A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Posner on Proposals to Tax the Wealthy More Heavily

January 30, 2012 by Doug Masson 12 Comments

Judge Posner has an interesting blog post entitled Taxing Wealthy People More Heavily. One of his arguments against increasing the taxes on people with a million or more in income is that they would then have a strong incentive to keep their income under a million. I hadn’t understood President Obama’s proposal of 25% on such incomes to refer to 25% on everything made that year; but maybe he did. I figured he was referring to a marginal tax rate – income, regardless of the source, in excess of a million at 25%. That would, I think, negate one of Judge Posner’s arguments against increasing taxes on high incomes.

He disregards proposals to switch to a consumption tax for practical reasons:

While there are good theoretical arguments for replacing income with consumption taxes, as discussed by Becker, the administrative and transitional costs would be staggering; and so with any effort to overhaul the federal income tax system rather than just tinker at the edges of it.

He also describes a tax on wealth (as opposed to income) as “an uncommonly silly idea.”

My proposal is simply to revert to the Clinton-Gingrich era tax structure. We know that it worked better than the present structure in terms of funding the government, and I don’t recall folks at the time crying out under the oppressive boot heel of communism.

HB 1046

January 30, 2012 by Doug Masson Leave a Comment

Rep. Lutz has introduced HB 1046 which would, in effect, require that horse track owners remit the proceeds of unclaimed pari-mutuel tickets to the county where the track is located. The money would be used for road improvement in the county.

If memory serves, Rep. Lutz comes from Madison County where Hoosier Park Racing is located. So, that would be some sense.

SB 322 – Tort Claim Immunity for Parolee monitoring

January 30, 2012 by Doug Masson Leave a Comment

Sen. Tomes’ SB 322 would provide tort claim immunity for governmental entities as to claims for injury to persons or property under the supervision of the governmental entity while the person is on parole. Tort claim immunity is also extended to Department of Correction employees or contractors who are providing monitoring services for parolees or sex offenders.

This sort of immunity is already in place with respect to probationers.

I’m generally biased toward these kinds of immunity. There are a number of areas, particularly pertaining to crime, where the immediate financial incentive of law enforcement and government is to sit on its hands and do nothing. (As Tom Thumb’s Blues puts it, “the cops don’t need us and, man, they expect the same.”) Various immunities help mitigate the incentive to steer clear of dealing with people who are going to be mad about government involvement and have nothing to lose by filing a lawsuit.

Osawatomie

January 28, 2012 by Doug Masson 5 Comments

Last December, President Obama gave a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. He gives a lot of speeches, so I didn’t pay much attention. But, I keep coming across references to that one. Initially, a relative of mine mentioned it over the holidays – the name of the town stuck with me because: a) it’s unusual; and b) the relative said the name of the town in a slightly derogatory fashion. That relative, in all likelihood, got the news from Fox News or talk radio.

But, I keep hearing the name pop up, usually from conservative leaning sources. So, I figured it was a talking point on right wing radio, but never looked into it. What I’d gleaned through osmosis was that Teddy Roosevelt had given a speech there and that both speeches had populist themes.

In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War. I ask that civil life be carried on according to the spirit in which the army was carried on. You never get perfect justice, but the effort in handling the army was to bring to the front the men who could do the job. Nobody grudged promotion to Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, because they earned it. The only complaint was when a man got promotion which he did not earn.

Roosevelt predicted that his detractors would paint him as a Communist agitator. That’s certainly the kind of response Obama has gotten — well, not necessarily “response.” The “socialist” accusations have been flying since Day 1. We’re still fighting Roosevelt’s “central conflict of progress” – the destruction of special privilege; a conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess.

Now, Obama’s detractors as with Roosevelt’s before him, would contend that our system compensates people according to what they earn. But, I don’t figure any man ever earned $57,000 per day (using Romney’s currently disclosed income) unless it was, say, the soldiers storming the beach at Normandy – and we paid them considerably less than that. And, I doubt any single person created value at the sustained rate of $57,000 per day. There may be some few exceptions, but I harbor enormous doubts that Mitt Romney was one of them. What he was doing, I suspect, was breaking up value – liquidating it – and appropriating pieces of that value, created by someone else, while it was being moved about.

Obama’s speech echoed some of Teddy Roosevelt’s themes, highlighted in the person of Romney:

Today, we’re still home to the world’s most productive workers. We’re still home to the world’s most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments – wealthier than ever before.

