Coyote Blog

Not that it is really necessary to make this point (as many of us were making it even before the Stimulus bill was passed) but the man tasked with coordinating Vermont's various stimulus programs reports that the stimulus pretty much failed. I thought this was a particularly interesting bit:

Another part of the job was to help Vermont entities win a large share of the "competitive" stimulus money available nationally at the discretion of federal agencies. Our electric utilities jointly applied for money to build a statewide Smart Grid. Our telcos put together applications for broadband money. Vermont received the most money per capita of any state for both broadband and energy. The Green Mountain State will probably benefit from these programs"”yet almost none of this money has been spent, thanks to the many federal approvals required.

The broadband and energy programs, in other words, are hardly examples of successful counter-cyclical spending: The only money spent on them during the recession was for grant-writing. More troubling, private investment in these areas, which might have occurred even during the recession, dried up as companies waited to see if they could build with taxpayer money. Entrepreneurial effort turned from innovation to grant-grubbing.

Wow, someone should coin a name for that.

I find it simply amazing that so many experienced political actors could have been fooled by this:

The acceleration of government projects that had already run the approvals gauntlet"”primarily the paving of roads"”worked. But the building of new infrastructure failed. Due to the time required to apply for grants and receive permits, none of it was done during the recession, and only a little will be done in the next few years.Nothing is "shovel ready" in the U.S. We've created a wall of regulatory obstacles"”environmental, historical sites, etc."”that blocks doing any major project on a predictable or reasonable schedule. Not even all the king's men with all the people's money can build tunnels, railroads, wind turbines, nuclear plants or anything else significant without years or even decades of delay. If permitting were speedy, we wouldn't need government money to have a construction boom.

That's easy to recognize after the fact, but plenty of folks with zero political experience, like me, were saying this before the bill was even passed:

A year from now, any truly new incremental project in the stimulus bill will still be sitting on some planners desk with unfinished environmental impact assessments, the subject of arguments between multiple government agencies, tied up in court with environmental or NIMBY challenges, snarled in zoning fights, subject to conflicts between state, county, and city governments, or all of the above.  Most of the money will have been spent by planners, bureaucrats, and lawyers, with little to show for in actual facilities.

My new Forbes column is up, and it discusses an article by Michael Malone that said in part:

The recent quick fade of the Deficit Commission was the latest reminder that America no longer seems to have the stomach for big challenges.  There was a time "“ was it just a generation ago? "“ when Americans were legendary for doing vast, seemingly superhuman, projects:  the Interstate Highway System, the Apollo Missions, Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, the Normandy invasion, the Empire State Building, Social Security.

What happened?  Today we look at these achievements, much as Dark Age peasants looked on the mighty works of the Roman Era, feeling like some golden age has passed when giants walked the Earth.

My response includes the following:

The list he offers is a telling one "” all except the Empire State Building were government programs, just as were the "mighty works" of the ancient Romans.  And just like the Romans, these and other government projects have more to do with triumphalism than they do with adding real value.

It is interesting he should mention the Romans.  There were few grand buildings during the centuries when Rome was a republic.  Only in the later Imperial period, when Rome became an autarky, did rulers begin to build the monumental structures that Malone admires.  Emperors taxed their subjects and marshaled millions of slaves to build temples and great columns and triumphal arches and colosseums to celebrate"¦ themselves.  Twentieth Century politicians have done the same, putting their names on dams and bridges and airports and highways and buildings.  They still build coleseums too, though today they cost over a billion dollars and have retractable roofs.  Are these, as Malone suggests, monuments to the audacity of the greatest generation, or just to the ego of politicians?...

This is the same concern that drives Thomas Friedman to extol the virtues of the Chinese government, where a few men there can point their fingers and make billions of dollars flow from their citizens to the projects of their choice.  This is a nostalgia for coercion and government power, for Lincoln imposing martial law, for FDR threatening to pack the Supreme Court, for the Pharaohs getting those pyramids built.  It is a call for dis-empowerment of the masses, for re-concentrating power in a few smart visionary folks, presumably including Mr.  Malone.

