Dispatches from District 48
Archive for January 2008
Apparently, some conservatives are trying to fuse social conservatism with economic populism. With a bit of hawkish international projection of power thrown in. Barf. The only possible good outcome of this is that maybe it might lead to a redrawing of political lines between such big government folks and libertarians, but I am not that hopeful. Does anyone really doubt that we are heading back to the bad old days of the 1970s?
People have been defaulting on mortgages for all of recorded history. In Roman times, such a default could well result in the mortgage-holder getting sold into slavery, so things have improved a bit. But seriously, people default on their mortgages all the time. So what makes those currently in default more deserving of taxpayer aid than those before them or after them? I mean, other than the fact that the press is paying attention to these particular defaults? A similar question was reasonably asked of 9/11 victims who scored government compensation when victims before or after of other transportation accidents and building fires have not been so rewarded.
I challenge any politician to answer this question with an answer other than "well, these people are in the media spotlight right now and as a politician, I want to be in the spotlight with them."
Update: More analysis here, including the bright side of the burst housing bubble:
Countrywide wants to be
able to take its loans that the market won't accept and refi them under
FHA or FNMA. That's what this is all about. Don't forget that.It's
not about homeownership. Let's look at the latest 25th percentile
(starter homes) list prices for a range of CA cities, compared to the
price in January 2007:LA: $365,000/ $429,920
OC: $414,900/ $499,000
Riverside: $259,900/ $335,000
Sacramento: $229,900/ $316,477
San Diego: $325,000/ $392,279
San Francisco: $380,000/ $468,376
San Jose: $489,950/ $580,589
Santa Cruz: $489,000/ $577,400What
you see above is great news for all the people who would like to buy
homes without going bankrupt a few years down the line. It's VERY bad
news for banks and financial companies that made the original bad loans
without bothering to check whether the borrowers could pay the danged
loan. You figure out who this country should reward - responsible
aspiring home owners or stupid banks.
Many of the feed readers out there grabbed my feed before I had fixed the video links in my post on my new climate video. The links are fixed in the original post, but if those fixes are not reflected in your feed, the correct links are below. Right click on the links to save:
Sorry about that.
After releasing my first climate video, which ran over 50 minutes, I had a lot of feedback that I should aim for shorter, more focused videos. This is my first such effort, setting for myself the artificial limit of 10 minutes, which is the YouTube limit on video length.
While the science of how CO2 and other greenhouse gases cause
warming is fairly well understood, this core process only results in
limited, nuisance levels of global warming. Catastrophic warming
forecasts depend on added elements, particularly the assumption that
the climate is dominated by strong positive feedbacks, where the
science is MUCH weaker. This video explores these issues and explains
why most catastrophic warming forecasts are probably greatly
exaggerated.
You can also access the YouTube video here, or you can access the same version on Google video here.
If you have the bandwidth, you can download a much higher quality version by right-clicking either of the links below:
I am not sure why the quicktime version is so porky. In addition, the sound is not great in the quicktime version, so use the windows media wmv files if you can. I will try to reprocess it tonight. All of these files for download are much more readable than the YouTube version (memo to self: use larger font next time!)
This is a companion video to the longer and more
comprehensive climate skeptic video "What is Normal -- a Critique of
Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Theory."
In a post that is a nice follow-on to this one about wages in trucking, Russel Roberts has a nice post about people making minimum wage:
According to Current Population Survey estimates for 2006, 76.5
million American workers were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.7
percent of all wage and salary workers.1
Of those paid by the hour, 409,000 were reported as earning exactly
$5.15, the prevailing Federal minimum wage. Another 1.3 million were
reported as earning wages below the minimum.2
Together, these 1.7 million workers with wages at or below the minimum
made up 2.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers.
Correcting for higher state minimum wages, but also adjusting for illegal immigrants (who are a special case with super-low bargaining power) and factoring in salaried workers (who by law to be salaried have to be making much more than minimum wage) one still finds that less than 2% or less make minimum wage, about half of whom are under 25. Roberts has a follow-on post with comments from Tim Worstall to say that even this number may be too high:
Unfortunately, on the page he's taken his information from he's missed one thing which makes his case even stronger.
