June 22, 2012
The California Legislature just closed another deficit by slashing health care for poor kids and in-home services for elderly.
At the same time, two bills to authorize $100 million a year to subsidize film production -- including films with smoking -- continue to move forward.
SB 1167 (Calderon), the extending California tax credits for another five years (and $500 million) will be heard by the Senate Government and Finance Committee this Wednesday, June 27.
AB 2026 (Fuentes), a sibling bill in the Assembly, is also pending a hearing in Appropriations.
AHA and ALA are on record opposing these bills unless movies with smoking are disallowed from receiving taxpayer funds, as is the Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee, which is charged by law (among other things) with making fiscal recommendations related to tobacco control to the Legislature.
In a positive development, last week the AMA adopted a national resolution against subsidizing movies with smoking:
June 22, 2012
I just got a call from AP saying that they are calling the race for Big Tobacco.
I was a little surprised that they did this at this point in time. There are wide differences in the responses by county, which makes predictions of the outcome complicated. I have developed a statistical model that predicts the votes since the election from those on election night. (The post-election counts are systematically more for Prop 29 than the election day returns.) The last projection I did (based on returns as of June 20) showed Prop 29 losing by .31%, with 49.85% yes vs 50.15% no) or 15,861 out of 5,129,712 votes.
This difference was, however, well within the statistical margin of error.
Here is what I told AP by way of reaction:
1. Both the Secretary of State and the health groups should carefully consider whether or not a recount is in order. (It the Secretary of State orders it, the state pays; if the health groups request it, they have to pay.) This is a complicated question, but given how close it is, the cost of a recount might be worth it. (If, at the last minute, Philip Morris and Reynolds lose, you can be sure they will demand a recount.)
June 17, 2012
June 11, 2012
At 4:43 am June 7, the morning after the election, the Secretary of State showed Philip Morris and Reynolds leading on Prop 29, with 50.7% no vs. 49.2% yes on Prop 29, a spread of only 63,176 votes, with about 1 million uncounted mail-in votes.
As of 5:55 pm on June 11, the Secretary of State showed that, with about half the votes counted, the cigarette companies' lead had narrowed to 37,096 votes, with 50.4% no to 49.6% yes.
I did a county-by-county analysis, using the election day returns to predict post-election returns (using linear regression), then estimated the number of yes votes remaining based on the number of uncounted votes by county. The result shows a very narrow loss of 29, but the difference is well below the "margin of error" of the statistical estimates.
It's still too close to call.