But, I don’t think that Roosevelt’s prior populist speech was the only attraction of Osawatomie for President Obama. Not being up on my Kansas history, I hadn’t been aware that Osawatomie was a major site where John Brown fought pro-slavery forces five years prior to the Civil War. President Obama didn’t bring up John Brown, but “Osawatomie Brown” was the reason for Teddy Roosevelt giving his speech there. And, the symbolism of Osawatomie in that context might be useful to President Obama and inconvenient to, at least, the Southern conservatives who oppose him.

The time of John Brown’s activity in Kansas are inconvenient to the mythology of the Lost Cause which we see reflected today in so much of the “state’s rights” rhetoric favored by Southern conservatives. Brown was an abolitionist by inclination before it had much juice in the North. But, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 fanned anti-slavery sentiment in the North. Mostly content to let Southerners do as they would after the Missouri Compromise, where southern states were admitted to the union with slaves and northern states were admitted free; the apple cart was upset when slave states were committed to allowing slavery north of the Missouri Compromise line, resisting, for example, formation of the Nebraska Territory, necessary to the creation of a trans-continental railroad unless the Missouri Compromise provision restricting slavery in the northern territories was specifically repealed. The Compromise of 1850, furthermore, contained a more draconian Fugitive Slave Act which paid no heed to the “state’s rights” of Northern states, required northerners to more actively participate in efforts to return escaped slaves to their southern owners. Among other things, it nullified northern state laws requiring jury trials before allegedly fugitive slaves would be returned to the south. Law-enforcement officials everywhere now had a duty to arrest anyone suspected of being a runaway slave on no more evidence than a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership; leading to many free blacks being enslaved and shipped to the South. Far from being state’s rights proponents, a good number of the Southern states’ declarations of secession cite as a reason, Northern states’ failure to knuckle under to this federal law.

On the populist front, the issue of slavery illustrates clearly how the wealthy can use the machinery of the law to appropriate to themselves wealth created by the labor of others. Just because slavery has been outlawed and the mechanics of wealth transfer are necessarily more subtle does not mean that people in our country inevitably earn what they possess and possess what they earn. Obama’s opponents readily, even eagerly, concede that the looters on the low end of the economic scale don’t earn what they possess; but it’s “class warfare” to suggest this might be the case on the high end of the scale.

But, back to Osawatomie in particular. John Brown, along with other abolitionists, had been spurred by the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act to head to Kansas to fight slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had created a sort of land rush where pro-slavery activists and free-soil activists were hurrying to establish themselves in Kansas since the status of Kansas as slave or free would be determined by popular vote. The slavery activists engaged in the more egregious voter fraud wherein 6,000 votes, many of which coming out of the nearby slave state of Missouri, were cast in a population consisting of about 1,500 voters. The pro-slave territorial legislature immediately set about institutionalizing slavery, including draconian penalties for agitating against slavery. Since a lot of the votes came from pro-slave Missourians, the free soilers considered the Kansas Territorial Legislature illegitimate.

Enter John Brown. He stirred other free soilers to militancy after the pro-slave forces sacked the free soiler stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas. About six free-soilers had been killed by the pro-slave activists. On top of this, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks had beaten Charles Sumner with a cane following an anti-slavery speech given by Sumner. From Brown’s perspective, Southerners were committed to violently imposing their will against their opponents. That such bullying violence should go unopposed was intolerable to Brown. He organized a violent raid of his own. Violence escalated until the “Battle of Osawatomie” where 400 proslavery forces were engaged by a band of about 40 free soilers led by Brown – after the slavers had killed one of Brown’s sons.

Brown is far from a purely heroic figure, but at Osawatomie, he was badly outnumbered but standing up against the superior forces of future Confederates who were attempting to violently impose their will that some humans should be compelled to have the fruits of their labor stolen from them by the wealthier men who owned them. Bleeding Kansas and the Fugitive Slave Act shows that seceding Southern states were not just seeking to be left alone to do as they would in their own states; rather they were actively seeking to spread their corruption far and wide. The white southerners (I’m sure they didn’t consult the black residents of their States) voted to secede because they didn’t get their way in a Presidential election; the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, having won.