Nearly three in four workers earning $5.15 or less in 2006 were
employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and service
jobs.That's your waitron units and barkeeps folks. And what do we know
about people who do these sorts of jobs? Well, perhaps you have to have
actually done them (as I have, everything from the graveyard shift in a
Denny's to tending bar around the corner from this guy's
place): they all make tips. In fact, so much so that there is (or at
least used to be when that BLS report was prepared) a special minimum
wage for those in such jobs, one lower than the official Federal
minimum wage.For example, way back when, the min. wage was $3.35 an hour. Waiters
got $2.01. You didn't really care because even serving pancakes at 5 am
you made another $25-$30 a shift ($50-$150 in a decent place). Barkeeps
got $3.35 plus tips.The BLS numbers are reporting what employers paid employees, not
what people are actually earning. So we might in fact say that while
the number being paid the minimum wage or less is 2.2% of the workforce, the number actually earning that figure is more like 0.5%.
As an aside, speaking of bargaining power, it strikes me that prostitution is an excellent example of supply and demand in labor markets trumping government mandates. Prostitutes have absolutely no power to run to the government for help over minimum wage or work condition violations. They have only limited power to get government help even when they are the victim of violence from those who pay them. But on an hourly basis, the most succesful make far more than most Americans.
In the absence of government meddling (e.g. price controls) healthy markets seldom create true shortages, meaning situations where one simply cannot obtain a product or service. One might think there was a shortage, for example, of Superbowl tickets, since there are only a few available and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people who would like to attend. But in fact one can Google "Superbowl tickets" and find hundreds available. You may not like the price ($3500 and up for one ticket), but they are available for sale.
Yesterday, the AZ Republic lamented that there is a shortage of truck drivers nationwide:
Trucking companies across the country are facing a shortage of long-haul drivers....
High driver turnover has traditionally been a problem throughout the
trucking industry. But retirements and growing shipping demand have
made the shortage of long-haul drivers more acute. Fewer drivers means
delayed deliveries and higher delivery costs that could be passed on to
consumers. The
issue is especially crucial for the Phoenix area, which touts itself as
a shipping hub for businesses fed up with the costs and congestion
around Los Angeles-area ports. The Valley also is headquarters to two
of the country's biggest for-hire trucking companies: Swift
Transportation and Knight Transportation....Trucking experts say the problem goes beyond a labor shortage in the industry. They call it a threat to the economy.
"Our country needs to figure out how to fix this," said Ray Kuntz,
chairman and chief executive of Watkins and Shepard Trucking in Montana
and chairman of American Trucking Associations. "Our economy moves on
trucks."
Here is the key fact:
"¢ Long-haul wages vary by company and are typically based on
experience, safety record and commercial-driver's-license endorsements.
Long-haul drivers with two or more years of experience usually earn at
least $50,000 to $60,000 a year."¢ An entry-level driver with no over-the-road experience starts in the high $30,000 range. Team drivers can earn more.
There is no way in a Platonic vacuum to determine if a wage is too high or too low. But the driver "shortage" gives us a really good hint that maybe these salary levels are no longer sufficient to attract people to the rather unique trucking lifestyle. I probably could write a similar article about how there is a shortage of Fortune 500 CEO's or airline pilots who will accept a $30,000 starting salary. The problem then is not shortage, the problem is that wage demands are rising as trucking is out-competed for talent by alternative careers. In fact, there is not shortage, but a reluctance by trucking firms to accept a new pricing reality in the market for drivers.
By the way, to some extent this "shortage" is indeed an artificial creation of the government. Under NAFTA, Mexican truckers were long-ago supposed to have been given access to the US market, but overblown safety concerns have been used as a fig-leaf to block the provision as a protection for US truckers and a subsidy to the Teamsters. If a truck driver "shortage" is really a national economic problem, then let's stop blocking this NAFTA provision. But my sense is that the trucking companies in this article would freak at this, because they are not really concerned about the national economy but, reasonably, with rising wages hurting their bottom line. My guess is this article is the front-end of a PR push to get states like Arizona to subsidize ... something. Maybe truck driver training. Look for such legislative proposals soon.
