Coyote Blog

Arizona has pages of ballot initiatives (or propositions) up for vote on the ballot tomorrow.  Here is my approach to voting on these initiatives:

• My default is a no vote on everything.  After all, most of these initiatives are regulations and tax increases that even the legislature, not shy about passing either, has not wanted to take on.   Having a default vote is very helpful - if I am unsure, if there is doubt, if I don't fully understand the issue, then it gets a "no".  Like "not guilty" in a criminal trial, its my default answer.
• I then look for tax cuts and regulation relief.  There tends to be little of this.  We have one ballot initiative that looks like it will help keep property taxes under control, and one that does a nice job circumscribing eminent domain takings as well as regulating "soft" takings (changes to zoning or land use that make a property less valuable without compensation).  On these I will switch my vote to "yes".
• I then look at bond issues.  A growing city like Phoenix needs facility expansions, and bond issues are a reasonable way to do so.  However, a lot of crap gets loaded in these.  Typically they will say the bond issue is "for schools" to get everyone to vote for it and then load a lot of garbage in it.  I believe California has some of this going on.  We have no bond issues up for vote in my district but we do have a proposition to increase the size limit of future bond issuances.  I am still thinking about this one, but if I can't get excited about it, it gets the default vote - "no".
• I will then consider procedural changes in government, but with a heavy bias towards "no" due to the laws of unintended consequences.  I don't understand the procedural changes being suggested in two initiatives on public land use so I will vote no on both.  I will definitely vote no on the proposal to pay people to vote with a lotter ticket.  The proposal to effectively switch Arizona to all absentee balloting with virtually no polls is intriguing, but seems fraught with possibilities for unintended consequences (or secretly intended consequences I don't understand) so I will vote no there too.

Police are getting way too aggressive with SWAT teams conducting raids for minor drug offenses.  Here is another story from Houston, via Tom Kirkendall:

Based on the evidence in the trash, a regional SWAT team arrived at
the home. Police say they knocked, waited 30 seconds, and then broke in
with guns and a concussion grenade. The house suffered $5,000 damage
and one officer shot and killed Margot's golden lab, Shadow, when
police say it charged toward one of the officers. What did officers
find inside?

"A joint half the size of my pinky fingernail and then one about
this big," she said, showing a length on her finger. "And not anywhere
near this big around."

We have the same problem with our egomaniacal sheriff in Phoenix.

The single post from way back that I still get the most Google hits from (and the most nasty email, I might add) was my post on the myth that public schools teachers are underpaid.  This was a follow-on post to my lengthy post fisking the NEA's school improvement plans and here too.  The premise in all these posts was that 1) Public schools actually spent more per pupil than private schools that do a better job and 2) Teachers, when you adjust their total hours to match other workers who don't get summers off, make a salary very competitive to other professionals, even before their hefty government benefits package.

The Goldwater Institute has just completed a study of Arizona private schools, and has come to many of the same conclusions.  The study's author, Andrew Coulson, summarizes the findings:

In a study released yesterday
by the Goldwater Institute, I analyze the results of their most recent
private school survey. Among the other fascinating findings is that
public schools spend one-and-a-half times as much per pupil as do
private schools. Or, looked at the other way, private schools spend a
third less than public schools.

Some other fascinating tidbits:

Teachers make up 72 percent of on-site staff in Arizona's independent education sector, but less than half
of on-site staff in the public sector. In order to match the
independent sector's emphasis on teachers over non-teaching staff,
Arizona public schools would have to hire roughly 25,000 more teachers
and dismiss 21,210 non-teaching employees.

When teachers' 9-month salaries are annualized to make them
comparable to the 12-month salaries of most other fields, Arizona
independent school teachers earned the equivalent of $36,456 in 2004 "”
about $2,000 less than reporters and correspondents. The
12-month-equivalent salary of the state's public school teachers was
around $60,000, which is more than nuclear technicians,
epidemiologists, detectives, and broadcast news analysts. It's also
about 50 percent more than reporters or private school teachers earn.

My kids go to an absolutely fabulous private school here in Phoenix.  It is secular and (gasp) actually runs for-profit, so it has no endowments or sources of grants or charitable funds.  In exchange for a great education that far outstrips the quality of even the best local schools, it charges a tuition substantially less than the Phoenix-area per-pupil public school spending (and it offers a 20% discount for each child over one).  If you are considering a move to the area, email me and I will give you more detail.

More here on the virtues of school choice.  This is a sort of related post on the barriers to starting a private school.

I had been lulled into thinking maybe the US Postal Service was modernizing, but I was wrong.  I have a PO Box in Colorado where I have my mail for our business forwarded to our Phoenix office for the winter months.  However, there is apparently absolutely no way to have all the mail coming to that box forwarded.  It can only be forwarded by name.  So, if I have 7 business names and 12 employees with mail in that box, I have to submit 19 change of address cards.  And, if anyone makes a typo in mailing to one of these 19 names, it won't get forwarded - only if the letter is addressed to the name exactly as it is written in the change of address card will it get to me.  Anyone want to guess how often that happens?

Apparently there is a new study being trumpeted by social conservatives to help them begin a new attack on raunchy song lyrics.  The Rand study to be published in the journal Pediatrics did phone interviews with a bunch of teenagers, asking them about their sexual habits and what songs they listen to.  They found a correlation that teenagers tend to listen to more sexually-degrading music also are more likely to subsequently begin having sex (or having more sex).  The articles reporting on this study have headlines like this:

Study: Raunchy Music = Earlier Sex

The implication is that listening to sexually-charged* music causes more early sex.  But in fact, they don't know that.   Before it starts to rain here in Phoenix, the sky goes dark and the winds pick up.  Does this mean that darkening skies and increasing winds cause rain?  Or are darkening skies and winds merely a leading edge symptom of a broader phenomena that also includes rain, which we might call "a thunderstorm moving through town."

Does interest in sexually degrading lyrics actually cause teenagers to have sex when they might not have otherwise?  Or is this interest in such music merely a leading indicator, a symptom on the leading edge of a larger phenomena that one might label "adolescence" or "hormone overload."  As an alternative hypothesis to explain the data, one could argue that listening to this music is merely an early low-risk form of sexual experimentation, like sneaking a peek at the Playboy magazines at the local 7-11, which then gets followed up by (but doesn't cause) physical sex. 

I don't know the answer.   Though few would describe me as a puritan, I certainly won't let some of that crappy music in the house (I do check what the kids are downloading on iTunes).  On the other hand, "Don't Fear the Reaper" was one of my favorite songs for years and I never felt the slightest urge to kill myself. 

