The above comments are superb, and well written and considered, unlike the original editorial. It’s well know that companies (and wealthy people who do business as corporations) do not pay taxes, they merely collect them.
Now, let’s get to the ultimate sleazy corporation that probably does not pay taxes. Boothe Newspapers is owned by Newhouse and then by private ownership so diffused that even I can’t follow it. No one knows what the profits/losses are for the Grand Rapids Press, but I’d guess that they have enormous losses. (Stuck in Michigan, a paper that no one likes or can trust).
I looked up the stock price for the Gannett newspapers, largest chain of newspapers in the country; their stock price has gone from over 60 to 17 today. The rate of falling extrapolates to zero by next spring. They lost 7 dollars per share. How much better is the GRP likely to fare? But the editorial staff have vapors because the publisher should be paying taxes. Wait until he finds out what his flunkies are doing.
It is generally thought that the internet and new media are killing newspapers and television. That may well be a small part of the problem, but it is probable that the big problem is that the folks writing for these media are mediocre. They are unable to investigate stuff because they are timid about asking questions about money, have no business sense, and live in awe of their masters in government. They have become conduits through which we are told what our government wants for us.
What a degeneration from the ideals of press freedom laid down by Peter Zenger in the colonial period. He criticized the governor of NY, and was jailed, but managed to continue to publish. A notable aspect of the case is that his Philidelphia lawyer, Hamilton challenged the legality of the crimes for which his client was being prosecuted. It was one of the first times in American history in which a lawyer challenged the laws rather than the innocence of his clients. The jurors were stunned and didn’t know how to, or even if they were allowed to, address whether the law itself was “legal.” This has come down to us as jury nullification, and is a powerful tool that citizens must learn to use again to subvert their government’s lustings for ever more power.
The publisher is in real trouble; falling sales, a dysfunctional product, no one wants to invest in his business, and advertisers are going elsewhere. You’d think that he could rethink his business strategy; publishers who criticized their governments stirred up emotions, and sold papers. The kind of lickspittle in this editorial is politically correct pablum, writers’ malfeasence. What will happen to these editorial writers when the business folds? Who will pay for this drivel? Unemployment insurance indefinitely?
The Press is not likely to be in the vanguard of anything, given that their business probably does not pay taxes, and should.
I’ll plagiarize from the original editorial; Corporate deadbeats can’t be allowed.
Erwin Haas, communications director of the Libertarian Party of West Michigan, and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third congressional district.
GVSU can’t much of a college if they’d allow someone like me to get an MBA. The headline about my old haunts caught my attention. The tag line, about training the little undergrads to act like paupers and ride buses is somehow reminiscent of training the little tikes in public schools to be factory workers.
What is offensive about this editorial entails two major facts that escape the writers, probably because they kowtow to their government.
The first is the engineering finding that buses are 20% less fuel efficient than are private cars in operational use. Correspondingly, they are 20% more polluting than are cars. Look up all the damning numbers at the Bureau of Transportation statistics web site. This effectively scotches the canard that using buses is “Green”. Green, BTW is no longer cool.
The second concerns a story that the GRP should have picked up on. The ITP/GRATA has had proportionately 2 times the capital expenditures for the last 10 years when compared to all of their peers. The ITP would not even put their budget on their web site, choosing instead to put their operating budget online in an apparent attempt to draw attention away from their outrageous use of taxpayer funds.
Of course, each ride costs the taxpayer about 7 dollars, and is another governmental boondoggle that rips off poor people and seems to make these editors ecstatic.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
The welfare state as swindle;
These federal statistics don’t mean much. Poverty is defined by a deviation from some sort of artificial average, and so an almost constant 11-13 percent of the US population will be in perpetual poverty, in infinitum. Period.
Nevertheless, the reasons for their relative poverty may be interesting, and I’ll write them down so as to preempt the inevitable peevish editorial.
Politicians like to promise that they will take care of poor people by taking from corporations and the rich and giving to the disadvantaged. And the poor buy into this and vote for these unconscionable parasites, expanding the size of government.
I’m not sure why Austrian economists don’t emphasize the obvious connection between big government and poverty among the populace. It’s not that complicated. Let me put it as succinctly as possible.
Corporations have to make a certain amount of profit, or else they go out of business. They regard taxes as a cost of business, and increase their prices to compensate for these costs. The consumer, or customer pays for these taxes. The corporation merely collects taxes, it doesn’t pay for them. This is merely banal, and should not need any further elaboration. All income statements have the line item “ebitd” or suchlike, showing that taxes are subtracted, right there along with how the assets are paid for, as incidental to making profit.
We now have to make the distinction of rich people vs. high income individuals. It’s the classical economist’s distinction between stocks and flows.
The rich make their money on interest and dividends. Once more, they don’t invest so as to lose money. They, and perforce the market for capital, adjust the returns on their investments so as to compensate for inflation, taxes and risk.
High income individuals often confused with the rich, but these are often just aspiring towards wealth. There is a group of workers, like doctors, lawyers, and accountants, or unionized workers, who have licenses or other franchises, monopolies granted by the government. Entrepreneurs are in this category, and gain monopolies through copyrights, patents, or “being there firstest with the mostest”. They can charge pretty much what they need to, or change what they do to make their labor profitable. Once more, this is a group that sets their prices for their production.
It turns out that corporations, and the wealthy set prices so that they can pay taxes and still make the money that they demand to make their efforts rational.
The poor earn plenty, but have to pay artificially the high prices necessary to pay for their government. Poor people pay their taxes when they go to the grocery. A gallon of milk or a pound of butter should cost a dollar, but they have to pay 4 dollars. The landlord collects tax expenses and the borrowing costs for the apartment from the tenant. The poor man pays the taxes when he pays the interest on his credit card.
It has always been so, and nothing will ever change it so long as markets continue. Prices, as von Mises taught, are packets of information, and, as any socialist can tell you, we are in the information age. More socialistic societies as in Europe, South America, and Africa, are characterized by increased muddling of price signals, and of course, economic and social stagnation. Socialists never seem to be able to make the intellectual connection between distorting prices and wasted production
Taxes might be conceived of as consumption taxes. The rich and high income individuals also pay them: to the extent that individuals spend money, they pay taxes. Frugal individuals hardly pay taxes at all.
Politicians like to get elected by promising that they will take care of poor people. They will take from the rich and give to the poor. As we have seen, this is a fraud. And the politicians know it to be so.
This accounts for the observation made for the last 40 years that the incomes of the poor have not kept up with the generally rising income of other Americans. 40 years of a war on poverty, and the poor got screwed. As the tax and regulatory burden on Americans rises, the increased burden of paying for government is pushed down onto those lower n the economic ladder in the form of higher costs. In the swindle known as the welfare state, only poverty is redistributed.
Erwin Haas, communications director of the Libertarian Party of West Michigan, and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third congressional district.
We expect the usual bromides from the establishment and from the GRP. The public schools started in Michigan about the same time as did Labor Day. The first public school law was first promulgated by the Michigan Legislature in 1871, and not really enforced until after 1900 because folks knew that they were a bad idea. The original and ongoing purpose of the PS was to turn smart enterprising farm kids into mentally sluggish, passive factory workers, and Dr. Taylor’s opinion does nothing to distance himself from that tradition. Children are not vehicles for “sustaining and improving our region’s economy, global competitiveness”, they should have opportunity to pursue their own lives liberties and property (recalling the original formulation used by most founding fathers). Home schooled kids are the ones who have the real educations, able to think nimbly, to relate to adults and “social perspectives different from their own”. Home schoolers have real choice, since they ask questions, and have to noodle out their own answers. PS students, as in the GRPS are forced to hear answers to questions that they don’t have, numbing their minds. They leave school with no ideas, a hatred for learning, angry. It usually takes a few years, and jobs before they recover.
Most of the US presidents didn’t go to PS. Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, no schools at all.
The PS are a big welfare program for the teachers, cafeteria workers, schoolbus drivers and builders. The enormous cost comes out of the wages of very poor working people. And damn the kids.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Dear Ms. Hinkel;
Change is in the air, and I thought that my note addressed it adequately; the public schools were designed by factory owners to turn bright kids into factory workers so inarticulate that they could never make an effective objection to the abuses that the owners visited upon them. Read John Dewey and tell me differently. The public schools worked just fine until the factories disappeared. We are now in the information age, and that requires originality, conviction, drive, not the day in day out boring, meaningless discipline which is the sole content taught in the PS.
Your anecdotes (anecdotes are not evidence) about seeing hundreds of happy grads may well be correct, but what about the thousands who go through the system and are cited by no2fructose.
You play the poverty card; the former libertarian GRPS board member tells me that it costs 12,500 to train one of these kids per year. This money is looted from desperately poor people. (Leona Helmsley was right, only little people pay taxes). If they would not have to pay the outlandish costs to botch up their children, they could easily afford to do home schooling, or to send them to private schooling as appropriate.
I certainly enjoyed hearing from you; the message is from the ancient Greek Heraclitus “you can’t step into the same river twice”. Change is everything, and you’ll have to reason your own way to the future.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Let me get this straight; Georgian president Shakasvili, relying on his good buddy Bush, attacks So. Ossetia (although that area had broken away from Georgia, and almost all the Citizens express a wish to belong to Russia), and kills 10 Russian soldiers. Shakasvili is clearly the aggressor, and it’s not clear how much encouragement he got from Bush.The Russians defend themselves and counterattack. The aggressor, Georgia, cannot morally dictate the time and place when the war stops. The Russian army goes into Georgia, and leisurely, in a gentlemanly way, destroys all of the Georgian military equipment, much of it American.
Result; Bush and flunkies howl that Russia is the aggressor! Talk of a cold war redux.
One suspects that Bush and gang foresee that their war on terror is getting stale and that they need another war to fire up the troops for November.
Cynical manipulation, wouldn’t you agree.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Why would an economist’s opinion get an airing? They have accurately foretold 10 of the last 3 recessions. They worship at the feet of Lord Keynes, and, as noted above, have debauched the currency as they create credit (basically print money) to forestall recession, if you believe that theory. This extra money chased stocks in the 1990s, real estate until last year, and is now into commodities.
The ancient Roman soothsayers would cut open a chicken and observe the pattern of the intestines. Wars, planting of crops, marriage, all of these so called auguries were believed. I would have thought that modern skepticism would have eradicated many of these superstitions.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Prices are not just a problem for consumers, they are also signals to producers and to users, to wit, intelligence or information. The original reason offered for the falling number of flights, and falling passengers, was that GRR had snubbed some small feeder airlines in the remote past, and that they are now standoffish, and won’t fly into GRR. The current article tries to make it part of a national problem but I’d guess that the number of flights nationally has not dipped.
I regularly fly from Texas to GRR and rent a car for maybe a week. I had to stop at Ohare on one occasion and rent a car for a week. The fee that week to fly from El Paso to GRR was 500 dollars, and car rental 169.. To fly to big, busy, corrupt Ohare was 220, and the car rental 110. It costs 80 dollars less to fly a thousand miles from a similar sized airport than to fly 140 miles to GRR.
The parking fee in El Paso is less than 4 dollars per day, and it’s outside in a very hot dry sunny spot.
The aircraft leaving GRR are full. The market tells me that there is something wrong with GRR. Something is keeping the cheap feeder airlines from flocking to a place where they could make huge profits yet, none come.
The GRP might salvage its reputation of being an organ of the government by exploring this facet and actually getting a scoop featuring some KC (republican) commission screw ups. I know that the Libertarian Party KC sheriff candidate, John Stedman has told me that he intends to investigate GRR itself to see why they are turning airlines off; you see, markets are seldom wrong. Airlines do not do irrational things like eschew easy money. Airlines do avoid headaches.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Fannie and Freddie (Programs of the Democratic Party) have never been pitched to help poor people; they were formed to increase the mortgage market
The overall purpose of the takeover is to prop up housing prices, because if they continue to erode, almost everyone’s mortgage will be more than the nominal value of the house, and people will abandon their mortgages.
The overall effect is to drive housing prices beyond the reach of poor people. After all, why let them onto the first step of the economic ladder.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
1)Republicans and Democrats want to make you happy; I prefer to let you pursue your own happiness
There is little that a politician can do about hard times. The unemployment rate in W. Michigan 10 years ago was 1.5%, now about 7%. The incumbent promises to rescue us, but where was he when the problem evolved? And what do my opponents propose that is different from what has been done for many years. We don’t need job training; we need to keep our own money so as to start our own businesses. Alternative energy is yet another boondoggle. Anything that Taxpayers in Rockford have to continue to subsidize after 30 years sounds like Synfuels on steroids to me. I’d support nuclear power generation. One of my sons has been an engineer designing these plants, and assures me that these have a bright future.
Lower spending. Get out of Iraq, and all our foreign military entanglements, no more corporate and farm subsidies, shut down the departments of labor, energy, environment, etc. Lower regulations.
