax” and voted no. Which basically means that now everyone’s taxes are getting raised, since they can’t tax the rich at a higher rate. It is in the IL constitution that our tax is a flat rate not dependent on income, so we had to approve an amendment to change that, and it did not go through. Bollocks.
Looks like Dems lost a few seats in the House, but will still retain control. Susan Collins won re-election in Maine & looks like Republicans will most likely keep their Senate majority.
Yeah, the Uber/Lyft thing is a mixed bag because I know drivers in CA who were terrified they weren’t going to have that as a source of income any more - as I understand it, if the vote went the other way, then Uber/Lyft just wouldn’t operate there?
Okay so not as cool as I thought then. I thought it would keep them on the job and didn’t know about the lack of protection and the loophole that it could constitute for corporations trying to take advantage of workers.
I was thinking of all the countries (mostly in Europe) where the other drivers are pushing to ban them. I had the same take as @TrisPrior
That’s what Uber/Lyft was threatening. Them, plus doordash pushed $200 million to push notices out to every single driver and rider/customer in california to threaten that every single time they used the app.
However, we don’t actually know they’d stop operating because of how massive a market California is for them - but we can expect that we would see FAR less drivers in rural places, where ride-hailing services and delivery apps have transformed life for people that can’t/don’t use cars.
These ride-hailing companies have avoided regulation - both labor regulation and traffic safety regulation - forever, and essentially California let them run unchecked because they were classed as “technology” companies for a long time. California tried to pass a law - that I talked about on the podcast - to make workers that are “integral to a business’s operation” cannot be independent contractors and must be employees.
If they were employees they would have to have: health insurance, sick time, and worker’s comp (health care and insurance for workplace injuries), plus part of their taxes would be paid for by the company.
instead, many many workers drive for Uber/Lyft as their full-time job, and the conditions of their work is dependent on the app, but they don’t get those protections.
The thing I often wonder is whether the pricing would remain competitive with taxis if they had benefits, or whether you’d see all the drivers disappear to either automation (if safe fully self-driving cars ever become a reality) or car sharing services like ZipCar
There are many countries where ridehailing apps are just taxi-hailing services, in my experience. You use the app to just hail a taxi driver, it just streamlines paying (no haggling) and booking (no finding the individual app for each taxi service or finding a corner to hail). The pricing seems similarly market competitive in my experience. The issue is finding drivers in places like BumFuck, where taxis already didn’t exist.
Carsharing isn’t really considered competition to ride-hailing, except for point-to-point carsharing.
I think it was because some special rules were enacted due to covid. In most of the other states the rules for when counting can start/when ballots need to be received by are already in the state constitution.
My immediate reaction to the words fair tax was that nonsense put forth in Congress back in the 2000s about a 30% sales tax and no income/estate/capital gains taxes. I wonder how much of the response was due to people remembering all the talk about how awful that proposal would have been and then just instinctually voting No.
Local stuff:
None of the 6 or so (7? maybe?) county-level referendums in my state regarding removing confederate monuments from county courthouse grounds passed. (Well, the one that was worded as “should the monument be retained” passed, but yeah, none of them are going anywhere now.)
(Well, the one that was worded as “should the monument be retained” passed, but yeah, none of them are going anywhere now.)