People constantly ask me this question: “How do we encourage people to participate?”

We have a primary election coming up. In 2022, according to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, 23.1% of people of voting age turned out. I get why it’s frustrating to vote in a state primary. After all, the process is confusing and one of our major parties closed their primary more than a decade ago. When you know that a political party and its so-called leaders are more important than ordinary people, it’s hard to be interested.

Turnout amongst people of voting age was better in the general election, at 42.3%, but in Idaho, the party primary had already pretty much determined the outcome. (Although it’s nice that the general will have more contested races this year.)

Regardless, the numbers are startling when you think about it. Less than half of the eligible voting population sets the agenda for everyone else. When it comes to the policies we end up with—whether it’s how many organs are “acceptable” to lose before you get the healthcare you need or whether you can check out a book in your local library—the people who actively participate call the shots.

Unfortunately, there are systemic barriers to participation. In recent years the state legislature has made voting more difficult. They continue to push for increasingly restrictive measures, even though there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud or any sign that our elections are compromised.

Additionally, the pressures of everyday life weigh on people. When a 40-hour job isn’t enough to pay for housing and food, when you need to help with homework and get the kids to sports practice, how are you supposed to get involved?

Plus, it doesn’t help that the duopoly often presents us with top-of-the-ballot choices that aren’t that appealing.

But it really is time to look at local and state level races. Our electoral college system means that your voice doesn’t matter much in the presidential election if you live in Idaho. And there’s never been a time that a missive to one of my Congressional representatives received a reply that wasn’t a canned response.

The state level, though, is where the policies are impacting our lives. We’re one of the few states in the region that doesn’t have an anti-price-gouging law for gas. Our state legislators are more concerned with telling parents what their kids can read and obsessing over pronouns than they are dealing with the homeowners exemption mess they made and providing property tax relief.

This is where we need to put our available focus. No, the top-of-the-ticket doesn’t look super attractive to a lot of people. But if you have one hour a week to look at state-level races and consider voting yes for the upcoming open primaries initiative, we might be able to start making a difference.

At some point, we need to get beyond party and start looking at what policymakers are doing. And getting involved to hold them accountable.

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized financial expert, writer, speaker and podcaster. She is the chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

For example, we know from data and research that the best way to prevent abortion is to provide access to safe and effective birth control, as well as age-appropriate sex ed. One has only to review the body of research gathered on the National Institutes of Health website to see that abortion bans don’t reduce the number of abortions.

If policymakers were serious about their stated policy position of “protecting life” by reducing abortions, they would use data to craft policies that address the perceived problem.

Instead, we’ve got a situation where women facing life-threatening situations are being airlifted out of the state while the U.S. Supreme Court debates how many organs a woman should be able to lose before her life is considered in danger.

This is a culture of life? Ok, sure.

Our so-called leaders talk a lot about supporting families. But what are they doing to support families of all kinds? Well, first of all, they are selective about what they consider to be “real” families. And that’s an issue right there. They only want to support certain families that they approve of.

The National Bureau of Economic Research finds that each dollar spent on Medicaid for children yields a return of $1.78 in future tax revenue and economic benefit.  So, why are we continually trying to restrict access to affordable healthcare for families in Idaho?

And if we care so much about children, why did our local Senators reject federal funds to feed hungry children over the summer? Even if their concern was the “cost of administration,” we supposedly have these massive budget surpluses. Why aren’t we investing these so-called surpluses in our communities and families?

Our legislators have time to create policies that tell everyone, from librarians to doctors, how they think the job should be done, but can’t be bothered to repeal the sales tax on groceries. Families pay a higher tax on their groceries than my business pays on its income here in Idaho.

Our legislators have all the money in the world to put into slush funds to defend the laws they know are unconstitutional, but suddenly there’s no money available to put into the unfunded affordable housing account. Something that would help families.

Plus, let’s not forget about the cap on the homeowners exemption put in place in 2016. You want to help families stay in their homes? Get rid of the cap and return the exemption’s peg to rising home values. But, no, we’ll let homeowners continue to bear 70% of the property tax burden while legislators pass policies that result in Idaho being one of the states with the highest levels of youth suicide in the country.

Let’s stopping taking these policymakers at face value when they say they support families and life. Because their actions and legislative priorities show they don’t.

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized financial expert, writer, podcaster and speaker. She is chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

The 2024 legislative session might be inching closer to an end, but the bad bills just keep on coming. Unfortunately, some of these bills—many of which are simply bad policies for made-up “problems”—are very similar to what we saw earlier in the session.