I was absolutely astounded several years ago when the city of Glendale (a suburb NW of Phoenix) agreed to shell out $180 million to build an arena to try to keep a pro hockey team (the Coyotes) in town.   Now, they are considering doubling their investment:

Will the Glendale City Council vote to shell out nearly $200 million in a deal aimed at keeping the Coyotes in town for at least 30 years?

But there is nothing simple about the decision facing elected officials in the West Valley city that has yearned to build its reputation as a sports and entertainment hot spot.

The deal involves Glendale taxpayers giving $100 million to Matthew Hulsizer, a Chicago businessman poised to buy the Phoenix Coyotes from the National Hockey League.

And, the Arizona Republic's Rebekah Sanders reports that "Glendale would pay Hulsizer $97 million over the next 5 1/2 years to manage the arena, schedule concerts and other non-hockey events."

Unbelievable.  The value destruction here is amazing.  A few years ago, the Coyotes were only valued at $117 million.  So the government will have subsidized an entity worth just north of $100 million with $400 million in taxpayer dollars?  Nice investment.  Of course they have a BS study about net economic impact of the Coyotes, with a sure-to-be exaggerated figure of $24.5 million a year.  But even accepting this figure, they are spending $400 million for at most $24.5 million in economic impact, which at best maybe translates into $2-3 million a year in extra taxes.  That works, how?

Losing more than 40 major events, that is hockey games, per year at the arena would be a punch-in-the-gut to bars, restaurants and retail shops that also call Westgate home.

Here is a hint:  I pretty much guarantee the buyout value or moving cost of these businesses is less than $200 million.  But here are the most amazing "economics"

that would only further jam up Glendale, which counts on sales tax revenues those businesses generate to pay off the debt it has amassed in trying to build its sports empire.

So we are going to spend $200 million to make sure we can keep up the debt service on the previous $180 million?  So where does the $200 million come from.  I am increasingly buying into Radley Balko's theory that the media is not liberal or conservative, just consistently statist.  Here is the comment on the Goldwater Institute's legal challenge

City officials also may face a legal challenge from the Goldwater Institute over the conservative think-tank's belief that the deal Glendale has cooked up violates state laws that prohibit government subsidies to private entities.

That, of course, means that the city will rack up untold legal fees to defend their deal.

Waaaaa!  More legal fees.  Is that really their biggest concern?  How about the strong possibility that Goldwater is correct, or a mention that they have won in court recently in similar cases.  But we will end with this happy thought:

Now, if they say yes to the $200-million giveaway, they may keep the team in town but are only piling on to that massive debt.

And as their initial deal with the team and previous team owners has proven, there are no guarantees that the $200 million will be enough.

Postscript: Local papers have never seen a sports team subsidy or new stadium they did not love.  Given the quality of their news departments, local sports teams sell newspapers.

PS#2: Long ago I wrote a post on subsidies for business relocations and the prisoners dilemma.

Why is it that taxpayers seem to be the one group that never has standing?  No one wants the milch cow mouthing off, I suppose.  How about we change the law to say that any taxpayer has standing in court on any issue that affects government spending.  Too broad?  Well, I'll narrow that when they narrow their interpretation of the commerce clause.

This is a clever subtitle mashup criticizing public pensions in California which, incredibly, does not actually use the Hitler clip from Downfall.

Private companies can be jerks too, but they don't write the laws or control law enforcement.  That is why government is so dangerous, not because I necessarily trust it less, but because there is nothing acting to circumscribe its power.

Ian Cotterell got bad news Monday night when he learned that a city tow truck had plowed into a Roxbury apartment building he owns, blasting a hole in the brick facade and forcing his 17 tenants to vacate. Yesterday, he got more bad news: The city is ticketing him.