Typically, wealthy individuals and investors will work hard to delay declaration of income and to push taxes off as far into the future as possible. The present value of taxes paid a year from now are less than paying the taxes today.
But over the last several weeks, I have had casual conversations with entrepreneurs and individuals from the moderately to very wealthy, and almost to a one they have said they are trying to pull income into 2007 and 2008 in anticipation of potentially large increases in capital gains tax rates and the rates at the top of the bracket.
On a different topic, a friend and I depressed ourselves in a bar last night laying out the case that the next decade may in many ways be a repeat of the 1970s. Already, we see both parties reverting to the economic prescriptions they promoted in the 1970s. Further, this week may herald the beginning of an inflationary monetary and fiscal policy combined with government enforced structural limits on growth (e.g. Co2 abatement policy, trade protectionism, price controls, high marginal tax rates and capital gains tax rates, lending restrictions, etc.) We are seriously discussing nationalizing a major industry (health care) for the first time since the 1970's (when nationalizing oil was seriously considered). Currently we have a Republican President who is less market-oriented than his Democratic predecessor, and at least as clueless on economic issues as were Nixon and Ford. All that's left to do is elect a new Jimmy Carter in 2008...
When businesses get US Census surveys, they are not the happy smiling documents one gets as an individual. Stamped all over it is "Your Response Is Required By Law" and when filling it out, one has the suspicion that he is facilitating his own doom by providing government weenies the data ammunition they need to tax or regulate us more.
The survey asks for total revenues and costs and payrolls cut a bunch of different ways, and takes about 1-2 hours to fill out if one is trying to be accurate. However, I looked at the survey closer this year and I noticed that this seven-page survey is for an individual business location.
I have nearly 200 campgrounds and other recreational sites. One of the tricks of our business is we have learned to operate a lot of small dispersed sites in a cost-effective manner. But now it turns out that to be strictly compliant with the census process, I need to fill out all of this information for each of these sites. In other words, rather than spend 1-2 hours (the feds say it should take an hour) on one summary report, in fact what I am technically legally supposed to do is fill out two hundred such reports, at a cost of at least 200 hours of my time. That is 10% of a standard man-year.
So -- do I do it the "right" at the cost of 200 hours of my time or do I do it the way I did it last year? I won't give my actual answer, which I think the post title telegraphs fairly well, but you can think about yours (yes, Travis, I know, more rope).
Without really knowing what I was doing, I bought a Sandisk flash drive with "U3" on it. This is an application that when you plug the flash drive into your computer, spoofs the computer into thinking it is a CD-ROM drive, so programs can be run from it. I presume this might be useful if you compute from a lot of public computers and want to carry your own email client around, but for me, this was useless functionality.
All that U3 did for me was radically slow down the process of plugging my flash drive into the computer and getting my damn files on and off. There is sort of a boot up process, and on several occasions it crashed my whole system, despite trying to update the software to the most recent version. Unfortunately, the built in uninstaller does not work, so, like spyware, the U3 has become impossible to remove. Despite paying $50 for this thing, I am seriously considering throwing it in the trash and getting a new one without U3 on it.
Update: Downloading this finally got rid of it. Again, this might be a cool tool for folks who use public computers or other people's computers a lot. However, if you don't need this functionality, and just want to move files around, you will not want the instability and incompatibility problems U3 brings.
Several sites have announced what purports to be a Darwin Award winner this year. I saw the link first at Q&O, but the same story has been on Pajamas Media and several other sources. I thought the story was awesome, but was suspicious in that too-good-to-be-true way, particularly when the original source had "sources" but no links. This is always a red flag for me.
So I took a key phrase from a quote in the article, in this case "on that bridge when Thurston shot" and plugged it into google. The second link is to the "official" Darwin Awards site, which tagged this story as an urban legend over 10 years ago. Looking down the Google search, it appears this old chestnut comes back in 2-3 year cycles.