What I do know is that you absolutely have to beware of the media when they report studies and statistics, and correlation=causation is their absolute favorite mistake to make.

* the article makes a second mistake, in that the study authors found a difference between the correlation of teen sex with sexually degrading music vs. just music with sexual content.  The media also misses this distinction.

Postscript:  This article about professional wrestling leading to teenage violence seems to make the same mistakes

Phoenix hit with rains and flooding.  Where's FEMA?  Where's Bush?  Where's my $2000 Visa card?  The government is intentially ignoring us because, uh, we're all rich white people with plastic surgery.  I heard that tens of refugees were all trapped in a local Hooters for hours and hours with no national gaurd to protect them. 

Below is the Indian Bend Wash mentioned in the article, which is next to my house:

LOL, the whole town was laughing at the national coverage our morning rainstorm got.  Drive time DJ's were particularly mocking Wolf Blitzers breathless commentary.  They were interviewing people who had panicked calls from out of town relatives who had seen the coverage, only to meet with confused shrugs of local residents who may not even have noticed.

The rain lasted barely longer than an hour, and the streets were dry by the time I went to get the kids from school.  We did have flash flooding in our "washes" (what we call dry river beds) but that is to be expected since desert soil does not absorb water quickly and so you get a lot of water runoff.  Also, Phoenix has few storm sewers -- it accepts the fact that things flood once every two years or so, and accepts the costs involved as cheaper than building more infrastructure, which I think is correct.  The golf course is flooded (creating a new island-green) because that's where we put golf courses here - in the dry river bottoms.  The grass grows better there and the land can't be used for anything else and its only a couple of adays a year they get flooded out.

(By the way, yeah, I know I screwed up stitching together the panorama - some of the tree trunks don't match.  I was in a bit of a hurry)

I was fooling around with a great web page run by the Sunlight Foundation linking earmarks from a recent Health and Human Services bill to Google maps.  Here are some of the earmarks in the Phoenix area:

1. $ 400,000 -- Midwestern University for a rural postgraduate educational program at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center
2. $ 150,000 -- St. Joseph's Hospital for facilities and equipment for its mobile maternity outreach program
3. $ 750,000 -- Translational Genomics Research Institute for facilities and equipment
4. $ 250,000 --  Arizona State University Institute of Civil Rights, for dropout prevention and other education projects
5. $ 125,000 --  Mesa Community College for nursing recertification curriculum
6. $ 175,000 --  Mesa Community College for the Enfermeras En Escalera program
7. $ 200,000 -- Marc Center for job training for adults with disabilities
8. $ 500,000 -- Scottsdale Healthcare for an electronic medical records system
9. $ 100,000 -- Arizona Dental Foundation to provide dental services to low-income residents of Arizona

Note that this is just from one narrowly focused bill and for one single metropolitan area.  For this one post, I will not be a libertarian and wonder why the government is spending money on some of this crap.  Instead, for one post, I will be a good little technocrat and assume that the government should be doing all these things and criticize the process.

If I were a technocrat, I would argue that Congress already funds an ENORMOUS beauracracy to route federal money to theoretically the most productive spots.  I mean, that's the whole technocratic argument for all this government spending, isn't it?  That the government run by experts in the field can top-down allocate resources better than some bottom up market process?

Ideally, in any budgeting process, you look at your goals for a pool of money - say to cure breast cancer or to provide worker retraining, and you rank projects and allocations against this goal.  I believe this to be an impossible task for a variety of reasons, some of which are described here.  But even if you buy into this theory of technocratic fascism, you STILL have to be appalled by these earmarks.  Because each and every one are an override of any kind of prioritization and thoughtfullness that might exist in the budgeting process.

Take #9.  So the government has a goal of providing dental services to low-income people.  Fine.  Then shouldn't it take its dental services budget and allocate it on the best cost per patient served basis?  Does the Arizona Dental Foundation fit into this picture?  I bet no one in Congress knows.  In fact, I bet it DOESN'T fit this efficient allocation of funds criteria, because otherwise someone in Congress wouldn't have overrrided the funding process to push $100,000 their way in an earmark.  And even if this is a non-profit, shouldn't this kind of thing be bid on -- say ask for proposals of who can do the most with $100,000?

Some of these others are pretty obscure, and say something in and of themselves about the reach of the federal government these days.  But take #3.  Is the Translational Genomics Research Institute the best place to spend 3/4 million to get the most bang for our health research dollars?  No one probably knows, but what I can tell you is that it is the darling of our local political establishment (just read its history, all about political namedropping, new facilities, and whoring for taxpayer funds without mention of any actual research).  It has political figures such as our current governor on the board, so you might be able to guess how they got their earmark.

Or look at #8.  Scottsdale Healthcare is a private company, though a not-for-profit.  It is a large provider of private, paid medical services in our area.  It, out of all of its competitors in town, both non-profits and for-profits, was chosen by Congress to get its medical records system upgraded by the US taxpayers, why?

Yet another company is falling into what I call the franchise trap, as Krispy Kreme's woes continue, including closure of its Arizona stores.  Just about 5 years ago, I remember when they first showed up here in Phoenix - there were long lines and police directing traffic around the stores.  Now, they're dead.  And the corporate parent is struggling.

If memory serves, Boston Chicken (now Boston Market) and Jiffy Lube both had their corporate parents go into bankruptcy at the back end of their wild growth phases.  This is what I mean by the franchise trap:  Franchises generally start out as a single location that does well.  Wanting to grow quickly, and lacking the capital to build their own stores, they adopt a franchise model for growth.  Soon, wild growth may ensue if their concept is good, and they discover that selling franchises is more profitable than selling whatever they sold in the store.  Once the growth phase ends, though, they often hit an iceberg.  Inevitably, they find that many of their franchisees either can't cut the mustard or chose poor locations and go bankrupt.  In addition, they must make the transition back from growing by selling franchises to growing by incrementally improving the core business.  Many can't make this transition back, corporate bankruptcy ensues, and someone who is an operator rather than a franchise promoter comes in and cleans up the house.

I thought the city of Washington DC had declared a "Crime emergency" because there was too much crime.  Apparently not, since they have created a whole new class of criminals:  16-year-olds who are ... shudder ... out and about after 10PM.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday that the city had to
set the new 10 p.m. curfew for youths 16 and younger because of
"irresponsible" parents who don't control their children.