After building inspectors examined the building to assess damage from the crash, they cited Cotterell for "structural defects" including collapsed bricks, damaged windows, and other "unsafe and dangerous" conditions, according to an order issued by the city yesterday.

The order noted that a Boston Transportation Department truck "drove into building," but it also ordered Cotterell to fix the problems within 24 hours and appear in court."It's unfair; the code violations I have because the truck made them,"

TJIC has more at the link

Well, as usual, the progressives have the rights and roles of private individuals vs. government exactly backwards, from Kevin Drum:

As I said earlier, I'm on the fence a bit about whether an indiscriminate release of thousands of U.S. embassy cables is useful. After all, governments have a legitimate need for confidential diplomacy. But when I read about WikiLeaks' planned financial expose [release of private emails from a private corporation], I felt no such qualms. A huge release of internal documents from a big bank? Bring it on!

The government and public officials acting in a public capacity have no rights to privacy of their work and work products from the public that employs them (except to the extent that privacy pays some sort of large benefit, which I would define pretty narrowly).  While things like the recent Wikileak are certainly damaging to things like sources and foreign relations, I have sympathy for such a mass dump when the government so systematically defaults to too much secrecy and confidentiality for what should be public business, mainly to avoid accountability.  The public has the right to know just about whatever the government is doing, in detail.

In the private sector, ordinary citizens have no similar "right to know" the private business of private entities, the only exception being in criminal investigations where there are clear procedures for how confidential private information may be obtained, used, and protected.  Had the proposed email dump related to alleged misconduct, I would have been pretty relaxed about it.  But the proposed document dump is just voyeurism.  One may wish for more accountability processes vis a vis banks, but in a country supposedly still founded on the rule of law, we don't get to invent new ex post facto rules, such as "if your industry pisses off enough Americans, all the material that was previously legally private is retroactively made part of the public domain."

Drum may be gleeful now, but someday he just might be regretful of establishing a precedent for consequence-free theft and publication of private information.   Had, for example, the words "big bank" in the paragraph been replaced by, say, "Major newspaper," we would likely see Drum in a major-league freak out, though the New York Times corporation has exactly the same legal status as Citicorp.

Everyone thinks his own information is "different" and somehow on a higher plane than other people's information.  Drum likely thinks his communication by email with sources is special, while I would argue release of my confidential internal communication about new service offerings and pricing strategies would be particularly damaging.  The way we typically settle this is to say that private is private, and not legally more or less private based on subjective opinions by third parties about the value of the data.

One aspect of the TSA debate I find hilarious as a libertarian is that we get to see yet another example of partisans switching sides on an issues based on whose team is in the White House.  Since when have Republicans had this deeply held concern about liberty and privacy vs. security against terrorism.  And now leftie Kevin Drum steps up to say that all the extract screening makes sense (to my college roommate Brink Lindsey:  Sorry, but the whole liberaltarian thing is a myth.  When in power, they seem to act just as authoritarian on social and civil rights issues as Conservatives).

Anyway, Drum is certainly not full-bore backing the TSA, but he does write

I hate the TSA screening process. Everyone hates the TSA screening process. You'd be crazy not to. It's intrusive, annoying, and time-wasting. It treats us all like common criminals even though most of us are just ordinary schlubs trying to get on a plane and go somewhere.

But guess what? The fact that you personally are annoyed "” you! an educated white-collar professional! "” doesn't mean that the process is idiotic. I've heard it called "security theater" so many times I'd be rich if I had a nickel for each time it popped up in my browser, but although the anti-TSA rants are often cathartic and amusing, they've never made much sense to me. All the crap that TSA goes through actually seems pretty clearly directed at improving the security of air travel.

The point is not, as implied by Drum, that current TSA screening isn't protection against certain types of threats. Let's be generous and assume that the TSA's screening, generally concocted in a barn-door approach after someone tries a particular approach, is effective at catching the threats it is designed to catch.