Having become aware of this history, the sounds of southern conservatives grumbling about Osawatomie seems like something larger than discontent over a single speech by President Obama. Maybe I’m giving in to the hyperbole of President Obama’s detractors, where a mere policy disagreement over a small increase in the marginal tax rate becomes “OMG! SOCIALISM!” But, when I now hear discontent over Osawatomie, I’ll likely hear it set to the background of the song John Brown’s Body which became the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
His soul’s marching on

Muncie Star Press Actively Makes Its Readers Dumber

January 28, 2012 by Doug Masson 28 Comments

The Muncie Star Press has an editorial entitled “What’s So Bad About Creationism in Public Schools,” providing an apology for the Senate Education Committee in passing the creation science bill. It does its readers a disservice in a couple of respects:

First, it dances around the idea that this bill is about teaching creationism as science. “It depends how the subject is taught,” hedges the Star Press. The bill doesn’t speak to “creationism as philosophy” or “creationism as literature.” It speaks to “creation science.” The editorial’s disingenuous attitude also ignores the whole background of this debate — creation science purports to be a scientific competitor to evolution and was advanced for that purpose. As literature, Genesis serves without embellishment. As philosophy, religious scholars have done better than “creation science.”

Second, and less excusable, is that the Muncie Star Press either does not know or refuses to inform its readers about the distinction between a scientific theory and the more common use of the word.

We … note the bill stresses “theories” on the origins of life. . . . We think a thorough education exposes students to different theories . . . Presenting theories in an educational setting is not an endorsement of religion

By ignoring the critical distinction between scientific theory and the type of theory that can be no more than a wild-ass guess, the editorial gives cover to a convenient ambiguity whereby when challenged legally, defenders can say, “Whoah! Who said anything about science? No science here. Nope;” when, in practice, the idea is for “creation science” to present a challenge within the science class to evolution.

The only way this bill could be made remotely acceptable is if it specified that “creation science” can not be taught as a scientific theory. But then the bill itself would be useless because creationism can already be taught in non-scientific classes – history, humanities, epistemology, literature, mythology, religion, etc.

The Star Press’s insistence on muddling scientific theory with non-scientific theories underscores the potential for confusion; intentional, I think, on the part of creationism proponents. But, for our kids to have an understanding of science, they have to have a clear idea of what scientific theory is and what it is not (in my last post, I explained in some detail how “creation science” fails as scientific theory) — allowing “creation science” to be confused with scientific theory fundamentally undermines that understanding. By kicking dust in the air on this issue, the Muncie Star Press has now played its part in undermining a clear understanding of what constitutes a scientific theory.

Drug Testing of Legislators

January 27, 2012 by Doug Masson 13 Comments

Rep. Dvorak’s amendment to Rep. McMillin’s HB 1007 passed during second reading by a vote of 54 – 41 (with 4 excused and 1 not voting). It is an amendment to HB 1007 which provides for a test program whereby welfare recipients would be required to submit to and pass drug tests as a condition to receiving public benefits.

Apparently running with the notion that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t go to abusers of drugs and alcohol, Rep. Dvorak’s amendment requires legislators to submit to drug tests and a random breathalyzer test. They would have to reimburse the legislative council for the costs of these tests. If the legislator refused or failed the test, he or she would be subject to discipline or an assessed penalty by his or her chamber.

I’m hearing that, with this amendment, Rep. McMillin is no longer so enthusiastic about the bill and will not be moving it forward.

SB 89 and Creation Science: Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding

January 26, 2012 by Doug Masson 24 Comments

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Senate Committee on Education and Career Development passed SB 89 by a vote of 8-2. I have not yet seen the tally sheet, but that vote suggests to me that all of the Senate Republicans and one of the Senate Democrats on the Committee voted in favor of this measure.

The Indiana Senate Bill

It is very short, stating only: “The governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation.”

It’s a little ambiguous, but it pretty much has to mean that creation science can be taught as science in the classroom. Schools can already teach creationism as part of, say, a class on comparative religions or history or literature or anthropology or philosophy. Courts generally interpret statutes with the idea that the legislature intends them to actually do something and likely wouldn’t interpret this as a mere nullity, allowing schools to do that which they were already permitted to do.

Scientific Theory

The idea of teaching Creationism as a scientific theory is awful to me, not because I mind critiques of or challenges to evolutionary theory; but because it degrades science to pretend that creationism satisfies the elements of a scientific theory:

A scientific theory is a set of principles that explain and predict phenomena. Scientists create scientific theories with the scientific method, when they are originally proposed as hypotheses and tested for accuracy through observations and experiments. Once a hypothesis is verified, it becomes a theory.

Why am I so protective of science? I suppose I don’t need to be; it’s probably able to take care of itself. But, it has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the world around us. It’s not the only tool, many will point out. And they are correct. But, in those areas of life that lend themselves to observation and measurement, it has revolutionized human understanding. (I use the term “revolution” advisedly.) So, what is this scientific method? Generally speaking, scientific inquiry is distinguished from other methods of obtaining knowledge by falsifiable hypotheses where the tests yield repeatable results. It is a search for natural explanations for natural phenomena.