I am going to post a bit more on this topic later today, but here is one of a number of great old computer ads shown here. Don't miss Elvira shilling for her favorite CASE tools. (HT Maggies Farm)
I just bought 2 TB in four 500 MB drives for less than $430 including shipping (that's an improvement from $150 per MB in 1979 to about $0.22 per MB**). With the great tools now available on most motherboards, I arrayed these in a fast and redundant Raid 0+1 setup with 1TB of storage. (Yes, to the total geeks out there, I would have preferred Raid 1+0 but alas the Nvidia chipset on my board did not support it.)
** By the way, this 700x improvement over 30 years actually has little or nothing to do with Moore's law. While some of the materials sciences are related, this improvement has little to do with silicon and nothing to do with transistor density. This is the result of incredible human creativity in the face of brutal competition, both from other hard drive manufacturers as well as from substitutes like static RAM.
The New York Times editorial board had one of the most jaw-dropping pieces I have read in a long time. In it, they are absolutely unapologetic in saying that they think the government can spend your money better than you can -- and the larger the government take, the happier we all will be.
The munificence of American corporate titans warms the heart, sort of.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that the top 50 donors gave $7.3
billion to charity last year "†about $150 million per head....Yet we'd be so much happier about all the good things America's
moneyed elite pay for if the government made needed public investments.The flip side of American private largess is the stinginess of
the public sector. Philanthropic contributions in the United States "â€
about $300 billion in 2006 "†probably exceed those of any other
country. By contrast, America's tax take is nearly the lowest in the
industrial world.
Oh my God, does anyone actually believe that Congress does a better job spending your money than you do? Apparently they do:
Critics of government spending argue that America's private sector does
a better job making socially necessary investments. But it doesn't.
Public spending is allocated democratically among competing demands.
Rich benefactors can spend on anything they want, and they tend to
spend on projects close to their hearts.
LOLOLOL. Has anyone looked at the last highway bill? How many tens of thousands of politically motivated earmarks were there?
Philanthropic contributions are usually tax-free. They directly reduce
the government's ability to engage in public spending. Perhaps the
government should demand a role in charities' allocation of resources
in exchange for the tax deduction. Or maybe the deduction should go
altogether. Experts estimate that tax breaks motivate 25 percent to 30
percent of contributions.
At the end of the day, this is not about a better prioritization process for spending -- this is about the NY Times getting a bigger say for itself in said spending. They know that Warren Buffet couldn't give a rat's behind what the NY Times thinks about how he spends his money, but Congressmen trying to get reelected do care. The NY Times wields a lot of political, but little private, influence, so they want to see as much spending as possible shift to political hands where the Times wields clout.
Postscript: Boy, here is some quality journalism:
Federal, state and local tax collections amount to just more than 25.5
percent of the nation's economic output. The Finnish government
collects 48.8 percent. As a result, the United States spends less on
social programs than virtually every other rich industrial country,
according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The Finnish government probably has money to build children's health
clinics.
"Probably has money?" What does that mean? Do they have government-funded children's health clinics or not? The Times couldn't work up enough energy to fact-check that? And by the way, who, other than the NY Times, declared that the best marginal use of additional public funds is for children's health clinics?
Postscript #2: Many of the very rich have been funding schools that are competitive with government-monopoly schools. In this and many other cases, wealthy people fund programs that work better and cheaper than government alternatives. I am sure that not only would the feds be happy to have this money to spend themselves (on some fat earmarks for key donors, most likely) but they would additionally be thrilled to get rid of the competition.
Update: I must be going senile. I missed the most obvious logical fallacy of all. The NY Times says that our democratic government is the best possible mechanism for allocating funds. But doesn't that also mean its the best possible mechanism for setting spending levels? How can it complain that our democratic government is doing a bad job in setting total spending levels but does a great job in allocating that spending?
I had just started to think that Fred Thompson might have been the least-bad candidate in the race, so of course he just quit.
On Sunday, CBS claimed that Antarctica is melting. In fact, once small
portion of the Antarctic peninsula is warming and may be losing snow, while the
rest of Antarctica has not been warming and in fact has been gaining ice cover.