"You shouldn't need a curfew if you've got parents who are
responsible," Ramsey said on Washington Post Radio. "But unfortunately
we've got some parents here that are totally irresponsible. Their idea
of raising a kid is throwing a kid out of the house and letting them
straggle back in at 2 o' clock in the morning."

Hat tip to Reason's Hit and Run, which had this comment:

It's not that city officials want to play parent to every kid in the district. It's just that, gosh, turns out law enforcement professionals are better parents.

I hate to think what ideas this will give our local stormtrooper Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff with the largest PR budget in the nation. 

Props by the way to Phoenix New Times reporter John Dougherty, whose longstanding reporting on Sheriff Joe is reminiscent of the tough, confrontational local reporting of old.  Of course, there's no room for that in the milquetoast pander-to-the-local-pols reality of big-city newspapers today, so Dougherty is relegated to the local alternative paper (which may not be fair -- I don't know Mr. Dougherty -- he may prefer to be where he is).   Sheriff Joe is popular here in Phoenix, so the Arizona Republic (the big paper here) panders to him rather than risk confronting a popular figure.  The fact that one of Sheriff Joe's family helps run the Arizona Republic's editorial page may also have something to do with it.

I have written several times about the phenomena of certain nativist Americans who get absolutely freaked out whenever they even encounter Spanish in the good old USA.  Here is another example of what I have started calling Spanish Derangement Syndrome:

A Spanish-language billboard promoting iced coffee is getting a chilly reception from some Bogota officials.

Mayor Steve Lonegan said the McDonald's billboard on River Road near
Elm Avenue and the railroad overpass is offensive because it sends the
message that Spanish speakers and immigrants do not need to learn how
to speak English.

Boy would this guy ever blow a gasket here in Phoenix!  So I have a counter proposal.  Everywhere that Steve Lonegan travels overseas, I think they should remove their English signs and everyone should refuse to speak English.  No English signs in airports, no English-speaking people at the hotel desk, no International Herald Tribune on the newsstand.   After all, having English signs and English-speaking customer contact people all over, say, Germany, just sends the message that Americans don't have to learn German to travel there.

I am reminded that nearly every country in the world has an "American School" where expats send their kids to learn in English and avoid as much contact and assimilation as possible with the local populous.  For example, I had several business associates in Singapore who all sent their kids to the local American School.  Can you imagine what a hissy-fit nativists in the US would throw if there were similar Mexican schools in the US?

Update:  By the way, I don't have any particular problem with English as a criteria for citizenship, but not for mere presence in the country.  Note that I don't consider citizenship the restrictive license that nativists do, as I explained here, among other places.

Also, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the Constitution somehow restricts first amendment speech protections to speech made in English.

Update #2:  Formatting has wigged out a couple of times with this post, with the word "English" formatted out on separate lines each time it appears.  Weird.  Hacker?

I am sure that, since I sort-of live in Scottsdale, you have all been waiting for me to comment on this:

  It started out small, with people all across the country nicknaming this city "Snottsdale."

Then came the reality television show about a local women's book club
where members spend almost no time delving into fine literature but
endless hours discussing Botox, marrying for money and the latest
fashions.

Soon after began the headlines about America's most
famous porn queen buying a Scottsdale strip club and the city's rapid
response: an ordinance that would prohibit dancers from being closer
than 4 feet from clients.

And then--as if all that hadn't been
enough--a guy from Las Vegas carpetbagged into town and opened a
restaurant named after a not-to-be-mentioned-in-polite-company part of
the female anatomy.

I say that I sort-of live in Scottsdale, because I actually live in neighboring Paradise Valley, another suburb of Phoenix, but since almost all the famous people listed in the article as Scottsdale residents actually live in PV, I guess I must count as Scottsdale too.

Anyway, here is my comment:  I think it is freaking hilarious.  Any city that actually spends tax money and chamber of commerce funds to advertise itself nationally as a rich enclave deserves what it gets.  If you try to advertise yourself as the next Beverly Hills 90210, you shouldn't be surprised when the media treats you like, well, Beverly Hills 90210. 

I will say that growing up in Houston and living in Dallas for years has somewhat immunized me to the hijinx of the tacky biologically-augmented nouveau riche.  While those who grew up in the Scottsdale that was the quiet horse town seem to be pretty bent out of shape by the town's new reputation, I don't see many of them complaining about the increases they have had of late in their real estate values.  And if the rich scene is more like Paris Hilton than like a Literary Lions Ball at the Met, well, at least it has some entertainment value.  (Though not too much, since CBS is cancelling their reality show).

The best feature of Scottsdale has to be school functions, because Scottsdale does lead the nation on the hot mom index.  I remember when we first moved here both my wife and I were floored at the women at the first school function we attended.  Heck, I still volunteer to drive the kids to school in the morning.  And don't even get me started about women at the Phoenix Open -- there is a reason the tournament is still a favorite among tour players despite the roudy crowds.

In conclusion, returning to the article, I couldn't have said it better than this:

"Oh, get over it," she said. "So what
if people want to make fun of us? Every city has its own particular
brand of strangeness. For some it may be gangs or drugs or troubled
youth. We just happen to have some over-Botoxed blonds with oversexed
tendencies."

I write in this blog often on my frustrations with regulation, but last night I learned, if I did not know it already, that things could be much worse.  I had dinner with some friends in London who are in the middle of a home improvement and renovation project on their 1830's era townhouse.  Now, I just completed a renovation of my own (1980's era) home in Phoenix, and, while home improvement is always frustrating, I at least had few problems with the city.  Phoenix will let you do about anything you want to your home as long as you respect your setbacks and don't install a nuclear reactor.

My London friends were not so lucky.  Their home is rated a class 2 historic structure, which means it gets a bit less scrutiny than class 1 palaces and stuff, but it still comes in for a lot of regulation.  Their plans had to be approved in detail, and I mean in gory detail, with the local history Nazis.  And this is for a building that really has little historic or aesthetic value (the owners would be the first to admit this) in a neighborhood that was nearly blighted thirty years ago. 

My hosts pointed out the dining room lighting, which was really dim (you could not see your food very well) band told me that the authorities would not let them add lighting fixtures to the room.  No doorways, moldings, or walls could be changed.  The funniest example of this was a doorway cut in a wall 20 years ago.  The government inspector came through the house and said "well, that door is not historic but I like it so you can't change it."  They thought the inspector was joking, but, after a lot of effort to get approval to change the door, found out she was not kidding. 