Open federal lands for drilling, to address the next 15 years; encourage (by allowing) nuclear power in the long term; Alternative energies will never work as it is too expensive and unreliable.
Get out forthwith. Our intelligence services didn’t know what was going on there in 2003, got WMD and the presence of Al Qaida wrong, thought that the Iraqis would join together to form a government that we would approve etc. They changed their opinions about Iranian nuclear weapons. The Surge was only in Baghdad, but independently the rest of the country calmed down .This is being hailed a victory for our intelligence services. Nothing assures me that the NSA/CIA know much about the Mideast. Tell me why any congressman thinks he knows what will happen after we leave?
Manufacturing jobs have dropped because there are huge gains in efficiency, just as there have been in construction, agriculture (thank goodness, I worked a farm in youth, decided that being a physician was easier) and mining. Manufacturing in the USA is booming; the increase in absolute value of output parallels that in China; we produce high value goods and sell internationally. We should open our borders to all sorts of trade so as to be able to sell to the world.
Consumer Driven Health Care is a medical savings account type plan that has been championed by Republicans among others. No other plan will ever be politically viable, lower costs, or overcome the numerous diverse moral issues dividing Americans.
The Economist magazine reports that easy credit fueled a relative boom in the rest of the country during the last 20 years (Greenspan opened the money spigots after Volcker had restricted them causing the 1980-2 recession)). The “free” money sloshed into the stock markets during the 1990s, into real estate until last year, and now is going into commodities; it’s fueling the current inflation, the decline of the dollar versus gold and other currencies as well as an export boom. The Chinese/Japanese/Saudis etc. hold trillions of dollars that are approaching worthless. If they decide to stop using dollars, American lives` will become poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The Fed can delay a recession for a brief period by continuing an easy money stance, but that will make the Chinese/Japanese etc. ever more uneasy.
Or we can tighten up monetary policies and suffer a nasty time for some years, (remember the 1970s with stagflation which Volcker ended with restrictive money policies). I guess I’d prefer the latter. The US Fed and Treasury caused this problem and propose solutions that merely kick the can down the road. TheDemocrats passed the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that prevented banks from excluding unqualified applicants from borrowing. And Republicans were in charge and approved while the federal reserve created cheap credit..
An historical observation might clarify the above. Michigan was being settled at a breakneck rate with easy money in the 1830s. After Andrew Jackson killed the first US Bank, there was a severe contraction. After 1837, money disappeared. It is reported in a History of Grand Rapids that for 5 years thereafter, a family in Kent County was lucky if they had a cow and a place to plant potatoes.
Dysfunctional, to put it charitably but Obama and McCain will be even worse..
The primary problems causing the current banking problems are twofold; the easy money stance taken by the Fed for the last 20 years, and over-spending/borrowing/regulation by the congress and administration.
The artificially cheap credit (low interest rates) produced by Greenspan etc. sloshed into the stock markets during the 1990s, into real estate until last year, and now is going into commodities; it’s fueling the current inflation, the decline of the dollar versus other currencies as well as an export boom. The easy money led to misallocation of resources, 4000 square foot homes, SUVs, ballooning credit card debt, etc.
The 1977 Community Reconstruction Act threatened commercial lenders with half million dollar fines if they denied mortgages to unqualified applicants. The Government also overspent and had to borrow in bond markets, driving up interest rates. The lenders were Chinese, Japanese, oil kingdoms.
No one seems to have noted that the dollar was being debauched.
A Our currency is becoming ever more worthless as Greenspan etc. keep interest rates artificially low. The low rates lead to incredible distortions in the economy; witness 4000 sq. ft homes, and SUVs, record private debt levels, all payed for with debt. Chinese/Japanes/oil producers who own this debt look at disappearing values as the dollar is debauched. If they decide that to de-dollarize, demanding payment in Euros or Yen, our prices will explode.
The easy money bubble bursts, and banks are stuck with worthless paper. Some, the greedier and unlucky, go out of business. Others have to increase their interest rates so as to become profitable and repair their balance sheets. Their reluctance to lend to other banks will wane if the interest rates go high enough.
But our political leaders want to “repair the balance sheets” of banks by buying up their toxic paper and keeping interest rates low. They will go into the capital markets to borrow a trillion dollars, crowding out private investors, and driving up interest rates to astronomical levels. Is there a swindle here somewhere?
Gannett
There is little that politicians can do about hard times except to make them worse.
We send 20% of our income to Washington, get back 18%; that 2% difference is our growth rate, money that should stay here so individuals can invest in their own advancement, businesses, happiness. I’d vote against Federal taxes, keep money here. Unemployment in W. Michigan 10 years ago was 1.5%, now 7%. The incumbent promises to rescue us, but where was he while the problem evolved? What do my opponents propose that is different from what has failed?
We need to open all federal lands for oil exploration in the medium term. I’d support nuclear power generation by sweeping away governmental restrictions on this eminently sensible power source. One of our sons has been an engineer designing these plants, and assures me that these have a bright future.
The surviving auto companies will develop electric cars on their own.
Solar, wind, biofuels are just scams; unreliable and too expensive for poor people. Does anything that needs subsidies after 30 years sound like synfuels on steroids?
Two approaches; I’d cut all sorts of expenditures of the Federal government. The departments of the energy, education, labor, agriculture, environment, health and human services would be defunded. Reduce the size of our armed forces, and get them off foreign soil so that they can protect us at home.
Also cut taxes and regulations. We need to allow new business formation by lowering entry barriers. Advocate for the Fair Tax which will encourage personal and business thrift, and get rid of the IRS as being inefficient and intrusive.
The deficit will turn into a surplus that can lower the national debt.
I’m a semi-retired physician, and feel deeply about this issue. Consumer Driven Health Care is a medical savings account type plan that has been championed by Republicans among others. It allows personal savings, and individual choice about medical care. No other plan will ever be politically viable, lower costs, or overcome the numerous diverse moral issues dividing Americans. There are numerous Federal laws that have increased health care costs and these will have to be abolished as well as insurance markets opened up across state lines.
Yes. Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg stated that Roe versus Wade was a bad decision. Abortion is a state issue. Planned Parenthood, a private corporation, does about 250,000 abortions a year, and gets 100 million dollars from both Medicaid/care. I find this morally repugnant. In an era of medical abortions and the internet banning abortions by law is impossible. A young lady finding herself pregnant can go onto the internet and order any of several preparations air freighted in, regaining that patina of social acceptability if not of moral virtue in a few days.
No. The US Constitution has no provisions on discrimination except the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment; “no state shall… deny to any person…the equal protection of the laws.” which limits only what government officials can do. The problem with discrimination based on sexual orientation is the lack of biologic markers. I lose a dispute with my neighbor, then go to court claiming that I’m gay. After I win my discrimination suit, I go to church or therapist, get the cure, and reclaim straightness. This proposal would make a mockery of the protections that minorities have won; we’d all be situational minorities.
Yes, but with reservations. Our immigration laws are a mess. My parents were immigrants who entered the USA 80 years ago (my father was exposed to Marxist socialism, my mother fled the national socialist Hitler) under provision of reasonable laws. Those changed since. We now need laws that allow immigrants to come here legally on temporary work visas, and that might mean millions who will do menial labor. Also, the laws should encourage the best scientists/technicians/entrepreneurs to relocate here and become citizens.
Get out forthwith. Our intelligence services didn’t know what was going on there in 2003, got WMD and the presence of Al Qaida wrong, thought that the Iraqis would join together to form a government that we would approve etc. They changed their opinions about Iranian nuclear weapons. The Surge was only in Baghdad, but independently the rest of the country calmed down .This is being hailed a victory for our intelligence services. Nothing assures me that the NSA/CIA know much about the Mideast. Tell me why any congressman thinks he knows what will happen after we leave?
I noted that there was only private money involved, and that the two researchers seemed to be the only or main employees/equity holders. Note the absence of the state or federal government. I predict a great future for MS.
Erwin Haas MD MBA, communications director for the Libertarian Party of West Michigan, and recent losing Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third congressional district.
The above comments are superb, and well written and considered, unlike the original editorial. It’s well know that companies (and wealthy people who do business as corporations) do not pay taxes, they merely collect them.
Now, lets get to the ultimate sleazy corporation that probably does not pay taxes. Boothe Newspapers is owned by Newhouse and then by private ownership so diffused that even I can’t follow it. No one knows what the profits/losses are for the Grand Rapids Press, but I’d guess that they have enormous losses. (Stuck in Michigan, a paper that no one likes or can trust).
I looked up the stock price for the Gannett newspapers, largest cahin of newspapers in the country; their stock price has gone from over 60 to 17 today. The rate of falling extrapolates to zero by next spring. They lost 7 dollars per share. How much better is the GRP likely to fare? But the editorial staff have vapors because the publisher should be paying taxes. Wait until he finds out what his flunkies are doing.
It is generally thought that the internet and new media are killing newspapers and television. That may well be a small part of the problem, but it is probable that the big problem is that the folks writing for these media are mediocre. They are unable to investigate stuff because they are timid about asking questions about money, have no business sense, and live in awe of their masters in government. They have become conduits through which we are told what our government wants for us.
What a degeneration from the ideals of press freedom laid down by Peter Zenger in the colonial period. He criticized the governor of NY, and was jailed, but managed to continue to publish. A notable aspect of the case is that his Philidelphia lawyer, Hamilton challenged the legality of the crimes for which his client was being prosecuted. It was one of the first times in American history in which a lawyer challenged the laws rather than the innocence of his clients. The jurors were stunned and didn’t know how to, or even if they were allowed to, address whether the law itself was “legal.” This has come down to us as jury nullification, and is a powerful tool that citizens must learn to use again to subvert their government’s lustings for ever more power.
The publisher is in real trouble; falling sales, a dysfunctional product, no one wants to invest in his business, and advertisers are going elsewhere. You’d think that he could rethink his business strategy; publishers who criticized their governments stirred up emotions, and sold papers. The kind of lickspittle in this editorial is politically correct pablum, writers’ malfeasence. What will happen to these editorial writers when the business folds? Who will pay for this drivel? Unemployment insurance indefinitely?
The Press is not likely to be in the vanguard of anything, given that their business probably does not pay taxes, and should.
I’ll plagiarize from the original editorial; Corporate deadbeats can’t be allowed.
Erwin Haas, communications director of the Libertarian Party of West Michigan, and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third congressional district.
GVSU can’t much of a college if they’d allow someone like me to get an MBA. The headline about my old haunts caught my attention. The tag line, about training the little undergrads to act like paupers and ride buses is somehow reminiscent of training the little tikes in public schools to be factory workers.
What is offensive about this editorial entails two major facts that escape the writers, probably because they kowtow to their government.
The first is the engineering finding that buses are 20% less fuel efficient than are private cars in operational use. Correspondingly, they are 20% more polluting than are cars. Look up all the damning numbers at the Bureau of Transportation statistics web site. This effectively scotches the canard that using buses is “Green”. Green, BTW is no longer cool.
The second concerns a story that the GRP should have picked up on. The ITP/GRATA has had proportionately 2 times the capital expenditures for the last 10 years when compared to all of their peers. The ITP would not even put their budget on their web site, choosing instead to put their operating budget online in an apparent attempt to draw attention away from their outrageous use of taxpayer funds.
Of course, each ride costs the taxpayer about 7 dollars, and is another governmental boondoggle that rips off poor people and seems to make these editors ecstatic.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
The welfare state as swindle;
These federal statistics don’t mean much. Poverty is defined by a deviation from some sort of artificial average, and so an almost constant 11-13 percent of the US population will be in perpetual poverty, in infinitum. Period.
Nevertheless, the reasons for their relative poverty may be interesting, and I’ll write them down so as to preempt the inevitable peevish editorial.
Politicians like to promise that they will take care of poor people by taking from corporations and the rich and giving to the disadvantaged. And the poor buy into this and vote for these unconscionable parasites, expanding the size of government.
I’m not sure why Austrian economists don’t emphasize the obvious connection between big government and poverty among the populace. It’s not that complicated. Let me put it as succinctly as possible.
Corporations have to make a certain amount of profit, or else they go out of business. They regard taxes as a cost of business, and increase their prices to compensate for these costs. The consumer, or customer pays for these taxes. The corporation merely collects taxes, it doesn’t pay for them. This is merely banal, and should not need any further elaboration. All income statements have the line item “ebitd” or suchlike, showing that taxes are subtracted, right there along with how the assets are paid for, as incidental to making profit.
We now have to make the distinction of rich people vs. high income individuals. It’s the classical economist’s distinction between stocks and flows.
The rich make their money on interest and dividends. Once more, they don’t invest so as to lose money. They, and perforce the market for capital, adjust the returns on their investments so as to compensate for inflation, taxes and risk.