After an outcry against earlier library bills, another, HB710, was introduced and has passed the House. As of this writing, it’s sitting in an amending order after being reported out of a Senate committee. Many of our legislators would rather try to find new and creative ways to penalize libraries and librarians than tackle affordable housing (RIP renter protections, BTW, see
HB545). This is a stark reminder that we must practice constant vigilance when it comes to our so-called “representatives.”

After citizens, who according to the annual Public Policy Survey overwhelming trust librarians to choose books, beat back previous attempts, legislators introduced yet another library bill late in the session. And this time it’s making more progress.

Why?

Well, part of it has to do with the fact that we tend to breathe a sigh of relief after our victories early in the session. We let our guard down. But if there’s one thing we can count on during the legislative session, it’s that determined “representatives” will keep pushing, no matter how unpopular or useless or harmful their bills are. They just tweak it a bit, try to wrap it in a slightly less awful package and hope we’re not paying attention this time.

Unfortunately, they aren’t wrong. Legislative session fatigue is very real for many of us. We watch as each year they try to restrict our ability to easily vote (HB667–currently retained on General Orders), try to make the initiative process even harder (SB137aa—ask Governor Little to veto) and attempt to starve public education. We might have convinced them to hold off on the voucher grift for the moment, but
there’s still time in the session—and there’s always next year.

Why should these legislators—some of whom have taken federal dollars in the form of subsidies and PPP loan forgiveness for their businesses—support early childhood education with federal dollars? They’ve got more important things to do, like act as the gender police and fret about
grammar (didn’t they learn about pronouns in grade school?). They’re too busy worrying about DEI statements to consider whether the 2016 property tax exemption mess they created should be fixed.

After all, why should they be concerned that 70% of the property tax burden falls on individual homeowners while commercial interests only shoulder 30%? Who cares if seniors on fixed incomes are struggling because the exemption hasn’t been indexed to home prices for the last eight years? They’ve got to battle “wokeness” or whatever this week’s poorly-defined catch-all grievance word is.

It would be great if we could trust the majority of our legislators to get on with useful policy-making. But that’s not the current environment we’re in. We must pay attention.

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized financial wellness expert, writer, speaker and podcaster. She is the chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

We’re a month into the legislative session, and Idaho’s citizens are practically begging our legislators to respect librarians, fund education, and stop trying to change the definitions of words that have actual legal, scientific, and medical meanings.

The budgeting approach has been changed to something sloppy. In fact, there were some major oversights that they claim they’ll fix later, maybe. If they can find time away from trying, yet again, to effectively repeal Medicaid expansion and write bills designed to push more doctors out of our state.

Idahoans don’t ask for much. 

We want the legislature to fund our schools uniformly, as suggested in our state constitution, rather than siphoning off money in a voucher grift that’s already caused headaches in several other states.

We’d like our property tax situation to be addressed. The legislature messed up the homestead exemption in 2016. Despite calls to fix the issue, they just keep ignoring it. Instead of taking accountability for this problem, they blame local governments since they “set the rates.” This isn’t a rate issue. And they know it.

We’re also concerned about the fact that our so-called “representatives” keep trying to repeal Medicaid expansion. After years of fruitlessly asking the legislature to do something constructive for Idahoans, we successfully passed a ballot initiative in 2018. The legislature’s response? Ongoing attempts to repeal it while at the same time trying to pass legislation to effectively end ballot initiatives.

Medicaid expansion is even more popular than it was when it passed with a strong bipartisan majority. Yet, our legislators, some of whom have accepted federal money for their own businesses, insist on wasting time trying to get rid of it.

Unfortunately, too many of our “leaders” are more interested in pandering to a loud minority of voices that believe the rest of us should live according to their rules. Idaho reflects the grandstanding we see on a national scale.

The border is a good example. President Biden has asked Congress for resources on the border. But certain “representatives” in Washington don’t want to approve those resources. Why? As Republican Senator Romney pointed out, they’d rather have a manufactured crisis on the border to run on in a presidential year than address the problem.

We’re seeing the same thing here in Idaho. Rather than working on Idahoans’ expressed priorities, many of our legislators write bad, sloppy bills meant to solve made-up problems. It’s a way for them to shore up their base and keep that dark money flowing.

Just this week, we got the news that one of last session’s poorly written and ill-advised culture war bills has an injunction against it. It’s rather common. So common, in fact, that it’s a regular occurrence for the legislature to increase the budget for their defense fund. And the track record is poor. They lose. A lot. They KNOW their bills are bad; that’s why they increase the fund.