You attempt to observe, measure and define the subject of inquiry. You propose hypotheses that might explain the observations and predict behavior. You design experiments to test these predictions. And then you repeat the experiments to make sure the behavior is repeatable. A hypothesis that is not falsifiable, can’t be scientific. (For example, the hypothesis, “God creates every moment independently of the next – any relation one appears to have to the next is entirely through His grace.” is not falsifiable or testable. It could potentially be true, but it’s not scientific.)

These relatively simple principles led to an explosion of human understanding and knowledge. Consider the state of human knowledge in the 16th century when use of the scientific method was getting started to the state of human knowledge today. The advances are mind blowing. Comparatively speaking, the differences between the 11th century and the 16th are relatively small.

Evolution through Natural Selection and “Creation Science”

Charles Darwin came up with a hypothesis that species evolved by means of natural selection. This hypothesis competed with other notions, such as Lamarckism which speculated that progeny inherited particular traits based on use or disuse by the parents. (e.g. if a giraffe stretches its neck for leaves a lot during its lifetime, its kids would inherit longer necks.) Through observation and testing and modification to account for new observations (e.g. discovery of genetics), evolution through natural selection has become a bedrock scientific theory of biology.

Meanwhile, let’s take a quick look at “creation science,” which the Indiana General Assembly presumes to declare as a viable competitor to evolutionary theory.

Creation Science or scientific creationism is a branch of creationism that attempts to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and disprove generally accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the history of the Earth, cosmology and biological evolution. Its most vocal proponents are fundamentalist Christians in the United States who seek to prove Biblical inerrancy and nullify the scientific evidence for evolution. The main ideas in creation science are: the belief in “creation ex nihilo”; the conviction that the Earth was created within the last 10,000 years; the belief that mankind and other life on Earth were created as distinct fixed “baraminological” kinds; and the idea that fossils found in geological strata were deposited during a cataclysmic flood which completely covered the entire Earth.

It is sort of an effort to retcon the Bible (or maybe they’re retconning scientific observation to comport with the Bible) by those who cannot abide the idea that the Bible might be speaking in metaphor or allegories. Their faith, apparently, is dependent on every part of the Bible being a literally factual, historical document. Objections to “creation science” as science include:

#It’s not falsifiable; no testable bounds can be imposed on the creator.

#It does not comport with Occam’s Razor which disfavors positing a more complicated explanation where one with fewer assumptions will explain the observed phenomenon.

#Because it posits supernatural forces, it cannot be empirically or experimentally tested.

#It is not open to change in order to explain new evidence. Relying as it does on the Word of God as absolute truth, evidence that runs contrary must be disregarded. “In science, all claims are tentative, they are forever open to challenge, and must be discarded or adjusted when the weight of evidence demands it.”

Prior Litigation

The legislative introduction of Creationism as science has been tried before and, the Scopes Monkey Trial notwithstanding, has not gone well for the legislation. Notable are the cases of:

Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968) – striking down laws that prohibit the teaching of human evolution in public schools.

Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) striking down a Louisiana law requiring that creation science be taught alongside evolution. It allowed that competing scientific theories could be taught along side evolution; but the key to that is scientific – for the reasons mentioned above, “creation science” is not “science.” The court also had no objection to teaching scientific critiques of prevailing thought. So, noting some of the things that evolutionary theory does not explain is fine. You just can’t fill those gaps with Biblical proclamations and call it “science.”

Now, the folks of Indiana are about a generation behind the creation science curve. Since the heyday of creation science, its proponents have tried to make it more sciencey, put some lipstick on the unscientific pig, and called it “Intelligent Design.” But, to no avail. The Dover Area School District in York County, Pennsylvania took a huge financial hit after it lost a challenge to the school district’s decision to require that intelligent design be presented as an alternative to evolution. (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp 2d. 707 (M.D. Pa 2005)). Intelligent design, as creation science 2.0, differs from its predecessor in that it calls itself science and pretends that it is not religiously based; but it makes this attempt by attempting to redefine science in a way that would invoke untestable, unfalsifiable supernatural explanations.

After a trial, the Dover court issued a 139 page decision (pdf). The court noted that ID was, at heart, a religious argument and observed that the writings of leading intelligent design proponents reveal that the designer postulated by intellgient design is the Christian God. For purposes of this blog entry, probably this passage by the court gets to the heart of whether Creationism (or intelligent design) ought to be taught as science:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. …It is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena.

The court also did not think much of the Defendants’ protestations that they weren’t advocating that students be taught Intelligent Design itself. No, no! They were merely advocating that the ginned up, non-scientific “controversy” be taught. “This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.”