The show visits an island off the Antarctic Peninsula which has about as much
weather relevance and predictive power to the rest of Antarctica as Key West has
to the rest of the United States. Absolutely absurd.
Unfortunately, I have a real job and I don't have time to restate all the
rebuttals to the CBS show. However, I took on the Antarctic
issue in depth here, and this post at NC Media
Watch has more.
Those of us with long memories, say back to the 1970's, can remember that the Left constantly complained about manufacturing and assembly-line work as "dehumanizing." Their goal was for workers to transcend this Tayloristic "hell" into clean, white collar office work. Well, now that we have done so by replacing many assembly-line workers with machinery programmers and service workers, the Left now makes the argument that assembly-line work was the Nirvana of all employment, and the only possible road to the middle class for many Americans. If I was an academic with time on my hands to do an in-depth research project, I would love to go back to records of leftish complaints about the economy form the 1960s and 1970s. Because in large part, they have gotten everything they were asking for and more, but now they complain about the change.
One of the explanations of this paradox is that progressives, despite their name, are extremely conservative (little c) in that they fear change in the economy and in work patterns more than anything else. Changing trade patterns, changes in economic mix, changes in work relationships -- these all send progressives into a tizzy. I know that in some sense I am answering a paradox with a greater paradox. Rather than repeat the argument, here is my argument in depth that capitalism is too dynamic for progressives. An excerpt from that post:
Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives
are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism. Ironically, though
progressives want to posture as being "dynamic", the fact is that
capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them. Industries rise and fall,
jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms. Progressives want
comfort and certainty. They want to lock things down the way they are.
They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and
next decade, and will always pay at least X amount. That is why, in
the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek,
only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and
certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.Progressive elements in this country have always tried to freeze
commerce, to lock this country's economy down in its then-current
patterns. Progressives in the late 19th century were terrified the
American economy was shifting from agriculture to industry. They
wanted to stop this, to cement in place patterns where 80-90% of
Americans worked on farms. I, for one, am glad they failed, since for
all of the soft glow we have in this country around our description of
the family farmer, farming was and can still be a brutal, dawn to dusk
endeavor that never really rewards the work people put into it.
Postscript: I still argue that the "decline" of American manufacturing is a chimera of how statistics are gathered. As I wrote here:
The best way to illustrate this is by example. Let's takean automobile assembly plant circa 1955. Typically, a large manufacturing
plant would have a staff to do everything the factory needed. They had
people on staff to clean the bathrooms, to paint the walls, and to
perform equipment maintenance. The people who did these jobs were all
classified asmanufacturing workers, because they worked in a manufacturing
plant. Since 1955, this plant has likely changed the way it staffs
these type jobs. It still cleans the bathrooms, but it has a contract
with an outside janitorial firm who comes in each night to do so. It
still paints the walls, but has a contract with a painting contractor
to do so. And it still needs the equipment to be maintained, but
probably has contracts with many of the equipment suppliers to do the
maintenance.So, today, there might be the exact same number of people in the
factory cleaning bathrooms and maintaining equipment, but now the
government classifies them as "service workers" because they work for a
service company, rather thanmanufacturing workers. Nothing has really changed in the work that people do, but government stats will show a large shift from manufacturing to service employment.
The Seattle Supersonics have finally admitted what rational folks have known for a long time: Billion dollar municipal stadiums are just taxpayer subsidies for already-rich players and owners, and do nothing for local economic development. Here is what the Sonics ownership stated in court papers (part of a case where they are trying to break their lease in Seattle):
"The financial issue is simple, and the city's analysts agree,
there will be no net economic loss if the Sonics leave Seattle.
Entertainment dollars not spent on the Sonics will be spent on
Seattle's many other sports and entertainment options. Seattleites will
not reduce their entertainment budget simply because the Sonics leave,"
the Sonics said in the court brief....Rodney Fort, a
professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, who has
criticized the economic-impact claims made by pro-sports teams, called
the Sonics' latest argument "the best chuckle" he's had in a long time.
Municipal stadium funding and team relocation blackmail as a prisoners dilemma game here.