At some point, something needs to change. Before they decide they really are beyond accountability.

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized financial expert, writer, speaker and podcaster. She is the chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

Last year, an attempt to introduce vouchers to Idaho failed. But, while Idahoans want to see more investment in our public schools, our legislators are at it again.

We’ve already seen what happens when school vouchers are introduced in other states like Iowa and Arizona. 

In Iowa, an analysis indicates that the voucher system implemented would likely lead to losses of $7,600 per student—felt mainly by low-income and rural students.

The Oklahoma Tax Commission reports that 55% of applicants make more than $150,000 a year. That’s much higher than Oklahoma’s median income. 

Arizona, though, currently takes the prize for the out-of-control costs of school vouchers. Initially, the program was supposed to cost right around $65 million. But now those costs are approaching $1 billion, with estimates that Arizona will spend $780 on school vouchers this year.

Plus, those who receive vouchers are generally already enjoying “choice” in their schooling. In Florida, for example, 69% of applicants to the recently expanded program were already in private schools. Basically, those who can already afford private schools are getting a bonus—while money is siphoned away from public schools.

And, through all this, there’s no proof that vouchers actually improve educational outcomes.

I’m sure that our legislators will make empty promises about caps and special incentives for low-income families. They might even claim that they will offer some oversight on how voucher money can be spent.

But we’ve already seen how our so-called representatives behave when we ask them to invest in communities rather than their well-off cronies. They pay lip service to education, but when the legislation is written, and the consequences come out, we often see results opposite to what our elected officials claimed they were trying to do.

These are people who happily take PPP money and other federal subsidies while actively rejecting federal funding for early childhood education. Our legislators are the epitome of “federal funding for me, personally, but not for thee or the community.”

The governor announced in his State of the State address that he wants to prioritize funds for our crumbling facilities. One of the issues is that Idaho is one of very few states that requires a 66.67% majority for passing school bonds. As a result, including here in Idaho Falls, our students often end up in unsafe environments. Maybe legislators should tackle the fact that a “no” vote for school funding counts more than a “yes” vote.

If our legislators wanted to provide the uniform public education required by our state constitution, they would work on solutions that, well, outright fund education. They wouldn’t be gearing up for basically the same voucher fight they abandoned last year after it proved unpopular.

We see how vouchers play out in other states. They’re expensive. They disproportionately harm low-income and rural students. School choice doesn’t matter if there aren’t alternatives in the rural area. We already know how this goes. And it does nothing to address our teacher shortage, crumbling schools or improve educational outcomes. 

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized financial expert, writer, speaker and podcaster. She is the chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

As we gear up for the legislative session, there are two questions to ask ourselves as we watch the posturing in Boise:

1. Should our legislators focus on issues that impact Idahoans most and that we, as citizens, prioritize?
2. Who should our legislators be accountable to?

I’m active in our community, working with nonprofits and speaking with people intimately connected to some of Idaho’s issues. I hear about the dissatisfaction felt by many Idahoans.

They’re frustrated. Conflict entrepreneurs profiting from a culture war seem to be driving the agenda. Most people I talk to (and it’s reflected in polls) want the legislature to tackle issues of housing, healthcare, infrastructure and education. They aren’t interested in what their neighbors choose to do, nor are they interested in restricting what other people’s children read in libraries. 

Citizens want our legislators to invest in Idaho’s people and communities. Unfortunately, it appears some of our legislators are interested in consolidating power, limiting access to the ballot box and scapegoating the most vulnerable among us in their culture war.

One of the concerns is that legislators are less interested in being accountable to their constituents and more interested in catering to the loud voices of a few people doing their best to cling to power as they attempt to enact unpopular policies.

Locally, so-called leaders are trying to tell legislators that their loyalty should be to party. And, more specifically, the idea of party that they espouse. If you don’t fall in line with their narrow ideology, well, you must not be a real one.

That’s dangerous to our republic. Our representative form of government rests on the idea that legislators should be doing their best to represent the citizens and act in our best interests. 

George Washington famously warned against excessive partisanship and how relying too heavily on parties could be detrimental to the republic, saying in his farewell address:

“…they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”  

Our legislators are not answerable to their party leaders—at least they shouldn’t be. They should be answerable to us. Unfortunately, some so-called leaders are trying to make it harder for our voices to be heard, attempting to place barriers to our participation. 

They also hope we’re not paying attention. That we will opt out because of how “toxic” these loud extremists have made politics. If we hope to influence what happens at the Capitol, we need to show our legislators that we are willing to hold them accountable at the ballot box. 