The point is that nearly anyone with a room temperature IQ can think of 20 ways to attack an airplane that is not covered by the screening. If there are, say, a hundred imaginable threats, how much privacy do you want to give up to protect yourself from 35 of them?

For example, you know what is in the cargo hold below your seat? The US Mail. You know how much screening is performed on the US Mail? Zero. How hard would it be to wire up a package with a bomb and an altimeter, or perhaps just a noise sensor, and send it off airmail.  They screen the crap out of your bags and body and then throw them on the plane right next to a bunch of anonymous, unscrutinized cargo.  And that is just one example.

Yeah, I can see the Administration has its finger on the pulse of what all Americans feel to be the real, burning issue confronting the TSA.  Specifically:

"It is no secret that the morale of the TSO workforce is terrible as a result of favoritism, a lack of fair and respectful treatment from many managers, poor and unhealthy conditions in some airports, poor training and testing protocols and a poor pay system," said AFGE President John Gage. "The morale problems are documented by the government's own surveys. TSOs need a recognized union voice at work, and the important decision of the FLRA finally sets the process in motion to make that right a reality."

At every airport I have been to lately, there are probably two TSA workers standing around doing nothing for every one working.  Obviously this is a brutal productivity standard, and TSA workers long for the conditions that obtain, say, among municipal road workers where five or six workers stand around doing nothing for every one working.

I tell folks all the time that  99% of the time the problem with bad governance is not bad people in the government (or at least not bad before they entered government) but bad incentives and information.

Take the recent public reaction against the new TSA search procedures.  Its not that everyone in the TSA aspired for a job where they could grope stranger's nads.  Its that the incentives in government make risk management impossible.

Let's look first at the cost side.  How much do internal TSA evaluation and incentive systems value

• protection of individual rights and privacy
• stewardship of taxpayers money

Can we safely say close to zero?  I don't think anyone at the TSA is being denied promotion because they were insufficiently concerned with the fourth amendment.

So what is it that does matter in their incentive system?  I would argue that they have one single, overriding concern -- to avoid an incident for which they can be retroactively blamed as being insufficiently diligent.   If you are confused about how this incentive might arise, Conservatives need only look at themselves.  How many of you have pounded Janey Napolitano for being insufficiently diligent, for example in her "the system worked as it was supposed to" comments.

I spent a lot of time at HBS, in consulting at McKinsey, and in corporate life worrying about incentive systems.  And the absolute first rule, in my mind, is to ignore the official incentive system and explore what really drives behavior.  For example, a company might have a finely balanced set of published performance measures, but if the last three promotions all went to the person who sucked up the most to the boss, the latter will likely influence behavior much more than the published system.

The same is true at the TSA.  I have no idea what their official performance metrics are.  But to a large extent these metrics are irrelevant anyway in an environment where it's impossible to be fired and salaries and promotions have more to do with seniority than performance.   In this environment, unofficial incentives are going to be very powerful, and I am virtually positive the overriding such incentive is avoiding blame due to lack of diligence.

So we should not be surprised if the TSA runs out of control with its diligence in a way that is unchecked by any considerations of cost, privacy, or risk management.  This incentive is so powerful that the only way to override it is either through executive leadership or legislative action.  We'll see if we get either, but trashing privacy and the fourth amendment tend to be bipartisan hobbies so I am not wildly confident much will change.

Radley Balko tells his frustrating stories about dealing with the IRS.  These stories seemed totally familiar to me because in my business life, I deal with very similar problems nearly every day.  Doing business in 12 states, I don't just deal with the IRS but 12 sales tax agencies, 12 employment tax agencies, 12 unemployment insurance agencies... you get the idea.   Multiply this story times 100 and that is what I spend most of my time on running my business.