Dover School District’s prize for serving up this warmed over Creation Science? In addition to whatever it spent on its own legal fees, it was required to pay the legal fees of the Plaintiffs as well. Those fees were apparently in excess of $2 million; but, in the spirit of comity and out of recognition that this was a small school district, the Plaintiffs let it go for a mere $1 million.

What is the Point

So, what is the point of the law recommended to the full Senate by the eight Senators? Why do proponents want to pull down the fence and let school districts wander into the minefield? I suppose I can only guess. It certainly is not out of a deep and abiding concern for open scientific inquiry. Get away from matters touching on religious orthodoxy, and these proponents could not care less about the state of scientific debate. I can’t imagine it’s out of a real desire to promote spirituality. From my perspective, it looks like abuse to the Bible, contorting Genesis into a parody of science. It acknowledges, in word if not deed, fealty to the primacy of science while awkwardly attempting to stuff Biblical creation stories into the architecture of science which was not designed to hold such cargo.

I think what they’re trying to do is, once again, mark territory. There is a vocal subset of Christians who have a dominionist mindset. They want to make it clear that they enjoy cultural dominance. Evolution undermines that feeling of dominance by its strong suggestion that the Biblical creation story is likely not historically accurate. Most believers in the Bible are happy to allow evolutionary theory and Genesis to co-exist by regarding the latter as metaphor or allegory that express theological truths. But, for some, this kind of reconciliation apparently causes psychological trauma of some sort – even when it’s only practiced by others.

But, if this passes, what result are they hoping for? Do they really want science teachers chewing on creation science like a bone; giving their students chapter and verse on the comparative scientific merits of “creation science” versus evolution through natural selection? Even worse, what if schools did not stop at “creation science,” but went on to teach the alternative theory advocated by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.
—Bobby Henderson

Of course, if the bill does not pass, its proponents will get to enjoy another round of being martyrs, basking in their own self-congratulatory sense of self-righteousness.

This is a horrible idea for Indiana; wrong on science, wrong on the law, and, ultimately, prohibitively expensive for school districts that act on the discretion given under the legislation.

Senate Education Committee Passes Creationism-as-Science Bill

January 25, 2012 by Doug Masson 14 Comments

WISH-TV has an article entitled Creationism clears Ind. committee. By a vote of 8-2, the Senate Education committee has endorsed SB 89 which allows schools to teach creationism as science.

Teach creationism as an unscientific religious idea? Fine. Turtles all the way down, if you like. But, science? No.

Once again, scientific theory does not mean “wild-ass guess.”

A scientific theory is a set of principles that explain and predict phenomena. Scientists create scientific theories with the scientific method, when they are originally proposed as hypotheses and tested for accuracy through observations and experiments. Once a hypothesis is verified, it becomes a theory.

Evolution meets this definition. Creationism, arising mostly from stories written down by our bronze age ancestors, does not.

The Caging of America

January 25, 2012 by Doug Masson 13 Comments

Mostly I’m linking this New Yorker article: The Caging of America so I don’t forget to go back and read it. I’ve read the first few paragraphs, and it seems worth going back to. (h/t Roger).

Catching my eye right at the front “In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.” The former is the Northern impulse whereas the latter is the Southern.

HB 1373 – Fraudulent Financing Statements

January 24, 2012 by Doug Masson Leave a Comment

Reps. Steuerwald and Noe have introduced HB 1373 which would provide a mechanism to have a financing statement reviewed by a court where the financing statement is filed by someone unconnected to the transaction, without the consent of the secured party (in the case of an amendment or termination), or for the purpose of harassment.

A financing statement is typically a document filed with the Secretary of State indicating that a creditor has a security interest in a certain category of property belonging to the debtor. It puts other potential creditors or purchasers of that type of property on notice that they might have to deal with the first creditor to secure their own loan or acquire certain kinds of property free of a lien by the named creditor. They aren’t hard to file, and certain individuals and groups like to engage in what has been dubbed “Redemption Song” blog post.

I don’t know if this sort of activity is the major impetus for HB 1373, but in any event, it allows someone who believes a financing statement is bogus to go to court. If the judge agrees, the judge is to declare the financing statement ineffective, have the filing agency strike the record, and award attorneys fees and collection costs. It also makes such a filing a Class A misdemeanor, elevated to a Class D felony.

I like the sentiment. As a practical matter, however, the additional litigation on the entirely bogus ones will help clog the courts which is a stated goal of the “paper terrorists” and, will add another level of risk and complexity to those commercial cases involving a legitimate dispute between creditor and debtor where the debtor is trying to get leverage in the litigation against the creditor.