High income individuals often confused with the rich, but these are often just aspiring towards wealth. There is a group of workers, like doctors, lawyers, and accountants, or unionized workers, who have licenses or other franchises, monopolies granted by the government. Entrepreneurs are in this category, and gain monopolies through copyrights, patents, or “being there firstest with the mostest”. They can charge pretty much what they need to, or change what they do to make their labor profitable. Once more, this is a group that sets their prices for their production.
It turns out that corporations, and the wealthy set prices so that they can pay taxes and still make the money that they demand to make their efforts rational.
The poor earn plenty, but have to pay artificially the high prices necessary to pay for their government. Poor people pay their taxes when they go to the grocery. A gallon of milk or a pound of butter should cost a dollar, but they have to pay 4 dollars. The landlord collects tax expenses and the borrowing costs for the apartment from the tenant. The poor man pays the taxes when he pays the interest on his credit card.
It has always been so, and nothing will ever change it so long as markets continue. Prices, as von Mises taught, are packets of information, and, as any socialist can tell you, we are in the information age. More socialistic societies as in Europe, South America, and Africa, are characterized by increased muddling of price signals, and of course, economic and social stagnation. Socialists never seem to be able to make the intellectual connection between distorting prices and wasted production
Taxes might be conceived of as consumption taxes. The rich and high income individuals also pay them: to the extent that individuals spend money, they pay taxes. Frugal individuals hardly pay taxes at all.
Politicians like to get elected by promising that they will take care of poor people. They will take from the rich and give to the poor. As we have seen, this is a fraud. And the politicians know it to be so.
This accounts for the observation made for the last 40 years that the incomes of the poor have not kept up with the generally rising income of other Americans. 40 years of a war on poverty, and the poor got screwed. As the tax and regulatory burden on Americans rises, the increased burden of paying for government is pushed down onto those lower n the economic ladder in the form of higher costs. In the swindle known as the welfare state, only poverty is redistributed.
Erwin Haas, communications director of the Libertarian Party of West Michigan, and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third congressional district.
We expect the usual bromides from the establishment and from the GRP. The public schools started in Michigan about the same time as did Labor Day. The first public school law was first promulgated by the Michigan Legislature in 1871, and not really enforced until after 1900 because folks knew that they were a bad idea. The original and ongoing purpose of the PS was to turn smart enterprising farm kids into mentally sluggish, passive factory workers, and Dr. Taylor’s opinion does nothing to distance himself from that tradition. Children are not vehicles for “sustaining and improving our region’s economy, global competitiveness”, they should have opportunity to pursue their own lives liberties and property (recalling the original formulation used by most founding fathers). Home schooled kids are the ones who have the real educations, able to think nimbly, to relate to adults and “social perspectives different from their own”. Home schoolers have real choice, since they ask questions, and have to noodle out their own answers. PS students, as in the GRPS are forced to hear answers to questions that they don’t have, numbing their minds. They leave school with no ideas, a hatred for learning, angry. It usually takes a few years, and jobs before they recover.
Most of the US presidents didn’t go to PS. Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, no schools at all.
The PS are a big welfare program for the teachers, cafeteria workers, schoolbus drivers and builders. The enormous cost comes out of the wages of very poor working people. And damn the kids.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Dear Ms. Hinkel;
Change is in the air, and I thought that my note addressed it adequately; the public schools were designed by factory owners to turn bright kids into factory workers so inarticulate that they could never make an effective objection to the abuses that the owners visited upon them. Read John Dewey and tell me differently. The public schools worked just fine until the factories disappeared. We are now in the information age, and that requires originality, conviction, drive, not the day in day out boring, meaningless discipline which is the sole content taught in the PS.
Your anecdotes (anecdotes are not evidence) about seeing hundreds of happy grads may well be correct, but what about the thousands who go through the system and are cited by no2fructose.
You play the poverty card; the former libertarian GRPS board member tells me that it costs 12,500 to train one of these kids per year. This money is looted from desperately poor people. (Leona Helmsley was right, only little people pay taxes). If they would not have to pay the outlandish costs to botch up their children, they could easily afford to do home schooling, or to send them to private schooling as appropriate.
I certainly enjoyed hearing from you; the message is from the ancient Greek Heraclitus “you can’t step into the same river twice”. Change is everything, and you’ll have to reason your own way to the future.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Let me get this straight; Georgian president Shakasvili, relying on his good buddy Bush, attacks So. Ossetia (although that area had broken away from Georgia, and almost all the Citizens express a wish to belong to Russia), and kills 10 Russian soldiers. Shakasvili is clearly the aggressor, and it’s not clear how much encouragement he got from Bush.The Russians defend themselves and counterattack. The aggressor, Georgia, cannot morally dictate the time and place when the war stops. The Russian army goes into Georgia, and leisurely, in a gentlemanly way, destroys all of the Georgian military equipment, much of it American.
Result; Bush and flunkies howl that Russia is the aggressor! Talk of a cold war redux.
One suspects that Bush and gang foresee that their war on terror is getting stale and that they need another war to fire up the troops for November.
Cynical manipulation, wouldn’t you agree.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Why would an economist’s opinion get an airing? They have accurately foretold 10 of the last 3 recessions. They worship at the feet of Lord Keynes, and, as noted above, have debauched the currency as they create credit (basically print money) to forestall recession, if you believe that theory. This extra money chased stocks in the 1990s, real estate until last year, and is now into commodities.
The ancient Roman soothsayers would cut open a chicken and observe the pattern of the intestines. Wars, planting of crops, marriage, all of these so called auguries were believed. I would have thought that modern skepticism would have eradicated many of these superstitions.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Prices are not just a problem for consumers, they are also signals to producers and to users, to wit, intelligence or information. The original reason offered for the falling number of flights, and falling passengers, was that GRR had snubbed some small feeder airlines in the remote past, and that they are now standoffish, and won’t fly into GRR. The current article tries to make it part of a national problem but I’d guess that the number of flights nationally has not dipped.
I regularly fly from Texas to GRR and rent a car for maybe a week. I had to stop at Ohare on one occasion and rent a car for a week. The fee that week to fly from El Paso to GRR was 500 dollars, and car rental 169.. To fly to big, busy, corrupt Ohare was 220, and the car rental 110. It costs 80 dollars less to fly a thousand miles from a similar sized airport than to fly 140 miles to GRR.
The parking fee in El Paso is less than 4 dollars per day, and it’s outside in a very hot dry sunny spot.
The aircraft leaving GRR are full. The market tells me that there is something wrong with GRR. Something is keeping the cheap feeder airlines from flocking to a place where they could make huge profits yet, none come.
The GRP might salvage its reputation of being an organ of the government by exploring this facet and actually getting a scoop featuring some KC (republican) commission screw ups. I know that the Libertarian Party KC sheriff candidate, John Stedman has told me that he intends to investigate GRR itself to see why they are turning airlines off; you see, markets are seldom wrong. Airlines do not do irrational things like eschew easy money. Airlines do avoid headaches.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
Fannie and Freddie (Programs of the Democratic Party) have never been pitched to help poor people; they were formed to increase the mortgage market
The overall purpose of the takeover is to prop up housing prices, because if they continue to erode, almost everyone’s mortgage will be more than the nominal value of the house, and people will abandon their mortgages.
The overall effect is to drive housing prices beyond the reach of poor people. After all, why let them onto the first step of the economic ladder.
Erwin Haas, communication director of Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third District congressional seat.
1)Republicans and Democrats want to make you happy; I prefer to let you pursue your own happiness
There is little that a politician can do about hard times. The unemployment rate in W. Michigan 10 years ago was 1.5%, now about 7%. The incumbent promises to rescue us, but where was he when the problem evolved? And what do my opponents propose that is different from what has been done for many years. We don’t need job training; we need to keep our own money so as to start our own businesses. Alternative energy is yet another boondoggle. Anything that Taxpayers in Rockford have to continue to subsidize after 30 years sounds like Synfuels on steroids to me. I’d support nuclear power generation. One of my sons has been an engineer designing these plants, and assures me that these have a bright future.
Lower spending. Get out of Iraq, and all our foreign military entanglements, no more corporate and farm subsidies, shut down the departments of labor, energy, environment, etc. Lower regulations.
Open federal lands for drilling, to address the next 15 years; encourage (by allowing) nuclear power in the long term; Alternative energies will never work as it is too expensive and unreliable.
Get out forthwith. Our intelligence services didn’t know what was going on there in 2003, got WMD and the presence of Al Qaida wrong, thought that the Iraqis would join together to form a government that we would approve etc. They changed their opinions about Iranian nuclear weapons. The Surge was only in Baghdad, but independently the rest of the country calmed down .This is being hailed a victory for our intelligence services. Nothing assures me that the NSA/CIA know much about the Mideast. Tell me why any congressman thinks he knows what will happen after we leave?
Manufacturing jobs have dropped because there are huge gains in efficiency, just as there have been in construction, agriculture (thank goodness, I worked a farm in youth, decided that being a physician was easier) and mining. Manufacturing in the USA is booming; the increase in absolute value of output parallels that in China; we produce high value goods and sell internationally. We should open our borders to all sorts of trade so as to be able to sell to the world.
Consumer Driven Health Care is a medical savings account type plan that has been championed by Republicans among others. No other plan will ever be politically viable, lower costs, or overcome the numerous diverse moral issues dividing Americans.
The Economist magazine reports that easy credit fueled a relative boom in the rest of the country during the last 20 years (Greenspan opened the money spigots after Volcker had restricted them causing the 1980-2 recession)). The “free” money sloshed into the stock markets during the 1990s, into real estate until last year, and now is going into commodities; it’s fueling the current inflation, the decline of the dollar versus gold and other currencies as well as an export boom. The Chinese/Japanese/Saudis etc. hold trillions of dollars that are approaching worthless. If they decide to stop using dollars, American lives` will become poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The Fed can delay a recession for a brief period by continuing an easy money stance, but that will make the Chinese/Japanese etc. ever more uneasy.
Or we can tighten up monetary policies and suffer a nasty time for some years, (remember the 1970s with stagflation which Volcker ended with restrictive money policies). I guess I’d prefer the latter. The US Fed and Treasury caused this problem and propose solutions that merely kick the can down the road. The Democrats passed the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that prevented banks from excluding unqualified applicants from borrowing. And Republicans were in charge and approved while the federal reserve created cheap credit..
An historical observation might clarify the above. Michigan was being settled at a breakneck rate with easy money in the 1830s. After Andrew Jackson killed the first US Bank, there was a severe contraction. After 1837, money disappeared. It is reported in a History of Grand Rapids that for 5 years thereafter, a family in Kent County was lucky if they had a cow and a place to plant potatoes.
Dysfunctional, to put it charitably but Obama and McCain will be even worse..
The primary problems causing the current banking problems are twofold; the easy money stance taken by the Fed for the last 20 years, and over-spending/borrowing/regulation by the congress and administration.
The artificially cheap credit (low interest rates) produced by Greenspan etc. sloshed into the stock markets during the 1990s, into real estate until last year, and now is going into commodities; it’s fueling the current inflation, the decline of the dollar versus other currencies as well as an export boom. The easy money led to misallocation of resources, 4000 square foot homes, SUVs, ballooning credit card debt, etc.
The 1977 Community Reconstruction Act threatened commercial lenders with half million dollar fines if they denied mortgages to unqualified applicants. The Government also overspent and had to borrow in bond markets, driving up interest rates. The lenders were Chinese, Japanese, oil kingdoms and they’ve noted with increasing anxiety that the dollar was being debauched.. If they decide that to de-dollarize, demanding payment in Euros or Yen, our prices and interest rates will explode, and economy tank.
When the easy money bubble burst, banks were stuck with worthless paper. Some, the greedier and unlucky are bankrupt, their shareholders and managers devastated, and the bondholders trying to salvage what they can. (BTW, nothing except the stockholder’s value is lost in bankruptcy, the loans to homeowners etc. are still valuable assets). Surviving banks will have to increase their interest rates so as to become profitable and repair their balance sheets. Their reluctance to lend to other banks will wane if the interest rates go high enough.
But our political leaders want to don’t want high interest rates and so propose to “repair the balance sheets” of banks by buying up their toxic paper and keeping interest rates low. They will go into the capital markets to borrow a trillion dollars, crowding out private investors, and driving up interest rates to astronomical levels.
Didn’t I just say something about increasing interest rates? Many different ways of getting there, but the same result.
Is there a swindle here somewhere?
Gannett
There is little that politicians can do about hard times except to make them worse.
We send 20% of our income to Washington, get back 18%; that 2% difference is our growth rate, money that should stay here so individuals can invest in their own advancement, businesses, happiness. I’d vote against Federal taxes, keep money here. Unemployment in W. Michigan grew from1.5% 10 years ago to 7%. The incumbent promises to rescue us, but where was he while the problem evolved? What do my opponents propose that is different from what has failed?
We need to open all federal lands for oil exploration in the medium term. I’d support nuclear power generation by sweeping away governmental restrictions on this eminently sensible power source. One of our sons has been an engineer in that industry, and assures me that these have a bright future.