Just as one example, 8 years ago Florida switched our company from quarterly to monthly reporting  for sales taxes.  They did this in the middle of a quarter, so the reporting for that quarter was a funny mix of a partial quarter plus one monthly report.  The next year a letter was triggered automatically from their system saying I hadn't submitted two months of reports.  It took me several hours and multiple phone calls and two faxed letters to get them to understand the situation and promise to update their system.  Frustrating but case closed.  Or not.  Their system again triggered a threatening letter to me over the same issue in December 2004.  And then 2005.  And 2006.  2007.  2008.  2009.  This comes up again every dang year.  Every year after hours of work someone swears I have finally found the right person and I would never hear about it again.  But the next year it pops up yet again.  In 2009 they actually sent a sheriff to our Florida location to start attaching assets over the non-issue.

Couldn't agree more with the thoughts in this post from TJIC:

I was discussing this with Dan Geer the other day "“ the fact that individual liberty (social, economic, etc.) is the goal, and democracy (political "liberty") is just a tool to get there "¦ and not even a particularly good tool.

I'd be all in favor of a limited constitutional monarchy, if the result was "“ integrated over time "“ more social and economic freedom....

Leftists don't understand this at all "“ they think that the freedom to vote for your choice of bully who will lord it over everyone else is the paramount right, and they don't recognize economic liberty at all.

I said something similar in this post on why I don't necessarily treasure the right to vote.

Now, don't get me wrong, the right to vote in a representative democracy is great and has proven a moderately effective (but not perfect) check on creeping statism.  A democracy, however, in and of itself can still be tyrannical.  After all, Hitler was voted into power in Germany, and without checks, majorities in a democracy would be free to vote away anything it wanted from the minority "“ their property, their liberty, even their life.   Even in the US, majorities vote to curtail the rights of minorities all the time, even when those minorities are not impinging on anyone else.  In the US today, 51% of the population have voted to take money and property of the other 49%.

I go on to discuss what things are more important to a good government than voting.

Not sure this even requires comment.

Chandler's new City Hall comes with some features that have municipal workers and visitors scratching their heads. Like the restroom signs that tell people not to drink out of the urinals and toilets.

...

A few employees have been cracking jokes and speculating about what it would take to make them slurp from potties when water fountains and sinks are a few feet away.

"I'm glad that I saw that sign because I was very thirsty and looking for a means to quench my thirst," Mayor Boyd Dunn quipped. "Seriously, I'm certain there's some regulation out there that requires that type of sign."

Two Americas:  Those who use the coersive power of the government to take money for themselves, and those who have to earn it by giving value for money in non-coerced , arms-length transactions.

Via Carpe Diem, which has more thoughts on the trend

Note:  I have seen folks defend this type of chart by saying it is just the function of  the inflection point of a normal distribution creeping by inflation across a dividing line.  But look the $180K+ in 2010 vs. the $150K+ in 2005.  By inflation, a $150,000 salary should not have increased to more than $165,000, but we see more than twice as many people making $180K plus today than made $150K plus five years ago.

This list is simply staggering.

From the WSJ:

The wide-ranging pay-to-play probe concerns whether investment firms like Mr. Rattner's former firm, Quadrangle Group LLC, were held up for fees and favors to secure access to lucrative business from New York's $125 billion public-pension fund.

So government officials, who have all the power, demand bribes from businesses in order for those businesses to participate in a certain market, and when discovered it is the private businesses that are being investigated?

This is just so typical of government, where pay-to-play rules are in fact legislated for businesses from bars to taxicabs.  I can't do anything new in Ventura County without bringing a whole series of checks to the County planning offices -- nearly every single department must be paid off before I can do something as simple as remodel a bathroom or revamp a store.  None of this is under the table, mind you, it is entirely up front and nominally legal.

California state treasurer Bill Lockyer is urging public employee pension fund to divest itself of stocks of companies because of their support for a particular state ballot initiative.   Check that again - a sitting state official using his position in power to punish folks during an election campaign for their stand in that election.

"¦ state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a former attorney general, urged the state's largest public employee investment funds to divest themselves of Valero and Tesoro stock.