My son learned of one additional downside this year to subsidizing an expensive stadium for the hapless Cardinals. He is a huge Cowboys fan, and there was to be a really good matchup in regular season this year that would be televised nationally (I can't remember which game, maybe the Packers regular season game). We did not get to see the game, because the local network was obligated to show the Cardinals game instead. If you have no team, you always get the best game on TV.
From Venezuela: (via Mises)
Venezuela launched a new currency with the new year, lopping off three
zeros from denominations in a bid to simplify finances and boost
confidence in a money that has been losing value due to high inflation...."We're ending a historical cycle of ... instability in prices,"
Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas said Monday, adding that the change
aims to "recover a bolivar that has significant buying capacity."Prices have risen as Chavez has pumped increased amounts of the
country's oil income into social programs, reinforcing his support
among the poor and helping to drive 8.4 percent economic growth in 2007.The Central Bank is promoting the new monetary unit with an ad
campaign and the slogan: "A strong economy, a strong bolivar, a strong
country." Officials, however, have yet to clearly spell out their
anti-inflationary measures.
Good to see the government taking meaningful steps. Next up will be "Whip Inflation Now" buttons.
The 8.4 percent growth cited above may be illusory, given this:
Venezuela has had a fixed exchange rate since February 2003, when
Chavez imposed currency and price controls. The government has said it
is not considering a devaluation any time soon.But while the strong bolivar's official exchange rate will be fixed
as 2.15 to $1, the black market rate has hovered around the equivalent
of 5.60 to $1 recently.
I was surprised to see on someone's blog that the writers' strike was still going on. I would think that the biggest danger of going on strike (beyond the lost income) would be that no one notices you are not working. This seems to be a real danger faced by the writers, and an important reason why you will never see Congress go on strike.
Our (mostly free) society has survived many challenges. But will it be able to withstand gentlemen like this waving around immensely flawed climate science:
Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most
extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of
the collective needs of the citizens. The subject is almost sacrosanct
and those who indulge in criticism are labeled as Marxists, socialists,
fundamentalists and worse. These labels are used because alternatives
to democracy cannot be perceived! Support for Western democracy is
messianic as proselytised by a President leading a flawed democracyThere must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy.
Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly
regardless of some perceived liberties. ...We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions
based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse
emissions. It is not that we do not tolerate such decisions in the very
heart of our society, in wide range of enterprises from corporate
empires to emergency and intensive care units. If we do not act
urgently we may find we have chosen total liberty rather than life.
He has great admiration for how China does things
The [plastic shopping bag] ban in China will save importation and use of five million tons of
oil used in plastic bag manufacture, only a drop in the ocean of the
world oil well. But the importance in the decision lies in the fact
that China can do it by edict and close the factories. They don't have
to worry about loss of political donations or temporarily unemployed
workers. They have made a judgment that their action favours the needs
of Chinese society as a whole.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
By the way, here is a little "tip." The author says this:
Unfortunately it seems increasingly likely that the IPCC underestimated
the speed of climate change and failed to recognise the likely effect
of a range of tipping points which may now be acting in concert.
I believe that man is having a warming effect on the earth, but that effect is small and non-catastrophic. There are reasons I may be wrong. BUT, you should immediately laugh out of the room anyone who talk about "a range of tipping points" in a system like the earth's climate that has been reasonably stable for tens of millions of years. When used by climate catastrophists, the word "tipping point" means: Yeah, we are kind of upset the world is not warming nearly as fast as our computer models say it should, so we will build an inflection point about 10 years out into the forecast where the slope of change really ramps up and we will call it a "tipping point" because, um, that is kindof a cool hip phrase right now and make us sound sophisticated and stuff.
Postscript: Anyone who makes this statement is WELL grounded in reality:
All this suggests that the savvy Chinese rulers may be first out of the blocks to assuage greenhouse emissions
LOLOLOL. They are building a new coal plant, what, every three days or so in China?
Postscript #2: Quiz for older folks out there: How long ago was it that environmentalists were encouraging us to use plastic bags over paper because it saved a tree?