If you have time this legislative session, pay attention to your legislator’s priorities. And then determine whether they’re working on behalf of Idahoans or whether they’re trying to appease the voices of loud extremists.

Miranda Marquit is a nationally recognized financial expert, writer and speaker. She is chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

We’re fond of saying that we live in an “information age.” Just about anything you want to know (and even things you don’t want to know) can be found within seconds using a computer that fits in the palm of your hand.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know what’s accurate unless you pay careful attention and take the time to cultivate information and media literacy. And unfortunately, misinformation tends to spread faster than accurate information. 

A few years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a study in which they found that misinformation on Twitter spread six times faster than accurate information.

With social media, all you need is a misleading headline and a few talking heads saying whatever comes to mind, and suddenly, you have the makes of a very shareable piece of inaccurate, misleading or downright wrong information.

What makes this even more frustrating for those of us who deal in facts, verification and nuance, these bite-sized bits of unsubstantiated information can take forever to debunk. Those with an unpopular agenda often use firehose tactics to spread misinformation and attempt to win people to their side. They provide a barrage of inaccurate tidbits that only take a few seconds to share. But debunking those narratives can take hours.

A good example is available right in our own community in the form of a November 19 post about ranked-choice voting on a local news website. The meat of the story focused on the fact that Nicholas Contos, the chair of the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee, doesn’t like ranked-choice voting. 

Contos didn’t provide any support for his statements beyond his “belief” in them. Let’s look at one of these statements. He said he believes that ranked-choice voting would lead to worse representation. 

Results in states like Maine don’t bear out this statement. For example, the Council of State Governments points out that in nine out of 11 gubernatorial elections before implementation, the winner had less than 50% of the vote, and three governors received less than 40%. That changed after ranked-choice voting. It looks like representation before was worse.

Additionally, cities with ranked-choice voting saw increased voter turnout. A 2020 study found a 10% increase in voter turnout after implementing the process in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Additionally, a 2021 study conducted by researchers in Wisconsin and Iowa found that ranked-choice voting resulted in higher youth voter turnout. 

The ability for winning candidates to show broader appeal, plus increased voter turnout, points to more and better representation rather than worse representation. According to a paper published by Arizona State University, our current status quo relies heavily on powerful parties to gatekeep the process, resulting in potentially less representative outcomes. 

As you can see, countering the unsubstantiated “belief” in one entry on a news site took much longer than it took to state something, have it published and move on. 

Another big election season is approaching, and it promises to be tiring as we try to sift through the unsubstantiated information.

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a national recognized financial expert, writer, speaker and podcaster. She is the chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

We hear a lot about “freedom” here in Idaho. Certain elements are SO SURE that the big bad federal government will tell them what to do that they pass all sorts of laws designed to tell the rest of us how to live. 

I’ve been pondering the nature of freedom lately. What does it mean?

Is it the ability to read what you want—and choose books for your children? Or is it a small number of parents, unable to take personal responsibility for what they and their families access, removing books from the library?

What about making choices about who you love? Is freedom being able to marry your chosen adult partner, or is it someone else making laws restricting your ability to claim the tax benefits that other married couples enjoy?

How about reproductive health? Should you be able to access safe and affordable birth control to choose when you become a parent? Or, next session, should we expect the state legislature to tell us we can’t use certain types of birth control?

Speaking of reproductive health, is it true freedom when your hospital no longer delivers babies? All because Idaho politicians have decided to practice medicine and want to prosecute anyone who dares perform an emergency room abortion to save a mother’s life. Does depriving her other children of a loving mother count as freedom?

We have a situation where healthcare providers are leaving the state. Young people talk openly about taking their talents elsewhere because they know they won’t be appreciated here. 

A minority of parents are trying to control what other people’s children read. Extremists are attempting to tell you what you’re allowed to do with your body and who you’re allowed to love.

It might be freedom for a few, but it doesn’t look like freedom for the rest of us.

When our founders declared independence, they wrote that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were “inalienable rights.” 

In Idaho, though, those rights have limits. Apparently, one parent taking offense at a book like “Abuela” is grounds to remove it from a library, preventing everyone else’s kids from reading about a child who spends a day with their grandma. (It’s true. On the list of books a local extremist group wants to be removed from the library is one about spending the day with grandma.)

If these extremists have their way, they would prevent you from the pursuit of happiness by living in a body you feel comfortable with. They would also take away your choice about when to have a child and prosecute you for a health emergency. 

I don’t know about you, but a lot of the things being pushed by a vocal minority right now sure don’t seem like freedom to me.