Lockyer sent a letter to the public pension funds, known as CalPERS and CalSTRS, asking them to rid themselves of any stock connected to the refiners Valero and Tesoro. Lockyer charged the companies with attempting to constrain gasoline supplies in California to ensure profits for years to come "” and opposing the state's climate change law as a means to ensure that constraint.

"CalPERS and CalSTRS should not be investing in Texas oil companies that hurt the California economy, no more than they should invest in companies that spend millions of shareholder dollars to undermine California's environmental laws and the state's green energy industries and green tech jobs," Lockyer wrote.

Lockyer, a board member at CalPERS, is expected to ask the board tomorrow to divest Valero and Tesoro holdings during a meeting."

The Green Hell blog added:

It was also reported to this blog that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who views the global warming law as his signature accomplishment, kept Chevron out of the Proposition 23 battle by threatening the company with adverse tax measures.

Me, in January 2009:

But there is an even better reason why the stimulus bill will never work:   it is simply impossible to break ground on any new government construction project in less than a year.A year from now, any truly new incremental project in the stimulus bill will still be sitting on some planners desk with unfinished environmental impact assessments, the subject of arguments between multiple government agencies, tied up in court with environmental or NIMBY challenges, snarled in zoning fights, subject to conflicts between state, county, and city governments, or all of the above.  Most of the money will have been spent by planners, bureaucrats, and lawyers, with little to show for in actual facilities.

Obama, in October 2010

In the magazine article, Mr. Obama reflects on his presidency, admitting that he let himself look too much like "the same old tax-and-spend Democrat," realized too late that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects"

How smart can the guy be if it takes him two years to figure out what random schmoes like me thought was obvious?

Private companies often come running to the government to protect themselves from competition.  Sometimes they are successful, and get government licensing and certification requirements that help create barriers to entry that protect incumbents  (if incumbents are lucky, they will actually get to control the licensing and certification board and testing process).

But whether or note private companies have the political muscle to get this kind of protection, the government almost always protects itself whenever it embarks on any sort of quasi-commercial enterprise.  The ban on first class mail delivery competition is one example (as an aside, when email began making an end run around this ban, the USPS actually made a [fortunately failed] play to be the monopoly email provider).  In Denver, there was a story a while back that after they built a new toll road, they added traffic lights and lowered the speed limit on a parallel free road to drive more people to the toll road.

Carpe Diem brings another example:

"When the old arena for the Orlando Magic opened 21 years ago, it was common for Parramore neighborhood residents who lived nearby to charge Magic fans and concert-goers to park on their property. But five weeks ago, the Orlando City Council approved standards that will likely keep most Parramore homeowners from profiting on parking near the Orlando Magic's new $480 million Amway Center (pictured above).

Among other things, property owners must pay a $275 application fee and provide a business tax receipt. Lots must have an attendant, signs, proper lighting and a paved, gravel or grass surface free of potholes or ruts. City officials also recommend hiring security. Even when all those requirements are met, temporary parking lots are allowed only during an event expected to draw at least 5,000 attendees. So far, five applications have been approved, but all are for large properties such as churches, not homeowners.

The city, meanwhile, has doubled its event-parking rate to $20 at the two garages closest to the Amway Center; elsewhere, event parking at city garages and lots is $10."

The last sentence explains the first two. They are trying to charge an above market price for parking, so must constrain supply to avoid being undercut.

Kevin Drum is, by my description (I don't know what he would call himself) a leftish technocrat.  My read on him is that he sees a beneficial role for government via smart people sitting at the top and optimizing systems (e.g. the economy, energy policy, climate, etc).  This is a consistent with a century-old branch of American progressivism, that distrusts chaotic outcomes of individual action and believes top-down optimization is called for.

The problem with this approach (discussed by Hayek and many others) is such top down optimization is impossible for a variety of reasons, from information to incentives.  There is simply a myriad of examples where supposedly smart government officials attempted such technocratic tinkering and only ended up with a mess.  I always supposed folks who argue for more of the same simply mentally ignored these examples.