The surviving auto companies will develop electric cars on their own.
Solar, wind, biofuels are just scams; unreliable and too expensive for us folks. Does anything that needs subsidies after 30 years sound like synfuels on steroids?
Two approaches; 1) I’d cut all sorts of expenditures of the Federal government. The departments of the energy, education, labor, agriculture, environment would be defunded. I’d right-size of our armed forces, and get them off foreign soil so that they can protect us at home.
2) Also cut taxes and regulations. We need to allow new business formation by lowering entry barriers. Advocate for the Fair Tax which will encourage personal thrift, and get rid of the IRS as being inefficient and intrusive.
The deficit will turn into a surplus, lowering the national debt.
I’m a semi-retired physician, and feel deeply about this issue. Consumer Driven Health Care is a medical savings account type plan that has been championed by Republicans among others. It allows personal savings, and individual choice about medical care. No other plan will ever be politically viable, lower costs, or address the numerous diverse moral issues dividing Americans. There are numerous Federal laws that have increased health care costs and these will have to be abolished and insurance markets opened up across state lines.
Yes. Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg stated that Roe versus Wade was a bad decision. Abortion is a state issue. Planned Parenthood, a private corporation, does about 250,000 abortions a year, and gets 100 million dollars from both Medicaid/care. I find this morally repugnant. Politically, abortion becomes moot in an era of medical abortions and the internet. A young lady finding herself pregnant can go onto the internet and order any of several preparations by air freighted, regaining that patina of social acceptability if not of high virtue in 3 days. Banning abortions by law is impossible.
No. The US Constitution has no provisions on discrimination except the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment; “no state shall… deny to any person…the equal protection of the laws” that limits what government officials can do. The problem with discrimination based on sexual orientation is the lack of biologic markers. If I lose a dispute with my neighbor, I could go to court claiming that I’m gay. After I win my discrimination suit, I go to church or therapist, get the cure, and reclaim straightness. This proposal would make a mockery of the protections that minorities have won; we’d all be situational minorities.
Saw Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” great filmography
Yes, but with reservations. Our immigration laws are a mess. My parents were immigrants who entered the USA 80 years ago (Dad was exposed to Marxist socialism, Mom fled the national socialist Hitler) obeying reasonable laws. Since then, laws changed. We now need laws that allow immigrants to come here legally on temporary work visas. That might mean millions who will do menial labor. Also, the laws should encourage the best scientists/technicians/entrepreneurs to relocate here and become citizens.
Get out of Iraq forthwith. Our intelligence services didn’t know what was going on there in 2003, got WMD and the presence of Al Qaida wrong, thought that the Iraqis would join together to form a government that we would approve etc. They changed their opinions about Iranian nuclear weapons. The Surge was only in Baghdad, but independently the rest of the country calmed down .This is being hailed a victory for our intelligence services. Nothing assures me that the NSA/CIA know much about the Mideast. Why any congressman thinks he knows what will happen after we leave?
My last two books were John LeCarre’s Mission Song, and Michael Polanyi’s The Logic of Liberty
| Bailout!
The incumbent voted for the bailout; he knew he was in trouble and so issued a press release telling you that he objected to AIG’s board of directors spending 400,000 dollars on a fancy retreat. He’s trying to muddy the waters. Don’t be fooled, he really did want to spend your 850 BILLION on the bailout crapshoot.
The primary problems causing the current banking problems are twofold;
1) the easy money stance taken by the Fed for the last 20 years, and
2) over-spending/borrowing/regulation by the congress and administration.
Urchins in Buffalo frequently talked about the fat lady with the short skirt. The ugly excesses bulge out somewhere.
Very much like the fat lady, government is a zero sum game. I’ll relate this to the bailout.
The artificially cheap credit (low interest rates) produced by Greenspan etc. sloshed into the stock markets during the 1990s, into real estate until last year, and now is going into commodities; it’s fueling the current inflation, the decline of the dollar versus other currencies as well as an export boom. The easy money led to misallocation of resources, 4000 square foot homes, SUVs, ballooning credit card debt, etc.
The 1977 Community Reconstruction Act threatened commercial lenders with half million dollar fines if they denied mortgages to unqualified applicants. The Government also overspent and had to borrow in bond markets, driving up interest rates. The lenders were Chinese, Japanese, oil kingdoms and they’ve noted with increasing anxiety that the dollar was being debauched.. If they decide that to de-dollarize, demanding payment in Euros or Yen, our prices and interest rates will explode, and economy tank.
When the easy money bubble on housing burst, banks were stuck with worthless paper. Some, the greedier and unlucky are bankrupt, their shareholders and managers devastated, and the bondholders trying to salvage what they can. (BTW, nothing except the stockholder’s value is lost in bankruptcy, the loans to homeowners etc. are still valuable assets). Surviving banks will have to increase their interest rates so as to become profitable and repair their balance sheets. Their reluctance to lend to other banks will wane if the interest rates go high enough.
But our political leaders don’t want high interest rates and so propose to “repair the balance sheets” of banks by buying up their toilet paper and keeping interest rates low. They will go into the capital markets to borrow over a trillion dollars, crowding out private investors, and driving interest rates up to astronomical levels. Main street will grind to a halt, hard times for everyone.
Didn’t I just say something about increasing interest rates? Many different ways of getting there, but the same result.
It’s that fat lady again.
Other thoughts;
1)Times of economic disruption are great opportunities. Bankruptcy is
the destruction of mismanagement, of misallocation. Inept shareholders and management is wiped out and the bond holders take over. They appoint a receiver who can either try to run the company, or liquidate the assets, usually cents on the dollars. If one is liquid, one can snap up stuff, probably without debt and turn it into something very profitable. Tough for the former investors, the degenerates.
1) Hard times are not bad times, they are an opportunity for ordinary folks with guts and luck to make a bundle.
2)Another assertion of the bail out is trying to keep financial firms alive, or even having the government take them over and allegedly even profiting form holding these assets. The ordinary guy who work for Fannie Mae, WaMu etc will continue to have his job, which is fine, and continue to support the local economies.
3) Now, I sat on the board of the Grand Valley Coop Credit Union for 8 years. I can assure you that our little credit union can in principle do exactly the same stuff that Goldman Sachs does, but do it smarter and with less overhead. The bail out asks the already dinged up muttonheads in Michigan to forego the jobs, and pay taxes so that Swells in NYC, Boston and Seattle can retain good paying, genteel jobs. Muttonheads, after all might get ideas.
3)My wife and I were evicted from our home and the place where we had our business and raised the kids in 2004. The city of GR wanted to build affordable housing or something on our property, so we had to find someplace to live. We knew, from listening to real estate agents (the ultimate idiots) that “the property prices in GR will never go down” and from reading the Economist magazine about the impending real estate bubble that that market was toppy. We really looked hard at renting, but ultimately bought to smallest, cheapest condo that we could find. Our suspicions have been vindicated. The prices went up until 2006, and then started to come back down again, but the amounts in play are negligible. Two of our kids considered buying, didn’t and are better off for their forebearance.
4)I have an MBA, was a stock broker and was exposed to the Black Sholes models for valuing securities and options. I even worked my way through a problem when I was younger and a lot smarter. It uses the normal “jiggle” of price variation during the past year (or some other period), corrects it for dividend payments, applies a statistical bell shaped curve of the probability that prices will be in some relevant range and assigns a value to options. D’ya understand?
This is the model used to manage risk, at least, the way economists define it. Elegant, but I could never make the connection between a predictable jiggle in prices, and the fact that a company or security might, and probably will, find itself in a new economic environment sending the security price into space, or into the toilet. There was simply no recognition that risk is not predictable, in markets risk is mercurial and can’t be managed. How did these Ivy League trained geniuses not recognize that they are in a chaotic world?
5)The bill actually passed provides for an enormous increase in the Federal government power to invade our privacy. The IRS, NSA, CIA got that which they wanted, and our rights be damned.
6) The purpose of the bailout is to stabilize real estate prices so that the banks’ will have profits and be able to keep their capital ratios up to snuff. But doesn’t that keep the price of homes up and beyond the reach of so many poor people that the Democrats claim to cherish so dearly? How will the poor working man ever get onto the ladder to financial success if he can’t get on the first run of wealth accummulation?
7) The Japanese had this happen to them in 1989. Banks had invested in the stock market which also had been hyper-stimulated by easy credit. When that bubble burst (the Nikkei fell from 40,000 to as low as 7000, it is now 11,000 as I write) the banks were similarly bankrupt. The Japanese government also did not allow the banks to fail. Interest rates have been close to zero, they have paved over the northern-most island of Japan trying to stimulate the economy. Yet banks could not afford to lend, and companies were not allowed to go bankrupt. A lot of businesses are on life support, pale corpses.
Japan has had a stalled economy for nearly 20 years now. Growth is often negative, there is serious unemployment, and young people cannot afford to marry or have children.
Had they allowed the banks to fail, they would have had the nightmare behind them in a few years.
Why was this model of failure of governmental policy never invoked in addressing our housing bubble.
8) The question markets struggle with is whether the bailout will evolve into an inflationary blowout as in Germany in 1920-23, or into a deflationary grind as in Japan or during our great depression.
. The treasury and Fed both are trying to deflate their way out of the financial pinch. Two problems confront these Keynesian geniuses (the economists who have accurately predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions); the Fed makes credit available but that does not guarantee that individuals are credit worthy or that they will want to borrow and so they are “pushing on a string”, and can’t create credig. The second problem with inflation of our money is that Chinese, Japanese, OPEC members all hold huge amounts of dollars, and if they de-dollarize our economy will really experience exploding prices.
The markets reaction, for it’s worth, seems to indicate deflation
9) The public is being frightened by threats that they won’t be able to sell, or buy real estate or live in homes if banks are in trouble. I beg to differ; one can easily buy and sell real estate much more simply and safely by using land contracts. And businessmen know that in the ideal world, it doesn’t make any difference in buying versus renting real assets.
10) Moral hazards is an economic term that describes the displacement of caution shown by economic and other actors if they realize or believe that someone else will step in and relieve them of responsibility or the consequenses of their mistakes. When the government stepped in and allowed the same corrupt companies to survive and even prosper, it opened a flood gate of problems for itself in the future. These banks, mortgage companies and now even the auto companies have now experienced acting stupidly and yet not being punished for it. What will prevent them from being even stupider and more reckless next time?
11) Austrian economics eshews the false glory of predicting the future. Keynsian economists, on the other hand, claim that they can manage the economy, foresee problems and guide public policy which is why they are popular, especially with politicians and other followers.
I’m a kind of contrarian, and when these Keynsians point the way and claim to guide us to calm waters ahead, I experience a kind of vertigo. But then, I can’t predict what the economy will look like even tomorrow, but I’m certain that these Keynsian clowns should be credited with far less than tomorrow; they don’t even understand what happened yesterday, or 20 years ago. |
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16Nov 08
I noted that there was only private money involved, and that the two researchers seemed to be the only or main employees/equity holders. Note the absence of the state or federal government. I predict a great future for MS.
Erwin Haas MD MBA, communications director for the Libertarian Party of West Michigan, and recent losing Libertarian Party candidate for Michigan’s third congressional district.
The specious arguments used by the Rapid included;
1) that using buses is fuel efficient and less polluting than are private cars. In fact, the national Bureau of Transportation Statistics shows unequivocally, year after year, that buses are 20% more polluting and less energy efficient than are cars operationally,(rather than in some ideal world).
2) Misleading financial statements. On their publications and web site, the Rapid presents their operating budget, giving the impression that they have costs under control and greatly understating the actual costs per passenger mile.
3) When the actual budget is compared to other public transportation systems funded by the government, the Rapid has spent double the norm for capital expenditures, year after year, and going back over 10 years with its predecessor GRATA. This has never been challenged.
4) The running condition of the buses that I have used is shabby, they rattle. Do they keep up on maintenance?
5) All of the above were presented to the GRP repeatedly during the campaign to stop the tax increase by opponents, and ignored. The GRP (advertising dollars?), Mr. Varga and Mr. Ehlers (big booster for this pork funding) need to explain their involvement with the Rapid.
Erwin Haas, Communications director for the Libertarian Party of West Michigan.
The big picture on alleged global warming and any political response to it lies in understanding the scientific bases of these allegations; almost all of it arises from computer simulations of assumptions about the atmosphere. These are notoriously subject to the assumptions that are posited at the beginning of the computer run.
There is indeed an approximate doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air, and an unknown changes in other gases like water vapor, methane, sulfur compounds, and particle pollution that have effects on retaining solar energy and so warming the air. There is a minute increase of global temperatures of .3 degrees Celcius measured by the MSU satellites in the last 30 years which is far too little to validate the computer models so far proposed.