The staircase to the top floor (originally the servant's quarters) was steep and unsafe for their children, but the inspector insisted it could not be changed because the "logic" of having the servant's quarters accessible by a difficult staircase needed to be maintained.  The homeowners rebuttal that they had no servants and were more concerned with safety than the history of class differences in Britain had no effect.  In several cases where the homeowners argued that the portions of their house they wanted to change was not original to the house (and therefore not covered by restrictions) it was made clear that the burden of proof was on them, the homeowners, and not on the government.

As one other funny sidebar, the basements and below grade areas of these homes apparently don't fall under this scrutiny or are exempted in some way.  As a result, everyone in his neighborhood seems to be tunneling out into their backyards to expand their house.  One homeowner bought three adjacent homes and tunneled out enough area for an indoor underground swimming pool.

Can you imagine if someday the US government decided that those 1970's homes were subject to such historic restrictions?  Suddenly, by government fiat, instead of being stuck forever with insufficient lighting and unsafe staircases, you might get stuck with orange shag carpet and gold-mirrored walls.  If you think this is ridiculous, read this.

Suffice it to say, I am tired of a relatively small group of people imposing their wishes on other people's property, a practice I call eminent domain without compensation.  If you want something specific done to a piece of property, then buy it and have at it.

ABCNews is asking viewers to submit stories of evidence they have found for Global Warming in their back yard.

Witnessing the impact of global warming in your life?

ABC News wants to hear from you. We're currently producing a report on the increasing changes in our physical environment, and are looking for interesting examples of people coping with the differences in their daily lives. Has your life been directly affected by global warming?

We want to hear and see your stories. Have you noticed changes in your own backyard or hometown? The differences can be large or small--altered blooming schedules, unusual animals that have arrived in your community, higher water levels encroaching on your property.

Show us what you've seen.

So I submitted my story:

I can remember that just five years ago, the summers at my house used to be relatively cool and very wet.  Our summer temperatures never got much above 80 degrees, and it would rain every few days, at least.

The last couple of summers, temperatures have soared as high as 112 degrees at my house, and we have at times gone whole months without rain.

I am terrified at these effects of global warming.  Several of my "friends" have said they think this change has more to do with my move from Seattle to Phoenix, but they are clearly in the pay of the oil companies.

I have explained to them that ABC News and their climate reporting have educated me that small anecdotal blips in the local weather are scientifically valid proof of long-term global climate changes.

For example, my Exxon-butt-kissing friends tried to claim that for over a century, hurricane activity has followed a 20-40 year cycle, and that the recent upsurge in hurricane activity is due to the return of the "busy" end of the cycle.  I know from ABC that in fact our two-hundred years of burning fossil fuels have cause CO2 to build up and lurk in the atmosphere, ready to jump out and increase hurricane activity suddenly in 2005.

Its great to see that ABC has adopted the same lofty levels of scientific proof that are used by the rest of the environmental community.

So we're going to build a wall and send an army to the border.

Maintaining a military to defend a group of people against outsiders who wish to use force against them is one of the core functions of government.  Even crazed libertarian anarcho-capitalists like myself concede it as a function of government.  If libertarians were to have their version of the ten commandments, the only phrase that would have to be on the stone is "Thou shalt not deal with thy neighbor through force or fraud."  The government maintains police and a military to handle the people who wish to violate this one commandment.

Throughout the years, countries have built armies and fortifications to defend against invaders who wanted to loot their lands, or steal their property, or impose their own version of racial or religious uniformity.  The US Army itself has fought for freedom, it has fought to restore democracy and individual rights, it has fought to stop genocides. 

Today, the US Army sallies forth again, to fight for and defend .... what? 

It fights to stop waves of Mexican immigrants that are dangerous because they ... want to freely exchange their labor with US Citizens?

It fights to protect Americans from ... competition for unskilled labor jobs?

It valiantly rides forth to make sure Americans never face the horror of ... interacting with someone with only broken English?

The soldiers racing to the borders are not fighting for me, because I am not in danger.  And neither is anyone around me here in Arizona -- no one from outside the border is threatening me with force or fraud (surprisingly frequent emailers sending me messages about Mexicans all being diseased criminals notwithstanding).  Its not like I live blithely ignorant of the border area in Kansas.  I life in Phoenix, and run businesses  right down on the border.  I don't feel a threat or danger.  In fact, the only danger I see is that the army may come down and drag families who are my friends out of their homes and out of the country (or into concentration camps, as one conservative writer longed for).

Immigration opponents are sometimes a little hazy about what danger they are trying to fix.  I agree there is a problem with the welfare state when it meets immigration, which I discussed here and proposed a solution for it here.  Democratic politicians still are confused on this particular problem, wanting some immigration solution but refusing to consider limiting access to the welfare state.   If the problem is infrastructure (police, prisons, schools, etc.) then it could be possible to provide national funds to border regions for this purpose, rather than for armies and walls (the Feds, after all, are handing out hundreds of billions to New Orleans).  And if the problem is too many people who don't look like us Anglo-Saxons, well, sorry  (If you don't think that this is the real issue for many anti-immigration folks, think about the recent scare headlines that soon a majority in the US may be Hispanic.  Can you imagine similar anxiety over the headline "majority of US may soon be of Canadian descent"?)

Update:  Nick Gillespie comments on the fact that Congress has given its official sanction to my speaking English.

Thank you, Middle Eastern 9/11 hijackers, for finally getting the point
through our thick skulls (forgive our slowness, but all too many of us are
descended from immigrants) that the greatest security threat to the United
States is the influx of Spanish speakers from across the border with Mexico.

Christ, it's bad enough that we have to eat foreign food, live in states
with Spanish-derived names, and answer that extra question about which
language to use at the ATM. (Thought experiment: How much is that extra
second or two of time slowing down the U.S. economy and driving down our
productivity, precisely at the moment when the Chinese are breathing down
our
necks like a bunch of post-industrial railroad coolies? You can be damn sure
that the Chinese government doesn't allow ATM users to pick their own
language.)

As I have written before, I have gotten more bizzaro emails on my pro-immigration stand than anything else I have written about.  Gillespie apparently has had the same experience.

The Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute is looking for a Director of Administration and a Director of Development.  If you have always wanted to convert your desire for small government into a paying job, this might be your chance.  From their web site:

The Goldwater Institute was founded in 1988 by a small group of
entrepreneurial Arizonans with the blessing of Sen. Barry Goldwater.
Like our namesake, the Goldwater Institute board and staff share a
belief in the innate dignity of individual human beings, that America
is a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of
regular men and women, and, that while the legitimate functions of
government are conducive to freedom, unrestrained government has proved
to be a chief instrument in history for thwarting individual liberty.
Through research and education, the Goldwater Institute works to
broaden the parameters of policy discussions to allow consideration of
policies consistent with the founding principles of free societies....