HT: Tom Nelson
Drew Carey's new Reason video focuses on San Tan Flats, a restaurant in the Phoenix area where local officials are trying to ban dancing.
A while back, I complained about County Attorney Andrew Thomas's self-promoting billboard campaign to impose extra-legal additional punishment on convicted drunk drivers. Thomas, by the way, teamed with Sheriff Joe Arpaio in a shameful government legal attack on a newspaper that had been critical of him in the past (fortunately, that case has since been dropped).
Well, now it appears that Thomas has used public funds to send out thinly-veiled advertising for his re-election.
Maricopa County supervisors are questioning County Attorney Andrew
Thomas' use of public money to produce and distribute hundreds of
thousands of slick booklets that feature his name and smiling portrait.County administrators on Tuesday said the 45-page pamphlets,
distributed in local newspapers, were paid for through the county's
general fund.They believe more than 500,000 copies were produced. Most supervisors
said they were astonished to see that Thomas spent the money on
booklets that they said were "self-serving" and "self-promoting."
The only other comment I would make is that, knowing out board of supervisors, they are probably mad only because they did not think of this approach for their own re-election.
We don't need more highway funds because right now, as estimated by the Anti-Planner, about 40% of Federal highway funds go to non-highway projects. In particular:
Over the past fifteen years alone, America has spent well over $100
billion on rail transit construction projects but has little to show
for it. As mobility advocate John Semmens pointed out a few days ago in
a recent Washington Times op ed, transit's share of urban travel has actually declined since 1995.
Wow, money well spent, huh? I have written many times on commuter rail follies in Phoenix and other western cities that are utterly unsuited to rail transit. The most recent news here in Phoenix is that design flaws are appearing, even before the first train is run.
OK, the comment thread in my post on Romney evolved into a good discussion on health care, but I did not get a very good answer on how Romney supporters could possibly consider him the inheritor of the Reagan small-government legacy. Apparently, I am not the only one confused on this, as both Michael Tanner and Jerry Taylor chime in with the same question.
What does it say about the Republican Party when the leading fusionist conservative in the field - Mitt Romney, darling of National Review and erstwhile heir to Ronald Reagan -
runs and wins a campaign arguing that the federal government is
responsible for all of the ills facing the U.S. auto industry, that the
taxpayer should pony up the corporate welfare checks going to Detroit
and increase them by a factor of five, that the federal
government can and should move heaven and earth to save "every job" at
risk in this economy, and that economic recovery is best achieved by a
sit-down involving auto industry CEOs, labor bosses, and government
agents armed with Harvard MBAs to produce a well-coordinated strategic
economic plan? That is, what explains the emergence of economic fascism
(in a non-pejorative sense) in the Grand Old Party at the expense of
free market capitalism?
Unfortunately, 1970-style Nixonian Republicans are back in force. Can "Whip Inflation Now" buttons be far behind?
Update: Apparently William F. Buckley is happily returning to the 70's as well.
And by the title of this post, I don't mean because they are not throwing enough money and mandates at it. Here is what I wrote about the alternative energy mandates in the most recent energy bill:
They want 15% of power generation from renewables by 2020. I am not
sure if this includes hydro. If it does, then a bunch of Pacific
Northwest utilities already have this in the bag. But even if
"renewable" includes hydro, hydro power will do nothing to meet this
goal by 2020. I am not sure, given environmental concerns, if any
major new hydro project will ever be permitted in the US again, and
certainly not in a 10 year time frame. In fact, speaking of
permitting, there is absolutely no way utilities could finance, permit,
and construct 15% of the US electricity capacity by 2020 even if they
started today. No. Way. By the way, as a sense of scale, after 35
years of subsidies and mandates, renewables (other than hydro) make up
... about .27% of US generation.
Here is an example of what I mean about the permitting process: 10-years a counting between proposal for a wind farm and having a chance to build it. And I assure you that there is not way this thing will clear remaining regulatory hurdles to be in place even by 2011.
If flying a fuel-laden passenger jet into a building is not considered sufficient cause for a building structure to fail, then surely the failure of eight 1/2-inch steel plates is not sufficient to bring down a large structure. Right?