A multitude of anecdotes are cited to buttress global warming narrative. Some glaciers have melted and the South polar ice cap continues to increase in size. Temperatures taken in cities are not valid as population centers predictably become heat islands. Beyond uncertainty about the whether there is man made global warming, lie questions about whether an increase in temperature on earth makes any difference. And if there is some way to discern the potential harm out of the opaque future, then the question arises about whether there is anything that we can do will stop, or reverse global warming.
Mankind adapts to his environment, be it tropical heat among natives in Arfica or artic ice for Eskimos; there should be more
Environmentalists
We have to distinguish between the State of Michigan, and of its citizens. The State has only one role, that of protecting the liberties of the individuals who live here. The individuals need the State to defend them from violence and fraud so that they are free to lead their own lives, be it as industrialists, or drunks lying in the gutter.
An Individual will work, learn stuff, move elsewhere, depending on his own goals and vision of the good life. Call it greed, or a will to life.
Out of this wellspring rises the creativity with all its craziness and unpredictability, that young people show, and out of which arise the businesses and industries of the future.
The writer, and many others, confuses the role of the State. It does not exist to put people to work, or to structure businesses.
The life sciences increased employment is almost all in the hospital and health care areas, the ones that will be severely curtailed when health care costs are “contained”. Green energy requires continuing state subsidies, and are unsustainable since they waste the resources of individuals.
The two areas in which the writer touts the role of the state are exactly the same as that in almost all the states, reflecting the dull, stereotyped imaginations of politicians. I don’t understand where there is any comparative advantage.
The State of Michigan is never going to attract or retain smart people as long as it tries to tax the individuals here to encourage established, mature firms and industries to come here. There is also the self serving stuff that comes out of tax and industry supported centers that asserts that entrepreneurs will come here if there is “good” public transportation, or cool downtowns. Hooey.
It would be far better for the individuals here if they retained their own money to invest, spend, or waste, as they saw fit. The state should shrink, and become like the night watchman. Or else the individuals here will continue to leave and go to places like Texas, where a more libertarian culture prevails
Erwin Haas, Communications director for the Libertarian Party of West Michigan
Stirring words, but misleading ones albeit.
The transcendental problem arises from subsidies that have to be pumped into renewals, or else they don’t function. The broken window example is useful to illustrate the futility of renewables.
If an urchin breaks the window of a store, we would hear Mr. Heartwell claim that this is a good thing. The merchant gets a new window, jobs are created making the glass and replacing it in the store, Rubbish haulers are involved.
However, what is not obvious is that the merchant now has lost a large amount of money and can’t pay his workers or suppliers as much, and may have to raise his prices to his cutomers to replace the glass.
Basically, Renewable energy is the broken window; we are forced to pay taxes for stuff that is economically not viable. Glowing rhetoric aside, the jobs produced will probably be for a minimum wage. We will take money from very much stressed taxpayers and give it to special interest who will ”invest” it in schemes that can’t compete in the energy markets without the big bailout.
Almost all of the states are also encouraging/subsidizing biology corridors, renewable energy suppliers and producers. Where is the comparative advantage for any one state?
Real scientists are skeptical about whether there is global warming, and the carbon dioxide model does not predict the temperature changes that have happened. Politically, can the USA and a few Europeans convince the rest of the world to go along with an impoverished low carbon future? And even if global temperatures go up, why would we think that that was bad?
Man adapts to worse things than a bit of climate change. Michigan, enthralled by lapdog politicians continues to languish because of the misallocation that these people foist on us.
Erwin Haas, Communications director for the Libertarian Party of West Michigan
Another non sustainable governmental boondoggle will suck up tax payer dollars. Didn’t the journalist question the subsidies that make this thing “profitable”? The “green” jobs of sorting through garbage will be trumpeted by the Democrats and their bedwetting knock offs, the Republicans, will pay ten dollars an hour but are “good local environmental jobs that can’t be exported” as I’m sure Mayor Heartwell will tell us.
I saw three trucks from Texas loaded down with blades for gigantic windmills this week. They weren’t made in Michigan giving the lie to the politicians’ claims that Green policies would create jobs here in Michigan.
“Green” increasingly means recycled rubbish.
Why doesn’t the GRP feature the other 6 trustees for their ideological stances? The other topics mentioned in the article all seem to be left wing topics. Where is the diversity? Aren’t these trustees using my tax dollars to drag the institution into the culture wars?
I have no particular problems with Davis or Avla, but ask where are do we see any critics of governmental failure? Where are Libertarian speakers like Walter Williams, John Stoessel or Father Robert Siricco?
Dr. Ryskamp has his rights of free speach, offers a breath of fresh air to the atmosphere at the college, and adds at least some necessary diversity to the GRCC board.
The examples used in the editorial perfectly illustrate the dysfunctional status of MEGA and MEDC. They are large established firms that provide jobs and services in mature, or even declining industries. Politicians like to stand in front of impressive buildings with the cameras rolling.
News flash; the future is unknown. Very likely the types of industries favored by MEGA will be long since gone. Lump the GRP in with these dying industries.
We don’t know what kind of industries, ventures, ideas will make money next year, or 20 years from now. I can tell you that there is, somewhere, a future Bill Gates, or Al Gore (father of the internet) who might be an engineer, musician, dreamer, entrepreneur or just layabout who will in a few years be starved for the capital that these boondoggles waste.
A more progressive use of the money might be to cancel all taxes for all Michigan Businesses. That way consumer prices would be lowered since Michigan stores, doctors, hairdressers etc would no longer have to pass their tax costs on to their clients. It would be a tax free way for progressive legislators to improve our state.
Erwin Haas, Communications director for the Libertarian Party of West Michigan
Are these the economists who staffed the Fed and advised the Congress and caused the housing morass? Or the geniuses who accurately predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions?
Trumpeting this kind of stuff is irresponsible. Is the GRP the ouija board of West Michigan?
Americans have been conditioned to value medical care more than it is worth. Medicine has become the new religion. People believe that doctors can prolong lives, delay the normal aging processes and make life better. They have been sold on these superstitions by the media that hypes high tech advances in medicine that may only help a tiny percentage of the general public. Americans ascribe the general prolonging of life spans to medical care, whereas the real reasons include public health measures against infectious diseases, better diets and lessening of physical stress. Doctors thump the pulpit by talking gullible families into doing “what we can do” to keep Granny alive, when in actuality they officiously prolong Granny’s dying
Europeans are not caught up in the American creed. It may be that Europeans got “free medical care” at a time when medical care could do little to alter the course of illnesses. Comforting the dying and their relatives was what they expected from doctors a hundred years ago when many of these schemes were introduced. The modest accomplishments of their medical systems has not led Europeans to alter their expectations.
I agree with Europeans. There are a few surgical procedures like appendectomy that save lives. Many orthopedic procedures can make life more enjoyable. Occasionally an antibiotic or an antihypertensive helps. But frying the brains of Ted Kennedy and Robert Novak stretched their lives from 6 months to a year as steroidal zombies.
The Democratic proposals don’t do anything to make Americans reject salvation, so I suppose that the special interests will continue to prosper and medical costs will climb. The Republicans ripped off some Libertarian ideas that would force individuals to confront the cost-benefit calculus, but few of their politicians understand consumer driven health care, and most would reject it if they did.
I don’t see anything in my lifetime curbing the American appetite for the marvelous.
Legalize all drugs, maybe tax ‘em, and let ‘em be sold like booze or cigarettes. Prices will drop and the incentive to push the stuff will fade.
The bulk of the people pushing drugs are like Amway distributors, they are also the main users and need the income, and new customer base. Get rid of the need for income, and the whole chain of money back to wherever it is collapses.
BTW, we had a heroin problem in Vietnam starting about 1970. The South Vietnamese air force almost certainly brought the stuff over from the golden triangle and the Vietcong distributed it. I suspected 30% of our soldiers were addicted, and another 20% used occasionally. Had we been attacked, we would have had 30% casualties armed with M16 inside our own wires. That has to be one of the reasons why we withdrew from Vietnam; we had been defeated militarily by a crafty enemy and the weakness of American draftees.
I don’t know why only rapid supporters are invited; how does the rapid confer on a combination of self serving special interests like construction contractors, publicists, transport unions, and frankly gulls credibility, but critics are intimidated and told not to attend a public, and I suppose, publicly financed meeting?
This is an obvious attempt of the rapid to drum up free publicity and support for the agency to mulct yet more money from the taxpayer.
The problem with the rapid is the rapid. It’s amassed huge moneys which management, politicians and the various hangers on have used to extend their power. There is a constant campaign of misrepresentation to further their goals.
I’ll cite some of their deceptions;
1) Their web site presented only an “operating” budget, excluding capital spending for buses, buildings, repair facilities etc. Their capital spending is grossly out of line with the spending of comparable public bus-lines elsewhere in the country. The capital budget for bus lines should add around 20% of operating costs; the capital budget for the rapid, both recently, and when averaged for the last 10 years (includes GRATA) adds 40% of operating costs. Why the gross overspending?
2) The rapid falsely claims that buses are “greener”, and save fuel. The Federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics publishes actual fuel usage per passenger mile each year. It states unequivocally that buses are 20% less efficient than are personal cars in operational use. The further implication is that buses are more polluting than are cars.
3). Their taxes will be levied on businesses and landlords who pass these increases on to customers instead of higher prices for food, clothing, heat, electricity. Very poor people are the victims of their scams.
Monies that are “lost” are “ICE-T” funds, and can be used to fix bridges and roads if not wasted on some of their self serving scams.
If several laws were changed, or abolished, a system of privately owned and operated buses, vans, jitneys, and taxis would soon compete with the public bus line, and efficiently find and solve transportation needs for folks who are too poor, or disabled to drive their own cars. The rapid is not operated for the public good, so much as to enrich the special interests; these do not want to have pesky competition and are powerful enough to thwart any reforms.
Travel 50 miles north of GR and find woods, overgrown fields, rotting barns. Travel 50 miles south, the same thing. In all directions find abandoned farm land.
This “report” ignores the fundamental reality that farmland is being abandoned by the millions of acres due in part to greater efficiencies on the surviving farms, and, near cities that hope to grow, incursion by suburbs.
Also, the GRP and the politicians who support “preservation” (has anyone seen land ever disappear?) have to tell us why the oppose free markets and capitalism.
Erwin Haas
I seem to remember Mayor Abe Drasin, and Commissioner Howard Rienstra being politically incorrect and calmly taking a strike by some 750 or so unionized city workers. They “broke” the union and won great praise. (I’m not against unions but the public service variety clearly serve no economic purpose.)
But my related question is, how did the workforce in the city swell to what I back calculated to 2000 (which was cut by 25% or 500)? Were more of Mayor Heartwell’s supporters put onto the payroll only to be let go when times got tough?
We lived in the city and paid huge taxes. The city planning commission under Mayor Heartwell decided to zone our and our neighbor’s property so that the politicians could build subsidized housing for their supporters. Nice loss of tax base and concomitant increase of costs to the city’s treasury. I greatly increased my net earnings and lost a lot of stress when we moved out of Grand Rapids. I seem to remember Mayor Abe Drasin, and Commissioner Howard Rienstra being politically incorrect and calmly taking a strike by some 750 or so unionized city workers. They “broke” the union and won great praise. (I’m not against unions but the public service variety clearly serve no economic purpose.)
But my related question is, how did the workforce in the city swell to what I back calculated to 2000 (which was cut by 25% or 500)? Were more of Mayor Heartwell’s supporters put onto the payroll only to be let go when times got tough?
We lived in the city and paid huge taxes. The city planning commission under Mayor Heartwell decided to zone our and our neighbor’s property so that the politicians could build subsidized housing for their supporters. Nice loss of tax base and concomitant increase of costs to the city’s treasury. I greatly increased my net earnings and lost a lot of stress when we moved out of Grand Rapids.
criticize
“payroll taxes up to seven times higher than high-income earners” is an inchoate statement in an article that otherwise reflects a compassionate though uninformed view of poverty.
Taxes, popularly, are levied on “the rich” and corporations. “The rich” actually are the investors in businesses ore corporations, so there is no real distinction.
Turns out that investors and corporations cannot lose money in the long term. They simply must justify the use of resources, or else cease operations (and there go the jobs). Businesses have to cover their costs with income, and therein lies the kernel. Taxes are a cost, and businesses have to pay them. They usually cover their costs by increasing prices. Businesses do not pay taxes, they merely collect them.
As the government has become larger in the last 30-40 years, businesses have had to increase their prices to customers, thereby passing their increased costs to someone else. That someone else is the working poor that our writer is so concerned about. Folks who are higher on the income scale have bargaining power, and those with union jobs political power to overcome these increases in the general prices for food, rent, clothing, transportation…..
The poor have no bargaining power; they have to take jobs that are offered at whatever wage, and pay whatever prices they encounter. The poor have to contend with a universe in which they pay for the increased burden of government when they buy food, pay rent, and contend with credit cards. This accounts for the observation that the incomes of the poor have not kept up with the general prosperity.