With the legislature introducing thousands of new bills every year,
it's nearly impossible for the average person to know when or where his
liberties are threatened, much less do anything about it. The Goldwater
Institute works on behalf of Arizonans to keep watch on government and
to expand school choice, restore economic liberty, protect private
property, and affirm Arizona's independence against unconstitutional
federal encroachments.

Check out this very nice NY Times article (I think it is outside the firewall) on Harvard economist Edward Glaeser and his takes on urban economics and housing markets.  One study of his that resonates with me is his research about just how much modern regulation and zoning is contributing to the high cost of housing:

Glaeser and several colleagues considered two explanations. First, the
possibility that builders in the metro area were running out of land and that
home prices reflected that scarcity. The second hypothesis was that building
permits were scarce, not land. Had the 187 townships in the metro area created a
web of regulations that hindered building to such a degree that demand far
outstripped supply, driving prices up?

Almost as a rule, Glaeser is skeptical of the lack-of-land argument. He has
previously noted (with a collaborator, Matthew Kahn) that 95 percent of the
United States remains undeveloped and that if every American were given a house
on a quarter acre, so that every family of four had a full acre, that
distribution would not use up half the land in Texas. Most of Boston's metro
area, he concluded, wasn't particularly dense, and even in places where it was,
like the centers of Boston and Cambridge, there was ample opportunity to
construct higher buildings with more housing units.

So, after sorting through a mountain of data, Glaeser decided that the
housing crisis was man-made. The region's zoning regulations "” which were
enacted by locales in the first half of the 20th century to separate residential
land from commercial and industrial land and which generally promoted the
orderly growth of suburbs "” had become so various and complex in the second half
of the 20th century that they were limiting growth. Land-use rules of the 1920's
were meant to assure homeowners that their neighbors wouldn't raise hogs in
their backyards, throw up a shack on a sliver of land nearby or build a factory
next door, but the zoning rules of the 1970's and 1980's were different in
nature and effect. Regulations in Glaeser's new hometown of Weston, for
instance, made extremely large lot sizes mandatory in some neighborhoods and
placed high environmental hurdles (some reasonable, others not, in Glaeser's
view) in front of developers. Other towns passed ordinances governing sidewalks,
street widths, the shape of lots, septic lines and so on "” all with the result,
in Glaeser's analysis, of curtailing the supply of housing. The same phenomenon,
he says, has inflated prices in metro areas all along the East and West Coasts.

One of his other areas of research was new to me.  Glaeser argues that the long-lived nature of housing is part of what keeps cities like Detroit and St. Louis around long after the economic and demographic logic would have had them die. 

Glaeser and Gyourko determined that the durable nature of housing itself
explains this phenomenon. People can flee, but houses can take a century or more
to finally fall to pieces. "These places still exist," Glaeser says of Detroit
and St. Louis, "because the housing is permanent. And if you want to understand
why they're poor, it's actually also in part because the housing is permanent."
For Glaeser, this is the story not only of these two places but also of Buffalo,
Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh "” the powerhouse cities of
America in 1950 that consistently and inexorably lost population over the next
50 years. It is not just that there were poor people and the jobs left and the
poor people were stuck there. "Thousands of poor come to Detroit each year and
live in places that are cheaper than any other place to live in part because
they've got durable housing still around," Glaeser says. The net population of
Detroit usually decreases each year, in other words, but the city still attracts
plenty of people drawn by its extreme affordability. As Gyourko points out, in
the year 2000 the median house price in Philadelphia was $59,700; in Detroit, it
was $63,600. Those prices are well below the actual construction costs of the
homes. "To build them new, it would cost at least $80,000," Gyourko says, "so
there's no builder who would build those today. And as long as those houses
remain, the people remain."

There's a lot more in the article, including a positive economic take on the role of roads and automobiles that he sets in counterpoint to the typical aesthetic arguments against sprawl. 

I found this next bit supremely ironic, though it matches my observations of these cities as well:

Zoning and housing supply ultimately determine not only who lives in a city but
also the very nature of these places. Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan are
obviously becoming rarefied destinations, mostly for America's elites (Glaeser
calls the cities "luxury goods"), with housing floating beyond the reach of the
young and the middle class. These cities' economies are in the process of
becoming boutique, too, accommodating only the most skilled and privileged.
Their desire to limit construction and grow not in buildings and population but
in prices has, in effect, begun to shape their destiny.

Residents of these cities turn up their noses at the aesthetics and red-state politics of places like Houston and Phoenix, piously believing that all the while they are the true friends of the poor, while at the same time putting in place a government-enforced housing system that only the rich can afford, driving those of moderate incomes to, well, Houston and Phoenix.

This last observation provides a fitting conclusion:

And what surprises him is that the changes in how we have treated property
rights for the last 40 years "” who gets permission to build, the size and
location of what owners are permitted to build "” have been the subject of
virtually no national dialogue, even as the effects on prices, in his view, have
been extraordinary.

As the Enron trial lumbers towards the end of its second week, Tom Kirkendall continues to have good analysis (keep scrolling).  While the Enron bankruptcy has spawned a number of books, it is likely that the Enron prosecution may spawn a few of its own.  Already, the prosecution has botched trials thought to be lay-ups and has demonstrated a new level of presecutorial abuse.  I know that most people have little sympathy for the defendants, but one has to be concerned with the tactics being used in these cases.  From reading his posts, while its early in the game, the defense may be ahead on points, as the prosecution made another tactical error in leading with and spending far too long with a weak witness, indicating that they are ready to commit on the same mistakes they made in the failed broadband trial.

By the way, this snippet is very funny - the indictment against Skilling and Lay is apparently so unclear and confusing and poorly written that the prosecution, who wrote it, is asking that the judge not allow it to be mentioned or quoted in the trial.  LOL - they are asking that no one mention the charges against the defendants in front of the jury.  Which is actually pretty appropriate, since in effect the prosecution is going to try to get Skilling and Lay convicted of being rich and unlikable rather than convicted of any specific charges.

By the way, we in Phoenix have been watching the revelations about gambling surrounding our Coyotes coaching staff.  The leaks by the police of as-yet unproven charges against prominent people is yet another abuse that happens all-too-often.  Beyond my own questions as to why gambling of this sort is even illegal in this day and age, it is crystal clear to me that the NJ police are going out of their way to leak insinuations of Gretsky involvement, which I don't think they can prove, merely to get press and attention for themselves.

