00:02:53 · Erika Beras, Jeff Guo
[00:02:53] S2: Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Behrs. [00:02:56] S3: And I'm Jeff Guo. Over the past few months, we have been following these randomly selected people in Connecticut in this unusual experiment to see if they can fix one of the most important issues state governments face, how to fund their schools and roads and emergency services. [00:03:13] S2: Today on the show, can a random bunch of citizens work together to fix property taxes, avert a future budget crisis, and maybe reinvent democracy?
00:03:13 · Erika Beras, S0, Jeff Guo, Bob Bailey
[00:03:13] S2: Today on the show, can a random bunch of citizens work together to fix property taxes, avert a future budget crisis, and maybe reinvent democracy? [00:03:32] S0: Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from BUILT. Rent and mortgages keep getting more expensive. That's why BUILT created three credit cards designed to offer rich rewards on everything you spend on. You can earn up to 1.25x points on every housing payment with no transaction fee, which can be redeemed for flights, hotels, a future housing payment, and more. Apply at joinbilt.commoney. Terms apply, subject to approval and eligibility. Billed cards are issued by column NA, member FDIC, pursuant to license from MasterCard International Incorporated. Support comes from our twenty twenty six lead sponsor of planet money, Amazon Business. Unlock smart business buying with a fast free delivery on millions of items and practical AI innovations that automate repetitive tasks so you can make smarter decisions faster. Learn more at Amazon Business dot com. This message comes from Insperity because how you HR matters. From payroll and benefits to HR compliance and talent development, helping your business move forward with confidence. Learn more at insperity.com/hr matters. [00:04:45] S3: On the day that those 100 random Connecticut citizens met in a room for the first time, they also met the organizers who had brought them there. One of them was Sean Scanlon, who gave him a little speech to get things started. [00:04:57] S6: Morning, everybody.
00:04:57 · Bob Bailey, Erika Beras, Sean Scanlon, Sean Scanlon, Jeff Guo
[00:04:57] S6: Morning, everybody. [00:04:59] S2: Sean is the state's comptroller. [00:05:01] S8: I have never been more excited in my ten years of being elected office in the state than to see what you come up with. [00:05:09] S2: You'll hear He's basically in charge of oversight for the state budget. He's seen Connecticut struggle with this property tax problem for years. It was a huge problem when he was first elected as a state representative back in 2014. [00:05:23] S9: I'm like, so excited to change the world. I meet with the speaker of the house and I said, mister speaker, I'm here. I've got this whole notebook of things I wanna do, and the first thing on it is I wanna solve the property tax crisis [00:05:33] S8: in the state of Connecticut. [00:05:35] S9: And he laughed at [00:05:36] S8: me. And he [00:05:38] S9: gave me a proverbial pat on the shoulder [00:05:39] S8: and said, kid, we're in the middle [00:05:41] S9: of a fiscal crisis. There's a lot of challenges. And just so you know, that's like the third rail of politics, [00:05:46] S8: and nobody's ever gonna figure that out. It's just the way it is. [00:05:49] S3: Yeah. Sean told us that obviously, he was not the first person to realize that property taxes in Connecticut needed a revamp. [00:05:56] S2: How long have people been saying, wait. This system is broken? [00:05:59] S8: I'd say probably seventy years. Right? I mean Seventy years?
00:05:59 · Sean Scanlon, Erika Beras, Jeff Guo
[00:05:59] S8: I'd say probably seventy years. Right? I mean Seventy years? [00:06:04] S2: It's a long time. Here is a problem with taxes in Connecticut. The people in Connecticut pay some of the highest property taxes in the country. In some towns, the tax bill for a middle class family home can come out to twenty to thirty thousand dollars per year. [00:06:18] S3: And that's because towns and cities here need that money to pay for their own local schools, their own local police, their own local water services. In Connecticut, the state doesn't chip in as much as in other states. So when towns and cities don't have enough money to pay for schools and police and all that stuff, they increase property taxes. Property taxes all over the state have been going up and up and up. [00:06:43] S2: Now a lot of people have tried to rethink the whole tax system in Connecticut. [00:06:47] S8: Every few years, somebody like me comes along, and what happens is they write a report. That report gets a couple days of press, and then it collects dust on a shelf. [00:06:57] S3: Yeah. Sean says every plan always runs into the same problem. Because to fix this issue, politicians might have to make hard choices, raise taxes or cut spending. But which taxes? What spending? Their choices would almost certainly make some voters mad.
00:06:57 · Jeff Guo, Sean Scanlon, Erika Beras, Helene Landimore
[00:06:57] S3: Yeah. Sean says every plan always runs into the same problem. Because to fix this issue, politicians might have to make hard choices, raise taxes or cut spending. But which taxes? What spending? Their choices would almost certainly make some voters mad. [00:07:15] S8: You know, politics, and I can say this because I am a politician, is usually the path of least resistance. Right? People want to be popular. They want to be well liked. It's rare that a politician goes out every day and says, you know, I'm gonna try to piss everybody off that I can. [00:07:31] S2: And this is a common problem with the way our democracy works. Most politicians are fixated on getting reelected. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. [00:07:40] S3: Which is why Sean was intrigued last year when he was approached by a group representing the towns and mayors of Connecticut. They had this idea of creating essentially a random jury of a 100 citizens. Get them to fix this problem. [00:07:56] S2: This group was working with a few academics, including a political science professor at Yale who had been studying these types of experiments in democracy. Her name, Helene Landimore. Sean looked her up. [00:08:08] S8: The first thing I googled about her was that she had written a book called Politics Without Politicians. So, [00:08:15] S3: Politics Without Politicians. That's the name of Helene's book where she lays out the case for why politicians are maybe not great for democracy. Have you ever thought about being a politician? [00:08:28] S4: No way. No. Oh, my goodness.
00:08:28 · Helene Landimore, Erika Beras, Jeff Guo
[00:08:28] S4: No way. No. Oh, my goodness. [00:08:31] S2: This is Ellen Landimore, and actually, she did win an election when she was in the seventh grade back in France. She was the class representative. [00:08:41] S4: And it went to my head, and I became this, like, horrible person, and I lost friends, and people were jealous, and I just hated the whole thing. I absolutely hated the whole thing. I think power is exactly what the Greeks thought of it. It's it's a dangerous thing that if you hold it for too long, it destroys your soul. [00:08:58] S3: Since her days as the tyrant of seventh grade, Helene went on to become a political scientist, and she's studied how democracy originally worked in ancient Greece, which is often thought of as the birthplace of democracy. [00:09:11] S2: And she says one thing the Greeks did became a big inspiration for her research and the experiment now happening in Connecticut. See, in ancient Greece, they picked most of their lawmakers, not through elections, but through random lotteries. And all these randomly selected public officials would take turns. So nobody held on to power for too long, and everybody, at least all the male citizens, got to participate. [00:09:38] S3: And over the past decade, Alen has been wondering, why can't we have more random citizens in politics today? Right now, the people who become politicians, they tend to fit a certain type. You know, around the world, they tend to be men. They tend to have college degrees. A lot of times, degrees from the same fancy colleges.