But here is Kevin Drum lamenting the insanity of ethanol subsidies (for which he should be praised).  Ethanol subsidies are absolutely counter-productive, but have been central to our top down US energy policy for over a decade.

So what I can't understand is how he keeps these two ideas in his head simultaneously -- of this ideal of brilliant actors managing the economy from above and the reality of ethanol policy.  I suppose he could argue, as many technocrats do, that if only his guys were in power, everything would be different.  But his guys are in power, and in fact his guys have been the main drivers and supporters of ethanol subsidies.

I have written a number of times about why even smart guys fail to do smart things when plopped down in the government.

Two great examples:

1.  Barney Frank is supposedly going to remake housing finance after having helped destroy it by his actions over the last 20 years.  In particular, after his polititization of Fannie Mae's business goals over the last 20 years, and constant fight to prevent any kind of oversight of Fannie and Freddie, which has led to over a hundred billion dollars and perhaps as high as $400 billion in taxpayer losses, Barney is going to do more of the same with Frannie and Freddie now that the government has full control of these entities.

2.  A NY state child protective services study shows that all their resources provide little real benefit to endangered children.  The solution -- do even more of the same.

And don't forget the classic example, the 10x increase in public school funding to no apparent benefit:

Greenwald on the ability of Presidents to have Americans assassinated:

During the Bush-era torture debates, I was never able to get past my initial incredulity that we were even having a "debate" over whether the President has the authority to torture people.  Andrew Sullivan has responded to some of the questions I posed about his defense of Obama's assassination program, and I realize now that throughout this whole assassination debate, specific legal and factual issues aside, my overarching reaction is quite similar:  I actually can't believe that there is even a "debate" over whether an American President -- without a shred of due process or oversight -- has the power to compile hit lists of American citizens whom he orders the CIA to kill far away from any battlefield.  The notion that the President has such an unconstrained, unchecked power is such a blatant distortion of everything our political system is supposed to be -- such a pure embodiment of the very definition of tyrannical power -- that, no matter how many times I see it, it's still hard for me to believe there are people willing to expressly defend it.

The whole post is an excellent defense of Constitutional protections and limited government.  If only he would treat the government's taking the product of peoples' labor with the same logic.

I had a real zoo of a week last week - one of those stretches I have every once in a while in business where new items were being tossed into my queue far faster than I could take care of them.

One of the most amazing was courtesy of the state of Florida.  Almost exactly a year ago, I submitted some backup data on my Florida revenues in 2006 to an auditor for sales taxes.  Such audits are entirely usual and routine (if irritating) and come up with some regularity.  There was no way the auditor could have figured out my tax submission from what I initially sent him - I would have to spend time explaining what different categories in my revenue reports and GL meant.  Further, I had data on seven locations which are divided in the tax reports into two county reports, but he did not have the data for which should go to which.

Well, I never heard from the guy for a whole year to clarify these issues.  Not sure what he was doing, but he was probably screwing up somehow, because on Friday his supervisor called me and told me that the statute of limitations was almost up on 2006 and they needed to complete the audit.  To this end, the auditor had submitted to her some mess of a set of numbers (see my comments above, he couldn't have done a correct job no matter how competent he was since he never asked me for all the information he needed).  I can see the guy rushing around trying to cover his ass having probably forgotten about it for a year.  Anyway, I told the lady that the statute of limitations was her problem, not mine, because her employee initially contacted me a year ago and had been sitting on the case all that time.

Well, I guess I was naive.  It turns out the statute of limitations is in fact my problem in the power imbalance that exists between me and the state of Florida.  She told me that, admitting she had no basis for doing so, she was going to file a lien against me for $40,000 in unpaid taxes as a "placeholder" to get in under the statute of limitations.  Yes, this would trash my credit and my legal standing and cause me no end of problems having a government lien on my company, but it would circumvent the horrible situation that when they actually did the work they should have done a year ago, I might owe taxes they could not collect.