Below in my first post on the old 1968 edition of The Population Bomb, I said one of the key mistakes of these doomsayers was static analysis, which I described as:

blind projection of trendlines without any allowance for individuals
actually doing something to alter those trends, particularly in
response to pricing signals.  This leads not only to predictions of
disaster, but to the consistent conclusion that only governments
coercing individuals on a massive scale can avert dire consequences for
humanity

A great example of the static analysis fallacy in action today in in the debate on school choice.  School choice opponents often bring out some or all of these arguments:

• Private schools are often more expensive than public schools, so even with vouchers set at the state per pupil spending, many won't be able to afford private schools
• Private schools have admissions requirements and testing, such that many students will not be able to meet the cut
• Private schools are disproportionately religious, leaving few options for secular parents
• There are no where near enough private schools for the potential demand

Do you see the consistent fallacy?  All the arguments assume that private schools, in terms of pricing, mission, supply, etc., will remain static and unchanged after a voucher program is instituted.  I hate to waste electrons stating the obvious, but the private schools that exist today did not evolve in a vacuum.  They evolved in a world of monopoly public schools, and their nature is based on that reality.  Change that backdrop, and the schools will change.

For example, take the cost issue.  Sure, many private schools are expensive.  The main reason is that private schools have been created in an environment where their customers must have the ability to pay for their kid's education twice.  My kids go to private school, and every month I pay their bill to go to a public school they don't attend (via my property taxes) and then I pay a second bill to the private school they do attend.  As a result, many private schools have high prices, because their customer base can pay.  If the government instituted a special tax so that everyone received a government-funded Yugo, don't you think that the number of inexpensive cars sold by private companies might dry up some?

But private schooling does not have to be expensive.  My kids go to a fantastic school here in Phoenix.  We have moved around a lot, and we have been lucky enough to be able to send our kids to some very good and sometimes very expensive private schools, and I can say with confidence that their school here is both the best and the cheapest!  In fact, the tuition I pay for an education far, far superior to the local public schools is less than what the state of Arizona spends as an average per pupil in the public schools.

The same type of rebuttal can be made to all the other arguments.  Private schools often have tough admissions requirements because the public schools have already staked out the niche for the lowest-common-denominator education, so private schools differentiate themselves by serving an intellectual elite.  But does anyone doubt that if millions of average kids suddenly had $6000 vouchers in their hands, someone would step up to serve the heart, rather than the tail, of the normal distribution?  And I addressed here the huge potential for private school to evolve to serve a diverse range of viewpoints.

Arizona Watch has a nice post on this same topic, including similar thoughts in response to criticisms of school choice:

The statist arguments against HB 2004 are more clearly spelled out in Mike
McClellan's blog
on AZCentral in which he calls HB 2004 "tuition tax fraud." Mike is (surprise
surprise) a public school teacher. Indicative of the quality of public school
education in Arizona, Mike's arguments against HB 2004 are weak, but I'll
briefly refute them here.

1. Private schools can choose who they take "“ many have entrance exams that
will block some students from entering the school.

Mike's correct: private schools can choose the students they accept. Some
students may not qualify for their first choice school. The real point he's
making here is that some students may not have access to private schools even
with the corporate funding "“ that the bill would create a class divide in
education. That's absolutely incorrect. If private schools become affordable to
a significant portion of the population, then more private schools will emerge.
These schools will assuredly serve different market segments. There will be prep
schools, technical schools, art schools, religious schools, atheist schools, and
schools that just provide a decent basic education. There will even be schools
that specifically serve challenged students "“ those students who Mike claims
won't have access to private schooling. The opposite is true. Schools will be
better able to serve a variety of students in a manner far more effecting than
the current one-size-fits-all public school system.

2. Even if they can attend the school, the tuition might not cover all the
costs the student will incur "“ books, uniforms, other fees. If the schools won't
waive those costs "“ and many can't afford to do that "“ the student's family
might not be able to make up the difference.

Certainly some private schools will be more expensive than the tuition grants
can cover. However, many more will design their tuition structure specifically
to stay within the limits covered by the tuition grants. It is absurd to think
that schools would deliberately price themselves out of the market. If the
demand exists, private schools are going to find a way to meet that demand and
earn those tuition dollars.

3. And here's the big one: Republicans apparently believe there are quality
private schools everywhere. They oughta take a more careful look. While Phoenix
and Tucson have plenty of private schools "“ some far too expensive for the
Republican plan, by the way "“ that is not the case in the rest of the
state.

Do you see a trend here? The answer to this last argument is the same as the
answers to the previous two. Tuition grants will create demand for private
schools. New private schools will emerge to meet that demand and collect that
grant money. This is basic economics.

The one concern I have is that statists and choice opponents have many ways to block private schools.  Even with vouchers, zoning and land use laws in many areas have provided a powerful tool to block private school expansion.

By the way, here is one way to test whether people who make these arguments against choice really mean them or are using them to hide the true reasons that they object to school choice:  If they are right, then what are they worrying about?  No new schools will open, no publicly educated kids will be able to afford or meet the admissions standards of those schools that do exist, so nothing will change.  But they seem really worried about school choice, which makes me think that they don't even believe their own arguments.

Today I ran my first half marathon, at the PF Chang's Rock and Roll Marathon here in Phoenix.  It was fun through about mile 9, and mostly sucked after that.  I am pretty excited that I got through it, though right now I am ready for Kurzweil's singularity because this body definitely needs to be replaced.  My sister runs full marathon's and I laughed when she told me she bandages her nipples and Vaselines her thighs for the race.  Now I wish I had done it too - beyond the joints and muscles those are the two spots that are chafed pretty raw right now.

My time?  Well it was 2:27:20 for 13.1 miles, which is pretty lame since it translates into a blazing 11 minutes per mile, but it does qualify as my personal best!  Update:  They have the stats up on the Internet, so I now know that I finished 10,345th place out of 18,536 finishers, so I seem to have finished just outside of the medals (lol).  By the way, my two sisters both ran the full marathon in Houston on the same day, so combined with my marathon-lite the coyote sibs ran 65.5 miles on Sunday.

The National Review has endorsed our own North Phoenix Congressman John Shadegg for the Speaker of the House.  I second the motion.  Though we don't always see eye-to-eye on some of the "social" issues, Shadegg is one of the few consistent voices for small government left in Congress.