Mr. Long would rationally advocate smaller government with lower demands on businesses. That way the oppression of the poor would ease. Increasing the income of the poor only forces more money and its waste through Lansing.
Erwin Haas is communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan. “The Thinks watching out for the Think nots.”
San. seems to be a Keynsian, the discredited economic school that got us into the current economic morass.
Rich folks do nothing that will lower the income that they require on investments, and that requirement includes progressive income taxes. If you tax interest income at 50 percent, they will have to increase the rates on credit cards and mortgages by 50 percent. Rich folks don’t care about taxes, which is why the left is dominated by Limousine liberals.
The multiplier effect has to do with what the fed does. Injecting money into banks is lent out and swells the amount of circulating money by a factor of maybe 2.3. Has nothing to do with welfare payments to Poor folks. The multiplier effect also debauches the economy, and distorts rational investment.
Demand by poor folks really is insignificant in the overall economy; new construction and the middle class spending really drive growth.
Rich folks invest where ever they get best return with inflation and safety factored in. That is why fat cats, like the Chinese, Japanese, and Suadi’s have invested trillions in our economy. Our investments abroad are insignificant to the incoming investments.
Userlogic;
I’ve never heard of the ISO standards. You must be very knowledgeable.
Possibly writing for the promotion of self interest?
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Pary of W. Michigan
The election of Sen Brown in Mass last week was certainly a victory for fiscal conservatives. I see it as dangerous shoals upon which our movement can flounder.
We now have to face the prospect that legislators of both parties will see importance of “Making laws”, “by compromising”, and “reaching across the aisle”, to wit, bastardizing our message that we don’t want more laws. If we want anything from legislators is that they restrict themselves to formulating, codifying or clarifying the laws that grow naturally out of our customs and practices as peace loving citizens.
The Ehlers and Hoekstras of the world see it as their role to be our leaders to make us better, to improve our health and morals, not as the servants who will administer government, and then retire to the scullery and filch the port wine.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan and will be the LPWM candidate for Michigan’s 3rd congressional district.
I’ve shown previously that PDR is another special interest patronage to increase the value of the remaining land owned by already wealthy guys.
The statement ‘“I don’t believe we need to contribute to the high unemployment rate when we have $30 million in reserves,” said outgoing Commissioner Bob Synk’ caught my eye.
Government jobs have always been patronage and are becoming more so as government metastasizes.
Governmental jobs remind me of the Moorsoldaten. Seems that The national socialists (Nazis) had impounded Communists (international socialists) in some moors near the Dutch border and forced them to dig ditches all day long, and then fill them in during the night.
This continued until the prisoners died. I’d like to emphasize that socialists were on each side of this exercise, so no one should feel undue sympathy.
What we can learn is that most civil service jobs consist of make work projects, like the Moorsoldaten. What is more damaging than wasting their time on digging ditches is that the civil service mostly creates work by bothering others. The Sheriffs will spend days filling their quotas for traffic tickets and low risk inmates are victimized because they got caught with a joint or two. We could do without these.
Maybe best to eliminate both the patronage jobs and the PDR, let individuals keep their tax dollars to seek their own happiness.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
Possibly I don’t get the point here.
The production spends 100 dollars here in Michigan. I as Joe Q. Public put in 42 dollars into the State’s coffers and the producer 58 dollars of production costs. He hires a few souls here as extras, brings in most of his Japanese and Chinese made equipment, and a big star from Hollywood. He peddles the film around the world and makes a profit.
The state of Michigan manages to tax expenditures from sales and income taxes, minor contributions from property taxes, the sum of which are capped at 10% of what is spent here. So Joe Q. sees at most 10 dollars come back to replace his 42 dollar expenditures.
Not an investment that Rick could have sold to anyone except the innumerate legislators. Hopefully he will get rid of the film industry like it’s a bodily function.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
I couldn’t understand the headlines and struggled to read the article to no avail.
I’ll rewrite what I think the author may have said.
The government of Michigan has a financial problem; not enough money in and too much out. A rejiggering seems in order.
The state should streamline the tax system by introducing the Fair Tax (basically what Texas does at 8.25%), get rid the current capricious schemes and watch investment and the economy soar.
At the same time the government must dump the special interests to cut expenditures, to wit, film, MEDC, tourist, prevailing wages on construction projects, public pensions and medical care costs……..
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
Greattake, the tax structure is dysfunctional and high and if it were lowered, would certainly help keep legislators from frittering away our resources. The state should streamline the tax system by introducing the Fair Tax (basically what Texas does at 8.3%), get rid the current fickle schemes and watch investment and the economy soar.
I opine that more of the state’s misery is due to regulations which strangle initiative here. The government must dump the special interests to cut expenditures, to wit, film, MEDC, tourist, prevailing wages on construction projects, public pensions and medical care costs……..
The state controls your health care, jobs, property, marriages, divorces, children and education, etc.
Granholme gloried in laying claim to all of the water in the state because of the fantasy that denying Great Lakes water to Arizona and New Mexico would make Michigan richer; remember how she tried to stop a bottled water plant from opening up north because of the ideology. Now in addition to everything else, you have to ask permission to use the water under your own land.
What is the point of endeavor? People who have a future will not work for the commune; they will work to earn and keep what is theirs.</p>
The only answer is for the individual to be set free from Michigan’s bureaucratic whimsies. The state cannot help the economy, or change what is best for the individual. The loss of population should have made that obvious. It wasn’t groups of people who left Michigan, it was one person at a time each seeking his own happiness.
Call it liberty.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
The economic reasoning supporting PDR is 1) for local economic diversity, 2) to create a long term business environment for possible agriculture and 3) to ensure a safe adequate local food supply.
If it were a function of our government to ensure local economic diversity, the Kent County commissioners should support publishing pornography. After all, with all of the religious and music publishing going around here, any citizen can see that more diversification will benefit those very important endeavors and buttress the 2) long term business environment for publishing.
I calculate the total agricultural cash flow of $121 million annually is about 1% of the net income of the economic activity of Kent County of 12 billion. Surprisingly little given the enormous resources devoted to it. I’d guess that publishing produces a far greater percentage of the county’s output, and of course, subsidizing pornography would only strengthen that industry.
I hope that the commissioners continue to encourage economic diversification by diverting monies wasted on small potatoes like farming and apply that money to the porn industry. For the scenery.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
Dear GR, if you don’t mind my using your first name;
In defending PDR you have to tell me why you want to have farms near a metropolitan area? The highest economic use of that land is for homes, businesses and factories and not in farming; that’s why PDR is a payment to the farmer to buy away that economic surplus. Why do you want to deprive the market of the lowest cost options available for necessary expansion?
Farms, even the toy ones that survive near the city produce smells, sounds and pollutants that finicky city slickers will find offensive; what yet more silly compromise will the Commissioners make when irate voters complain about this creation of theirs? I can picture some very liberal fire brands labeling a hog farm next to a public housing project as state sponsored terrorism, which oddly enough, frankly, makes sense.
Real farms start another five miles out. For the price of a cup of gas you and your descendants (mine have all left Michigan to seek fortunes elsewhere) can to out that much further to get food security, watch peasants and workers happily disport themselves among the weeds and to tolerate whatever scents and sights that real farming might thrust on them.
A caution though, don’t go much further than 20 miles from town if you want to see farms. Seems that most all of Michigan, and indeed the upper Midwest is dotted with abandoned farms. Empty barns, rotted weathered homesteads, weed overgrown fences and fields constitute the only scenery that our farming romantic is likely to find from the Kent County line stretching all the way to the Sou, or down to the Indiana Border.
I suppose that the commissioners could spend our money and all that leveraged pelf on preserving a hundred times as much land in let’s say, Houghton County. At least they wouldn’t do as much economic damage as depriving the market of space in a county where that is still economically relevant.
But if the commissioners really want to improve the livelihoods and scenery for citizens of this great County, they should invest in the porn industry and not fritter it away on the cornball and cheesy PDR
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
Well said, as usual Sage.
And La, you’re right on about nursing. I’ve been counseling new RNs to go to El Paso if they want to work. Texas is a truly progressive state (“Progressive” indicates the direction the worm goes to when it’s moving).
I didn’t read the original article, but I assume it’s the usual maudlin stuff about education and the state supporting health care. BTW, the population of Grand Rapids dropped about 3 percent in the last 10 years despite the “medical mile”.
Clogged toilets repeatedly flushed, and the back up deepens.
The thread here seems to be that Michigan or the USA should prosper by promoting our own kind of protectionism.
But why should I, as a consumer, object to acquiring goods cheaply while the government of China forces poor schnooks to work their fingers to the bone and subsidize my great life style?
The object of providing Americans with “shovel-ready” work is another crackpot idea. What joy do most Americans find in work? We want stuff, not work.
We know that capital can be substituted for labor. (People interested in economic history may consult the “Cobb-Douglas function.”) You can dig a the Erie Barge canal in five years, using 10,000 Irishmen with picks and shovels, or you can get your canal in one year, using 100 guys and an investment in giant earthmoving machines. This is the core of capitalism.
I envision a huge factory staffed by robots, with a few guys on loading docks marshalling raw material through one door and shipping finished goods out through another. A few maintenance men grease the wheels. Folks living genteel lives design, direct, and finance the operation from their homes, working a few hours a week.
I’d hate to employ a billion hands manufacturing (hand making) stuff in China when highly robotized machines operate in some place that capital and creative people find most congenial. And I hope this would be a free-trade U.S.A. If the crazy quilt work of regulation, work rules, and taxes in Michigan were liberalized, it might even occur here.
I’d say that the Chinese are in trouble, and meanwhile, let’s enjoy the cheap stuff.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
Erwin Haas is the communications director….
One;
You cite Pittsburgh as somehow leading the way. Two of our kids went to P’burgh to make a living. Both are highly trained and enterprising. The engineer worked designing a nuclear power plant in W. Miflin; hated it and left for a nicer environment. Daughter is a statistician at RAND which is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon (actually more prestigious than U. Pitt) a core city phenomenon. She loves it but I’ve warned her about buying housing there.
The reason is that Pittsburgh, despite its halo of having research, great universities and hospitals is slowly dying.
Yep. Greater Pittsburgh had 2.4 million folks 10 years ago, now down to 2.3 and change. The presence of a great downtown, world class universities and medical facilities which employ some 10s of thousands is not able to alter the rather fast decay of the surrounding city, and there is no hope that it ever will change.
Citing Pittsburgh identifies you, along with the editors of the GRP, with the religion of Salvation in “education”. Repeating each other’s cant discourages making effective arguments; rather you just validate each other without relying on evidence readily at hand.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
El Sayed Ali Ahmed Zaki
Former Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Sudan
El Sayed Ali Ahmed Zaki has held a number of distinguished government positions related to public investment and development programs in Sudan. From 1983 to 1989 he was first undersecretary of planning, and from 1989 to 1990 he served as minister of finance and economic planning. He is currently a management and economics consultant. Zaki has been a member of the board of directors of numerous public and private corporations and is now chairman of West Kordofan University and chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Electricity Corporation, Sudan. Zaki holds a B.Sc. in agriculture and an M.Sc. in agricultural economics from the University of Khartoum, and an M.A. in macroeconomics and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Michigan State University, USA.
Dear Alamo;
Capitalism is the spontaneous deployment in the marketplace of some combination of capital and labor to produce, market and enjoy stuff. (Economically, manufacturing is not a very productive use of human time.)
My point was that someone, somewhere will build a factory or factories that will employ a maximum of capital to make stuff, relieving most folks from the drudgery of labor. This has been the glory of the free enterprise system, pioneered in the West, and now imitated in the Orient. This trend has allowed 1% instead of 90% of the population in the USA to farm and feed the rest of us, and has allowed manufacturing to use ever fewer workers.
BTW, manufacturing in the USA is enormous; it accounts for about 15% of the output and in absolute terms expands as rapidly as does the Chinese manufacturing base. Firms in the USA produce high end stuff. The complaint of politicians is that there are no manufacturing jobs, never that Americans don’t make stuff.
If we got rid of the rigidities of environmental law, zoning and planning commissions, the interference of state and national labor laws, bureaucratic finance constraints, factories could be built here that would produce an enormous amount of stuff at low costs. Prices would drop and even the fellow with a minimum wage job could live well.
Automation would freeze China out of the breadline and they know it. Chinese workers have also lost jobs, probably more than in the USA. The bright and aggressive managers in China are slowly accumulating the capital to automate, but their big problem is their woeful lack of the marketing capacity which accounts for 80-90% of the value of stuff. This is where western societies and the Japanese still soar above their competitors.
Democrats never got over the industrial revolution and fantasize factories with assembly lines with highly paid union workers adding interchangeable parts to underlying junk,;the same dysfunctional thinking is also applied to the public schools. Republicans want us to live under the Christian equivalent of Sharia law.