Of course I told her this was BS and of course that got me about nowhere.  After a lot of time, I got one concession.  If I could prove I was clean by Monday, they would not issue the lien.  Well I spent all Friday, Friday night, and Saturday working up the analysis that is supposed to be their job, working on a 1 business day deadline because they had pissed away 250 business days sitting on my case file.  Completing the analysis, I calculated I under-paid taxes by just under $7.  We will see on Monday if I am able to battle back against this absurd thuggery.  By the way, we are being audited everywhere by local governments hoping to dredge up a few pennies from the couch cushions.  It is taking so much of my time that I actually chose to back off of bidding on a couple of new projects -- no time to spare.  So much for stimulus.

On the bright side, I have a lot of good stuff saved up to blog but I did not feel like it on Sunday.  Instead, I spent some time soldering switches and other trackwork on my n-scale railroad.  Made good progress, only about 3 more switches left to build on this module (the switches below are obviously before painting and adding wood ties.  Examples of finished work is here).

Update: By the way, I operate in red states and blue states and cannot detect any real difference in how arbitrarily I am treated by the state bureaucracy (with the exception of California, which stands alone at the top of the list of state bureaucracies that are a pain to deal with).  They differ in laws and tax rates, that often make red states more hospitable, but their bureaucrats are all about the same.

It is amazing how certain institutions remain true to their DNA.  I have already written twice about petty, mindless bureaucratic management in Mono County, California.  They have yet again surpassed themselves with absurd inflexibility.  I have occupancy licenses for each of our campgrounds there, about 12 sites.   We are entirely current and have been punctilious about paying our County taxes on all sites month after month for 10 years.

Then, recently, apparently they sent out renewals on the licenses that somehow did not get to our mail box.  So we missed the renewal deadline.   Of course their position is that we are still responsible for renewing, but realize I have 175 locations across the country with zillions of license registrations.  They admit we are entirely up to date on our taxes, we just did not submit the renewal fee for the licenses.  There is no approval or regulatory process with the licenses, its just a way for them to collect  a fee.

Well, without any second notice or phone call or any other such normal business courtesy, they canceled all the licenses.  I now have to fill out pages of license applications 12 times, and submit 12 penalty fees, all for a total cost of over $1,000 and hours and hours of my time.

Can you imagine the outcry if the phone company or electric company or your landlord turned off service after one missed payment without any kind of second notice?  But of course these guys are the government so we can be sure that they are public-spirited, lol.  Seriously, they could not even turn the licenses back on with a payment, I have to start entirely from scratch with new applications.  This is like 14 days after the payment due date.  I called them 1 hour after receiving the 2nd notice to sort this out, but for these guys the second notice is a termination notice.  Nice.

Via Watts Up With That:

In another example of vital statistics being grossly distorted by a combination of poor record keeping and possibly people with a selfish agenda, it is being reported in the Guardian and elsewhere that possibly hundreds of thousands of people over age 100 in Japan are actually dead, but unreported. Investigations are now underway to determine how much of this problem is due to record keeping problems and how much to family members failing to report the deaths of their elderly relatives in order to continue to collect their pension benefits by fraudulent means.

There are more than 77,000 Japanese citizens reported to be over age 120, and even 884 persons AGED OVER 150 YEARS OF AGE, who are still alive according to government rolls.

While we in the US wouldn't bat an eye if we heard this story coming out of the Chicago area of Cook County, Illinois, given the number of dead people still actively voting in elections there, there are at least 230,000 people in Japan over age 100 who simply cannot be located by any means. This large centenarian population is largely responsible for the very high average life expectancy in Japan (currently listed by the World Bank as 82.6 years, more than four years greater than the US average of 78.4 years (this is including dead voters in Chicago)), as well as any senior citizens under 100 who are actually dead but have not been reported as such on government records.