Congressman John Shadegg
of Arizona has jumped into the House majority-leader race. He is a
decided underdog and is taking a personal risk by voluntarily giving up
his leadership slot as head of the Republican Policy Committee to
pursue the majority leadership. But fortune favors the bold, and so do
we. At a time of an ethical crisis, when the Republican majority often
seems to have lost direction, John Shadegg is the right man to clean
house and restore the GOP majority to its core principles. We endorse
John Shadegg for majority leader.

No one doubts Shadegg's talent or his principle. While all three
contenders have conservative voting records, Shadegg is a member of the
class of 1994 who never lost the conservative, reformist spirit of that
watershed year. He voted against No Child Left Behind, and, more
recently, against the prescription-drug bill. He has warm personal
relations with the conference's moderates, and is a fresh face at a
moment that cries out for one.

Update:  I am in full support of this statement:

We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come
close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do
agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs
to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack
Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street.

We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact
advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than
simply influence Members.

But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with
privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms
including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence
operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase
openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations
and in the appropriations process.

As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more
candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the
entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We
hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent
conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope
all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new
media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.

Beyond this statement, I will say that until the government gets out of the game of distributing spoils, of sacrificing one group to the interests of the other, of taking from one person and giving to another, and of controlling how we as individuals make decisions in every aspect of our lives, corruption will never go away in government.  Some men will always be willing to bribe and cheat to use the government to get over on other men, and their victems will be forced to do the same to defend themselves.

Today is the anniversary of one of my favorite bits of Phoenix history.  Many people have seen the Steve McQueen movie "the Great Escape",
about a group of 60 or so prisoners who cleverly dug a tunnel out of a
German POW camp and escaped in various directions across Europe, many
of whom where eventually recaptured.

I don't know if such an event occurred in Europe, but an almost
identical real-life POW escape (tunnel and all) occurred right here in
Phoenix, Arizona almost exactly 60 years ago.

Like many isolated western towns in WWII, Phoenix played host to a
number of German POW's, in our case about 1700 in Papago Park.
Phoenix, and in particular Papago Park, with its arid climate and red rocks, must have been quite a culture shock to the Germans.

Anyway, I won't tell the whole story, but it is fascinating and you can read it all here.  A short excerpt:

The
German prisoners asked their guards for permission to create a
volleyball courtyard. Innocently obliging, the guards provided them
with digging tools. From that point on, two men were digging at all
times during night hours. A cart was rigged up to travel along tracks
to take the dirt out. The men stuffed the dirt in their pants pockets
which had holes in the bottoms, and they shuffled the dirt out along
the ground as they walked around. In addition, they flushed a huge
amount of dirt down the toilets. They labeled their escape route Der Faustball Tunnel (The Volleyball Tunnel).

They
dug a 178 foot tunnel with a diameter of 3 feet. The tunnel went 8 to
14 feet beneath the surface, under the two prison camp fences, a
drainage ditch and a road. The exit was near a power pole in a clump of
brush about 15 feet from the Cross Cut Canal. To disguise their plans,
the men built a square box, filled it with dirt and planted native
weeds in it for the lid to cover the exit. When the lid was on the
tunnel exit, the area looked like undisturbed desert.

There
is some dispute about how many people actually escaped -- official
records say 25.  Others argue that as many as 60 escaped, but since
only 25 were recaptured, 25 was used as the official number to cover up
the fact that German POW's might be roaming about Arizona.

The prisoners who led this escape were clearly daring and inventive,
but unfortunately in Arizona lore they are better known for their one
mistake.  Coming from wet Northern European climes, the prisoners
assumed that the "rivers" marked on their map would actually have
flowing water in them.  Their map showed what looked like the very
substantial Salt River flowing down to the Colorado River and eventual
escape in Mexico.  Unfortunately, the Salt River most of the year (at
least in the Phoenix area) is pretty much a really wide flat body of dirt.  The German expressions as they carried their stolen canoes up to its banks must have been priceless.

It
never occurred to the Germans that in dry Arizona a blue line marked
"river" on a map might be filled with water only occasionally. The
three men with the canoe were disappointed to find the Salt River bed
merely a mud bog from recent rains. Not to be discouraged, they carried
their canoe pieces twenty miles to the confluence with the Gila river,
only to find a series of large puddles. They sat on the river bank, put
their heads in their hands and cried out their frustration.

We probably shouldn't make too much fun of these hapless U-boaters, living in a land so far out of their experience:  Apparently the prison guards made Sargent Schultz look like Sherlock Holmes:

Although
the men left in the wee hours of Christmas Eve, the camp officials were
blissfully unaware of anything amiss until the escapees began to show
up that evening. The first to return was an enlisted man, Herbert
Fuchs, who decided he had been cold, wet and hungry long enough by
Christmas Eve evening. Thinking about his dry, warm bed and hot meal
that the men in the prison camp were enjoying, he decided his attempt
at freedom had come to an end. The 22-year old U-boat crewman hitched a
ride on East Van Buren Street and asked the driver to take him to the
sheriff's office where he surrendered. Much to the surprise of the
officers at the camp, the sheriff called and told them he had a
prisoner who wanted to return to camp.

One
of the last to be re-captured was U-boat Commander Jürgen Wattenberg,
the leader of the breakout.  Interestingly, Captain Wattenberg hid out
in the hills just a few hundred yards from my current home.

Note:  I self-plagiarized this story from a post I made a year ago.  If the repetition bothers you, I am happy to refund you the full subscription price you paid for this site.

Well, I am nursing some jet-lag but am working on a post for later this week on the alleged CIA secret overseas prisons.  This is one of those issues where my pragmatic frequent-flying persona is all over Jenifer Garner violating the crap out of terrorist civil rights to protect me, but my intellectual-libertarian persona knows better.  If you want a preview of where I am going with this, you can see this post on immigration, noting the argument that our individual rights pre-date, rather than flow from, the government, and therefore citizenship shouldn't matter in assessing what rights a person has vis-a-vis Uncle Sam.

I had the opportunity to look at some land while I was in Hawaii, thinking about maybe having a retirement home in the future, at least to escape the Phoenix summers.  My wife and I would like to be on a coast.  I don't like the Northeast, and neither of us like the Gulf coast or Northwest coast.  That leaves SoCal and Hawaii (if you limit it to the US).  What worries us is that though we expect some appreciation in our real earnings over the next decade, we fear that waterfront property in these areas may appreciate even faster, leading us to the conclusion that we may be able to afford a nicer piece of land now than when we retire.  We worry about bubble pricing but being willing to hold an asset for 20-30 years alleviates some of that problem.  The Big Island seems to be a better value than the other islands, but even there, its freaking expensive.  Sigh.  Maybe if it was a big enough lake, that would do?