Only Libertarians see clearly the power of the individual to imagine, create and enjoy in a free society. Freedom has sadly deteriorated in Michigan and in the USA. Absent our inherent freedoms and liberties, this country will be content with ever poorer, less enterprising and dejected citizens.
Learn to live with it, or else vote Libertarian to allow greed and individualism to work its magic as it did a hundred years ago.
I attended the gun show at the Deltaplex the weekend before the elections. The W. Michigan Tea Party was selling some trinkets along with Snyder, Hillibrand, etc.
I merely contracted my eyebrows because it was obvious that Snyder , like Obama, guaranteed himself election with a flowery vision and brushed off substantial details of what he would do. The press connived with this, never asking questions.
Now the Tea Party activists are treated to the spectacle of Snyder rubbing his worry beads instead of offending anyone. He is too detached to stir the fermenting manure pile so that it will at least heat up much less shovel it out.
Angry peasants will have plenty of manure to throw but all for naught. The new guys are in there for the next 8 years, all the time mollifying the commoners and above the stink.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan
Procrustes was a famous highway robber in Ancient Greece. His morbid sense of humor presages that of our Michigan public officials.
Seems that he wanted his victims to be all the same so he constructed a bed and measured all. Those who were too tall had hands and feet cut off to fit the bed. Folks who were too short were stretched on the rack, dislocating joints and causing death, until they too fit Procrustes’ bed.
The Procrustes’ bed was well known and feared among the founders; too bad that many Michigan’s public officials want to produce a drab sameness, emulating Procrustes. Many see it as their duty to produce some sort of equality of results under guise of social justice.
Erwin Haas is the communication’s director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
I wish Snyder well, but all I need from him is that he not interfere with my and other citizens’ use of our own properties and God given talents to make a living.
In last half century the state has assumed an ever more intrusive stance into private affairs. A culture here has evolved in which we assume that we have to seek the permission of the state to use our property. I always cite Texas for its progressive stance. In Texas you can do what is not forbidden; in Michigan, you may do only what is allowed. Snyder will make an impact only if he can break up this dysfunctional nexus.
The regulatory state is the problem, not the weather. Young enterprising folks leave because they can’t or won’t deal with the bureaucracy. Michigan has become a place where the state sets up the MEDC to help aspiring business not only navigate the maze of regulations and also raise money by taxing possible competitors. It’s crazy.
We should pay the state only to provide protection from those evil men who would deprive us of our earnings. We do not want government officials to equalize wisdom and foolishness, and who see themselves elected to solve people’s problems for them. This has created the servile mind so common in the Press and in the remaining citizens.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan
ST, since we seem to be on a first name basis.
How does denying Nevada fresh water make us richer?
We don’t improve our lot when we put someone else at a disadvantage. If Nevada wanted our water, they would have to pay for the transportation plus some sort of severance tax. This is how it’s done among adults. What would happen to us in Michigan if Texas or Louisiana decided that their oil was was too precious to sell to Northerners? Or how much electricity would you enjoy if Wyoming or Montana decided that they didn’t want any more holes in their gravel and were too jealous of low sulfur coal to want to share it?
We lose nothing when we sell what we have in unbounded excess. Indeed that is what free markets are all about. We have water, timber, oil and natural gas that remain locked away by government fiat. The one thing that Michigan now exports is labor, and resembles other social democracies like Mexico or Kerala in that regard.
The state of Michigan needs to stop interfering with the pursuit of life, liberty and property.
Absent this, prepare yourself for a long, impoverished grind or else leave and go to where grownups are adults.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan
ST, since we seem to be on a first name basis.
I’m not sure what a CAFO be, but it sounds like bureaucratic in group talk. In any case, you assume there is no water law separate from the monstrosity pushed through the Michigan legislature about 5 years ago.
The common law (and the law in Texas, where civilized behavior in enjoyed to this day) made provisions for me to sue my neighbor if any of his activities threatened my enjoyment of my property. He could be hauled into court if he fouled the water table, or my air or let his dirt come onto my land. He would have to pay for the legal costs as well as for any damages that I suffered. Issues of property rights were resolved in months to a year.
The environmental laws as practiced in Michigan forbad direct law suits; now the offended property owner has to register the complaint with the local EPA who will investigate, hold hearings and dither for decades, subject of course to political considerations like how big and connected the offender is.
Property subject to bureaucratic whim is diminished property and becomes valueless. Travel from Grand Rapids to the Sou to treat yourself to 250 miles of abandoned farm land, non of it fenced in or even posted, but all of it zoned, regulated and floating in water that belongs to the state.
Compare this dreary wasteland of governmental paternalism to what I have seen in West Texas. The land there is vastly less productive but is fenced. Windmills draw up water for a few cows every few miles. The only Protection that the landowners there would ever use are ancient established riparian and ordinary property rights. Politicians in the state of Texas would never dare try to squelch enterprise in the same way that those in Michigan have.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan
Other than the self serving experts who presented “the pros and cons” of wind energy, this editorial mentions Chris who remains in Michigan because of wind energy.
Reminds me of the attempts of an African government that wanted to teach locals how to work in factories. They had the fellows show up at a certain hour and then carry a rock on their heads across shallow river. After 15 minutes on the other side, they put the rocks on their heads and carried it back. All day for eight hours.
Economically futile Chris. Go to Georgia and sell life insurance.
I’m probably the only person alive who has read Huckleberry Finn.
Twain spent the 1880s fulminating against the public schools that were just being started in the 1870s and 80s (“His schooling interfered with his education”, First God made idiots, that was for practice. He then made school boards”).
Huck appeared in 1884. It is a masterpiece up until Jim is freed from slavery and Huck finds out that he may return safely to St. Petersburg since his abusive father has died.
Twain then goes off into a completely unrelated and trivial plot of Tom using his “education” to release Jim and Huck from that cabin. Tom goes through some childish contortions that puzzle Jim and Huck who nevertheless remain silent in deference to Tom’s educated status.
The last 50 pages of Huckleberry Finn mock public education and the professors have yet to tumble to Twain’s wile.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
This measure illustrates the magnificence of our constitution.
Pirates menace American ships and property. The Congress issues a letter of Marque and Reprisal allowing privateers like Prince to address the banditry. The president need not be involved, and no one declares a war.
The cost is minimal, the USA’s reputation are not on the line and no US serviceman will die.
Prince and his roughnecks can make a profit and pay compensation to his employees who might lose lives or be injured while carrying out this assignment.
The libertarian position is that we should have used this provision in the Constitution in Afghanistan.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
Another consideration is that GR had streetcars on at least 4 routes a hundred years ago; they were built and run by private companies but depended on a franchise from the city.
As I understand it, they needed to raise their ticket prices during the 30s and 40s , and the city fathers refused the request forcing the private company to near bankruptcy and the stock to lose almost all its value. The rails were still in the road bed of Wealthy, Plainfield, So Division and one other street in living memory.
GM bought the stock of the distressed streetcar companies around the country and either bankrupted them or terminated their rail operations. Buses, made by GM, replaced the streetcars and were subsidized by the city. A law suit charging GM with monopoly abuse was in the courts for 40-50 years and was only settled in the 1990s. The settlement was written up in the Atlantic Monthly
I don’t know whether the city fathers 60 years ago were influenced by GM, or just hostile to the free market, but it seems obvious that the politicians in GR who are the heirs of the fine fellows 60 years ago , or even in the other 5 cities victimized by the rapid lack the moral standing to force us to pay for their judgments which we now know be capricious at best, or the result of criminal collusion at worst.
Erwin Haas is the communications director of the Libertarian Party of W. Michigan.
“leading-edge medical devices, clean-energy products and other advanced materials”
Note that these are all manufactured goods and in industries that can be unionized. And the three have long since been in the public domain where any unimaginative politician can find them and propose that there be a “public-private partnership” (read a politician using out tax dollars to reward his ward heelers) in his state to compete with the 37 other states whose politicians read exactly the same shopworn rags.
Mr. Miles, Democrats and Republicans who want to “run” the state should allow liberty to run rampant. Let people do their thing with their own money. It’s not your role to improve people, or to make their lives better. You may think that the one wants to make billions is greedy, that another who wants to drink or gamble away his money is foolish and that the third who has to leave Michigan to earn his bread is disloyal after what we’ve “done for him,” but what makes another man’s happy is none of your business. It’s the government official’s role to administer the state’s laws and act as a neutral judge to mediate disputes. The role of the citizen is to do anything he damn well pleases including founding a business and making a fortune that he wants to keep in an industry that no one else could have conceived even possible and risking his own money, like Olds and Sparrow.
On groundwater, water
http://www.michiganvotes.org/SearchLegislation.aspx?CategoryID=0&Keywords=groundwater+withdrawal&StartMonth=1&StartYear=2008&EndMonth=12&EndYear=2008&Results=50&Laws=True&op=Search
The original pertussis vaccine was developed at the State Lab in Grand Rapids in the 1930s by two women, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldring, sadly now both gone. I saw Grace as a patient about a year before she passed. They lived together in retirement in a small house in Comstock Park.
They had developed an antigenic preparation of ground up B. bordetella bacteria which they prevailed on several of the ENT docs in GR to try; it didn’t cause any harm, and so they went into field trials which successfully prevented Whooping cough. The first publication was about the results in Kent County dated 1937, and then their major achievement, the results of testing in Michigan was published in 1947. Their vaccine was accepted by the WHO in 1948 and was the standard of care until 1991, as detailed in the article.
Their vaccination was effective for about 5 years and virtually eliminated pertussis in the general population. The last dose was given to kids when they entered school and it was understood that 10 year olds might well get whooping cough, but at that age, the disease causes few long term problems. I remember having whooping cough at age 11, being sick for over a week, with a wracking cough, bleeding into the whites of my eyes from the pressure of coughing and the family doctor making a house call, giving me an antibiotic which resolved the problem; pretty exotic stuff for a brewery worker’s boy from Buffalo’s east side.
Unfortunately the Grand Rapids vaccine which was so successful had two toxicities,-possible high fever and an occasional seizure, that bothered better “educated” parents and many stopped vaccinating their kids in the 1980s, resulting in huge outbreaks of pertussis around the world.
This prompted the development and deployment of the current acellular (only the weakened poisons of the bacteria were used, not the ground up bacterial cell) vaccine, which was not as likely to cause immediate problems. Unfortunately many parents still refuse vaccination for their kids and so the disease smolders among kids and adults develop chronic cough and remain contagious. More importantly, the new vaccine protects for only 3 years and there have been no provisions to revaccinate kids or even adults at this greater frequency. (Adults can get vaccine which helps prevent the disease only every 10 years.)
After the field trials with pertussis, Grand Rapids served as a testing site for other medical and preventative measures for years; the Killed Measles virus vaccine (abandoned in 1968 as being toxic and not that effective) was field tested here in 1961. When that vaccine failed, kids (and adults, as I and a colleague first described in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 1976) developed an inverted or atypical measles.
As a result of that article, I, and my colleague, were written up in the National Enquirer.
This recitation of claims, called “new urbanism” or “smart growth” have been made loudly for some years now by Marxist university urban planning faculties; the theories have long since been debunked. They assert that young, technologically connected people who are imputed to be job creators, want to move to places that resemble villages and towns that were at their peak 100 years ago (and now look like tourist traps-tree-lined streets and decaying storefronts included.) BTW, these are devoid of foot traffic after Labor Day. Public transit carries less than 1% of trips.
Two problems with this fantasy. The first is that young technologically adept, caring and sharing millenials will create jobs; clearly pie in the sky. They will move only to places (like in the report on Portland Or. which was featured in the NYT some months ago) where they will be hired for a minimum wages and fail to found families. These folks, indoctrinated in public schools and in elite universities, militantly will not start new businesses.
The second flaw in this spiel is the belief in magic; that if some town in Michigan looks like a street in Houston, that smart kids will be attracted-this is a cargo cult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
To explain; primitive islanders in Pacific tried to build replicas of aircraft, runways, chapels in the superstitious belief that these produced the prosperity that they had enjoyed when the American Army had passed through during WW2.
The same urban planners also enthused about pedestrian malls, urban renewal, housing projects, city planning and the zoning proposed by the Ku Klux Klan.
I know of no place where this new urbanism, AKA smart growth, has advanced anything except a swindle. Maybe someone can correct me.
It’s difficult to see the picture when you’re inside the frame.
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The shell game here is that we should be courting young Millennials because they are good employees. Bullfighters! That’s not what is needed.
We need new industries, but these facile, shallow college grads are not risk takers, innovators or the sort that will hunker down for decades building wealth, but rather are docile followers who want a small paycheck and bigger bennies.