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized financial expert, speaker and writer. She is the chair of Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

“Would you let your child read THAT?”

It’s a common refrain. Usually accompanied by someone waving around a book they found only after hunting through the adult section of the library in an attempt to find something “bad.”

For folks like this, a restricted library card isn’t enough.

They look for any excuse, claiming it’s “for the children,” to ban books that offend their delicate sensibilities. 

And, to answer the question posed at the beginning of the column. Yes, I probably would have let my son read that. Now he’s almost 21 and we go to lunch and for a walk a couple times a month. We go to the museum. And we still talk about books and ideas. 

My son is a thoughtful, interesting young man. Part of that is because he, for the most part, was never afraid to express himself growing up. Whether it was the clothes he wanted to wear or sharing an opinion different than mine. He didn’t have to worry that I’d freak out over any question he asked me.

And we could talk about books. In fact, he sometimes recommends books or manga for me to read—and then we discuss it.

There are interesting reads, like Wonder and Let Me Eat Your Pancreas (a manga about pancreatic cancer), that I wouldn’t have read without the recommendation of my son. 

That’s the beauty of the written word. Books contain whole worlds. They contain a wealth of ideas. You can become someone else for an hour. It’s possible to consider a completely different way of life from your own. And, if you’re up for the challenge, you might even find concepts that force you to re-evaluate a piece of information you’ve been given. Perhaps you’ll even learn something new about the world—or even learn something new about yourself.

But not if you’re afraid.

If you live in fear, books that don’t align precisely with your preconceived notions are dangerous. When you live in fear that your child will ask you a question that you can’t answer or challenge you on a viewpoint you can’t justify, books become the enemy. When you see your children and the children of others merely as soldiers in your culture war, controlling their information becomes the highest priority.

And you start not only telling your own children (because you certainly wouldn’t talk to them or listen to them or even get to know them) what they can read, but you start demanding that other parents conform to your beliefs. You insist that not only can your own child not read that, but that no one else’s child can read it either.

Because you’re afraid. 

And, even worse, you’re afraid that your children might disagree with you if they have access to information. They might develop empathy for the “other” if they can put themselves in the shoes of someone different. 

Your fear isn’t a reason to try to control the rest of us.

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized and award-winning financial writer, podcaster and speaker. She is the chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.

People often ask why I’m so passionate about state and local politics.

The answer is simple: it’s where we, as citizens and community members, have the best chance to make an impact.

There’s not a lot I can do to influence what goes on at the national level. Our Congressional delegation barely reads anything we send them.

Few of us will shake the hand of any president or meet a Supreme Court justice. But you can attend a school board meeting or see a city council member at the grocery store. We can attend town halls for local state representatives—when they hold them.

State-level politics are extremely important when it comes to how we live and whether we retain rights. Members of our state legislature set the level of property tax exemptions. They decide whether education in Idaho is adequately funded. 

And, unfortunately, when the legislature drops the ball, we the people often step in to fill the gap. The initiative process in Idaho is difficult, but dedicated citizens have been working hard to make our priorities a reality. The sad thing is that after we expanded Medicaid, the legislature immediately began trying to figure out how to kneecap our efforts. When we pushed for education funding, they made an end-run around the process and almost immediately reneged on their promise.

Our state legislature impacts our quality of life and what we have access to. Instead of sticking to issues Idahoans say they’re concerned about, our legislators often create made-up “problems” in a culture war. 

This becomes an issue when so many state legislatures across the country are doing the same thing. When we become concerned about the fact that the Supreme Court has, for the first time in decades, begun removing rights rather than enshrining them, it’s important to note that many of these cases start in state legislatures.

Restrictions on reproductive rights? Started in state legislatures. An erosion of voting rights? Started in state legislatures. When we look at some of the most concerning legislation wending its way to the highest court in the land, it’s clear that it starts in state legislatures. 

As citizens, we have a chance to make positive changes in our communities. But it only works if we’re involved. We must pay attention to who we’re electing. What are their policies? What kinds of changes are they pushing for? 

Which school board candidates want to ban books and which are in favor of access to information? Which school board candidates trust parents to have conversations with their children and which are in favor of letting a small number of parents impose their fearful will upon the rest of us? Which state legislative candidates are interested in supporting education and tackling issues of affordable housing? And which are most interested in angrily waging a culture war against the most vulnerable among us?

We have the power to influence the future of our state. But we have to be engaged enough to wield it. 

Miranda Marquit, Master of Business Administration, is a nationally recognized and award-winning financial writer, speaker and podcaster. She is the chair of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.