A while back, I wrote the Porkbusters post on Arizona farm subsidies, which are mainly cotton subsidies.  Cotton gets subsidized both with direct farm subsidies as well as price-subsidized water (this is a desert, after all, and unlike Egypt we don't have the Nile running through it).

Porkopolis is on the case with a further potential subsidy, as the US Government is apparently transferring a valuable piece of Phoenix commercial real estate to Arizona cotton growers:

A review of the final bill passed by both the House and the Senate shows that Senators DeWine and Voinovich, along with 97 other Senators,
voted for a provision that transfers a federal facility and surrounding
land to the Arizona Cotton Growers Association and Supima:

SEC.
783. As soon as practicable after the Agricultural Research Service
Operations at the Western Cotton Research Laboratory located at 4135
East Broadway Road in Phoenix, Arizona, have ceased, the Secretary of
Agriculture shall convey, without consideration, to the Arizona Cotton Growers Association and Supima all right, title, and interest of the United States in and to the real property at that location, including improvements.

They've got a very deep investigative report. 

Quite a while back, I suggested that a better use for HOV lanes would be to charge money for their use, thereby creating a new revenue stream to increase future freeway capacity and beginning to experiment with peak pricing.

Several years ago, I sent in a proposal to the Arizona
Dept. of Transportation for their new HOV lanes in the Phoenix area,
though I never got a response back.  I suggested that HOV lanes
probably did not really increase carpooling, since they probably just
shifted vehicles that would have already been carrying 2+ people into
the faster lane.  Why should I get this artificial subsidy of a
dedicated lane when I am driving my kid to a soccer game but not when I
am driving myself to do productive work?  Either way, the lane is not
changing my behavior.

Anyway, I suggested that instead, AZ DOT should create a
number of special passes for exclusive use of the HOV lane.  The number
of passes should be set as the largest number that could be issued
while keeping the HOV lane moving at the speed limit at rush hour.
Maybe 5000?  Anyway, they would have the stats to set the number, and
it could be adjusted over time.  I proposed that they then auction off
these passes in a dutch auction once a year.  I posited that the
clearing price might be as high as $1000, thus raising $5,000,000 a
year that could be used for other transportation projects.

I suggested that $1000 as the clearing price might be low.  For some workers and businesses, 20 saves minutes a day might be worth thousands of dollars a year.  Some wealthy people would buy it just because they can, or as a status symbol.  I observed that many people were buying hybrids in Washington DC solely so they could use the HOV lane, putting a price of at least $5000 (based on the hybrid's price premium over similar non-hybrids) on HOV lane use.  In this example, I posited an annual pass, rather than a toll, solely because we have not toll roads here and no infrastructure at all to support tolls and a customer based unused to paying them.

Apparently, Lynn Kiesling, the DC/Northern Virginia area may soon experiment with exactly this concept, charging a congestion-variable price for HOV lane use while giving a discount to carpools.  Apparently the idea already is in use in SoCal.

In a remarkable example of an anti-business hit-piece called "Fueling Contempt" on the front page of the AZ Republic, the Republic leads with this line:

Reaction to major oil producers' staggering profits ranges from rage at
the pumps to calls for profits to be reinvested in exploration,
alternative-energy research or simply returned somehow to the public.

The article is mainly focused on the profit announcement at Exxon-Mobil, so I will use their numbers to put "staggering" into context.  E-M announced profits of $9.9 billion on sales of $101 billion.  For those who cannot divide, that is a profit margin of 9.9% of sales.  Since when is a profit margin at a cyclical peak of 9.9% considered "staggering"?  Microsoft makes 30%, in good times and bad, with a fraction of the investment or risk X-M takes.  From this chart, you can see the average for all industry is about 8%, with the oil industry generally below this number in all but cyclical peak quarters and banks, pharma, software, semiconductors, financials, household products and many others all consistently over 10%.  Procter and Gamble makes a margin of nearly 13% of sales selling toothpaste and detergent but we are going to begrudge oil companies 7.6% on average and 10% in their best quarters?

The article does absolutely nothing to put the profits in their proper context, though I was able to do it in one paragraph.  This is the only context the article offers:

The oil companies assert that their profits are no larger than other
businesses and that they just look big because it is a big business.

Exxon Chairman Lee R. Raymond said in a statement that the company
"acted responsibly" in its pricing and said its fourth-quarter profits
would come nowhere close to the $9.9 billion in the third quarter.

That doesn't necessarily wash with Adrienne Valdez of Phoenix.

"I can't afford to buy socks because I am paying twice what I used to
for gas," she said. "It's not right that they should be making billions
at our expense."

In Phoenix, gas prices soared to $3.14 after Hurricane Katrina hit the
Gulf Coast. The average Valley price per gallon, which has been falling
in recent weeks, was $2.72 Thursday, according to AAA Arizona.

Bruce Trushinsky, owner of the former Moon Valley Exxon station at 1901
W. Thunderbird Road in Phoenix, called Exxon Mobil's $9.9 billion
quarterly profit "disgusting."

He became so upset at the $7.6 billion profit posted by the company in
the second quarter that he canceled a longtime branding agreement.

"I ripped down all the Exxon signs and threw them in the garbage,"

he said. Now, after 30 years, Moon Valley Exxon is Carmel Automotive
and Fuel. Trushinsky said the high wholesale prices charged by Exxon
were devastating to his business and that the last straw was when the
company canceled its dealer-incentive program.

"They cut us off, then they announced their (second-quarter) profit increased $2 billion."

This is populist crap, and is the reason the MSM cannot be taken
seriously when they say that they are neutral reporters.  They are not
reporting, they are cheerleading an anti-oil company bigotry that has
existed for decades.  I think that the E-M management should be embarrassed to make such a small return in their best quarter.  Shareholders should take management to the woodshed for investing and risking so much in a cyclical business and making so little.  For gods sakes, they make a lower margin than Jif peanut butter earns.  Is anyone suggesting that we impose a windfall profits tax on Charmin?

I find the title of the article "Fueling Contempt" interesting - I am not sure if it was meant to refer to high oil company profits or if it was just a statement of intent for the article.

UPDATE:

Since 1977, governments collected more than $1.34 trillion, after adjusting for
inflation, in gasoline tax revenues"”more than twice the amount of domestic
profits earned by major U.S. oil companies during the same period

This is just gasoline taxes - it does not include income tax payments, property tax payments, and oil lease royalty payments.