We are to believe that young technologically adept, caring and sharing millenials will create jobs; clearly this is pie in the sky. They will likely move to places that are ideologically compatible, funky places with walkable communities, bike paths and bars that look like a Super-Bowl beer commercials (like in the report on Portland Or. which was featured in the NYT some months ago) where they will be hired for a minimum wages, live on trust funds and fail to found families. These folks, indoctrinated in public schools and in elite universities, militantly will not start new businesses.
Give me the ambitious 40 or 50 year old with a gritty past, who has dreamed, saved, worried and prepared himself in marketing, finances, management and the technical aspects of an enterprise, and then takes the plunge.
We don’t need more employees, the unemployment rate is sky high already. We need ambition, greed, even avarice, the qualities of soul that come with age and a hard life, but character traits that have unfortunately been hectored out of millennial youngsters during their fashionable and politically correct toilet training.
And businesses, schemes,
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The good and the bad
Jan 7th, 15:53
“Deflation is bad”
Depends on whose ox is gored. Our standard issue economist would point to falling GDP and increasing unemployment, the worrisome debt of companies, individuals and governments as failures. It’s well to remember that these same economists advocated the elements that have led to deflation and, in a sober world, would lose any credibility in trying to fix the mess that they’ve created (unfortunately these guys will continue to peddle their nonsense, but….)
Savers and poor folks will be winners; they need only put cash under their mattresses. Investors will have to be careful to select only ventures that are likely to be winners in the productive environment and not just those that use inflation to make money.
The net result is less work and fewer resources used in wasteful endeavors. No one starves and life is less frenetic. Everyone cites Japan as seriously dinged by deflation, yet I see them using smartphones, women not bearing children and old folks retiring in dignified circumstances.
Life is good. We should not let academic economists and their acolytes in the media dictate to us how we should think.
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Trying times
Jan 7th, 13:32
My wife and I were in Turkey 6 years ago and witnessed intimidation and persecution of Christians. Yet this newspaper continued to characterize the AK party as “moderate Islamist.”
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The father of freedom
Jan 2nd, 13:39
This blog is a bit muddled; the question is not what Jefferson may or may not have believed, but what innovations he invented in “the statute of religious freedom in his home state of Virginia” and by extension to the federal constitutional first amendment.
There is a consensus that the founders, who remembered the recent religious conflagrations of the 17th century, feared the influence of religion on government, not that of the government on religion. Jefferson’s time was one in which daily life revolved around God much more than around being a political prostitute.
We, and our blogger, no longer believe in God, so we keep inventing extremely poor imitations of him in our secular and governmental lives, so making it easy to lose the prospective that Jefferson confronted 200 years ago.
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Unequally enforced
Dec 12th 2014, 18:02
Surveys are still useless.
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Unequally enforced
Dec 12th 2014, 17:30
According to the medical journal Addictive Behaviors, “underreporting of cocaine was documented with urine testing validation as well where African Americans in comparison to Caucasians who were urine positive were about 6 times less likely to report cocaine use when other factors are controlled for.”
At Johns Hopkins, they tested self-reporting of marijuana use among African Americans: “A study of 290 African American men in Baltimore, Maryland undergoing treatment for hypertension showed that self-reporting of illicit drug use is unreliable. Only 48 of the participants reported drug use but urine drug tests revealed that 131 had used drugs.”
In other words, this blog is misleading. The simple truth is that African Americans get arrested for drug offenses more often is because they use more drugs, but won’t admit it in surveys (which in turn are worthless.)
As a libertarian, I don’t agree with the whole concept of our government asserting control over what an individual wants to put into his body. In this case, drugs won the war-mainstream media whining not withstanding.
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Live poor, die young
Dec 8th 2014, 14:28
What is never said in polite US society concerns the life span of Black men; they died at an average age of 65 twenty years ago, at a time when the “full” retirement age was 65. Their life span is now 67, and the retirement age as increased pari passu to 67.
They pay 15.3% of their income into the system all their working lives and then, never really get anything back. I can make the case that US mandatory social security is the major cause of Black poverty. If the payments were into individualized accounts, the money (say 2-300,000 dollars) would go into their estates to be passed onto family.
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Pirates on the move
Nov 28th 2014, 16:02
“Do it with a little ship and you’re a pirate, with a great fleet and you’re called an emperor” Said of Alexander
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Send in the helicopters?
Nov 28th 2014, 12:56
I concur with Saspinki below; it may well be that a wealthy and industrius population somewhere loses its manhood, its heedless need for more, and stagnates. Price changes become an independent variable.
My point is that the self appointed experts who pronounce on these things are really just advancing their own protected rackets disguising them as legitimate enterprises.
They invent ad hoc fantasies to keep others entertained.
Europe is on the brink of Islamization, a reversion to the 10th century. And America????
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Send in the helicopters?
Nov 27th 2014, 16:27
The Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 gave low income couples 600 USD in an abortive attempt to forestall the great recession; we’ve all seen how well that worked.
I’m not sure why anyone believed or today, believes that the fellows who claimed to manage the economy but who got us into recent 6 year unpleasantness have the tools to get us out. We have a history of their failures and should discount their heavenly visions, no matter how beautiful. The Keynesian/Austrian/Moneterain theories have been, I think, debunked in the laboratory of experience and should be discarded. These theories are not robust enough to engineer an economy, but do remain as interesting conversation pieces, no more.
About this blog; we no longer print money, rather, central banks try to create credit; if folks are too impoverished, too uncreditworthy or unwilling to borrow because they foresee deflation, the velocity of money will slow, and nothing has been shown to be able to change that.
Deflation has a bad name because the current “managers” of the economy have deemed it to be so. In actual fact, it will allow very poor, but thrifty folks to save money and even thrive; no taxes but daily increase in purchasing power for cash kept under the mattress. Those with more money will have to invest it only in solid ventures since they cannot count on inflation for salvation.
And as interest rates float down to zero (they were actually negative during the great Depression for a short time), the 4 trillion dollars of long term bonds in the Fed will gain hugely in price, sufficient to pay off out 17 trillion national debt.
Where’s the problem?
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Harvard under fire
Nov 26th 2014, 14:43
In all of this, we should all pay homage to Ben Franklin’s observation that graduates of Harvard are unable to earn a living by using their wits.
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Trends in low places
Nov 18th 2014, 20:33
I concur; it will be a blessing to savers; no risky investments or income taxes to pay on the cash that we stow under the mattress.
Investors, on the other hand will have to pay attention to the actual business prospects of the companies and governments where they apply their money. Inflation and the melting away with time of debts that allowed sloppy companies to thrive will be a distant memory.
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Trends in low places
Nov 18th 2014, 16:09
Another quixotic post by an economist.
The theory (Keynesian, Austrian) is that governments can effect the economy; that fiscal stimuli, central banks “printing” money, jawboningor, whatever will make the economy bounce, to use Pres. Obama’s phrase.
These folks have their heads in the clouds and never look at the ground to see where things are going. I prefer a track record to lofty theories. The Japanese had a similar real estate and stock market unpleasantness in 1989 and stimulated, printed, promised, and 25 years later have achieved deflation, which the learned ones who got us into this mess pronounce to be “bad.” Why would any believe these Brahmins? What distinguishes the Euro or US quandry and reaction from that of the Japanese Government in 1989, or even now?
The Fed announces that they will allow rates to rise, therefore, they rise, and later announce a money creating policy to drive rates down and they go down! This is averred in all published accounts including this blogger’s.
Let’s see; in August 2012, the 30 year UST rate stood at 2.5% and the Fed announced QE3 (is that the correct number?) Eighteen months later, the rates stood at 3.9%.
Last winter the dissolution of the easing was started and now ending. The 30 year bond is now 3%.
Did I miss something; aren’t these trends in exactly the wrong direction?
You could make a lot of money betting against the Fed.
In a related and paradoxical issue;
The Fed is now said to hold 4 trillion dollars worth of long term bonds, yielding possibly 3% in the aggregate. At the same time, the Economist newspaper has been grumbling about impending deflation (paradoxical since the intention of the QEs has been to produce inflation.) In a previous bout of US dollar deflation, the Great Depression, UST rates became negative for a few days and hovered just above zero for a years. A fall in rates in the coming deflation to that level could happen again, let’s say to 0.5%. At that rate, the 4 trillion of UST would be worth 24 trillion dollars, enough to pay off the national debt and then some.
Magic.
And I’ll draw a half dozen comments showing that why I’m mistaken. The social sciences attract the sort of idealists who wish to live in a world rich in fantasies, and I respect that.
But give me your money.
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Fear and change
Nov 16th 2014, 14:07
A 22 year old may be willing to take the risk of such a career” “”for website designers,”…”the answer has to be some combination of better education for children.”
Poppeycock.
I don’t see more schooling imposed by our government as salvation. Quite the opposite; training designed by a bureaucrat or even by our blogger (“be productive,” “toe the line,” “learn how to build better bombs and tanks,” “be a team player”) will lead to even more obedient, more dependent and uniformly dull citizens who are ever more mal-content and knowledgeable only in what has already been discovered. They never have questions or the drive to seek out the new.
If governments fantasize that they can impact the prosperity of their citizens, it is clear that they should allow for individual self individuation, self responsibility, rebellion and even, Gasp!, greed.
Ain’t gonna happen but I have glimmerings of foci where enterprise still struggles to emerge.
Home schoolers have no schooling at all; mom or whoever soon looses interest in the daily grind and the kid begins to have questions and seeks out answers for himself. The Amish have the best schooling if that’s what you imagine might be formally available; they live in families where dad farms or has a small business; the math of how much an acre will produce, its costs and profits are part of their liveliehood. They learn 2 dialects of German and perfect English at one room schoolhouses taught by their 20 year old aunt. By the time they are 25, the married couple run a profitable small enterprise and start an enormous family.
I observe this only to contrast this with the hordes of 30 year old college grads living in beaten up neighborhoods with chipped green paint on the radiators, working at jobs where they wear paper hats trying to pay off student loans (and BTW, a machines at Mac D will now take your order and make the perfect burger) and who hate/avoid marriage since it’s unimaginably expensive.
They did everything that their government wanted, never found a sense of direction in their lives in the calculus that was bolted on or in the gender studies from which they learned logic.
What is needed for flourishing is room for the individual, child or 50 year old, to uncover questions and fashion answers of the most improbable sort, to make small mistakes, and to aspire to making the big money that will make the income gap even wider. (Gasp, you’re a bomb throwing anarchist, Erwin!)
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Why mobile data to prevent Ebola has not yet been released
Nov 10th 2014, 17:01
The gaps in my ignorance is only large enough to suspect that the epidemiological explanations seem to be lacking, and that person-to-person contagion does not alone explain the widespread geographical beginnings of this outbreak in villages that are quite cut off from each other and from the larger world.
You’ll not elicit any messianic insights about the future from this beaten down old Doc.
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Why mobile data to prevent Ebola has not yet been released
Nov 10th 2014, 13:39
“quickly-enacted emergency precautions have so far been successful”
Unlikely, but pretentious enough to persuade our blogger.
I do Infectious Diseases and am more than a little likely to be exposed and infected, so I pay attention.
The party line is that only fomites spread this ebola to and among humans. I’ve tried to find the original study or data on which this doctrine for this particular strain is founded; can’t find it on the internet because of all of the noise from hysterics and I suspect that it’s based on mathematical modeling at best.
Any study of ebola’s spread must be based on skimpy and unreliable data; there have been a handful of outbreaks caused by slightly different strains involving hundreds of cases scattered in a few isolated villages in mid Africa. The epidemiologist (I’ll bet he worked for a government somewhere) allegedly went into these villages weeks or months afterward, got whatever data in translated languages from survivors about how close they were, what they did, etc and concluded that fomites were the sole mode of spread. A few medical and other victims left Africa and were diagnosed in Europe or USA and it was from these that other anecdotes were garnered. I’d guess that this gossip was fed into some epidemiological paradigm somewhere and, woolah! We know how it spreads!
Reportedly, the current outbreak started with one infected child last winter and then spread over 4 countries spread over 500-800 miles during 6 months with sick and dead patients infecting other folks in tiny villages that are 6 hours walk from the nearest hospital.
Hmmm; this virus must be evangelical indeed.
I don’t know how any epidemiologist working with the current strain could have gotten cleaner data than they did with the original studies 20 or 30 years ago, and the current virus is one starting 1000 miles away from the River Ebola.
Let me try another tack. The virus is apparently native to fruit bats which are common bush meat. Now it’s probable that fruit bats get around and they could have had an epizootic with the relevant strain, many died but who would know? And the surviving bats carried the strain of ebola much as humans carry the herpes or hepatitis C viruses. Had there been this secular change of this epizootic in the fruit bat or possibly in the hunting practices or needs for meat of primitive natives in West Africa, one could explain the explosive onset and spread among humans, beginning in multiple scattered areas, of a virus not previously known to be present in that region. It would indeed continue to spread via fomites and thence into the health care systems where it created so much chaos. Nothing suggests that the space suits, ebola hospitals or teaching about how to deal with natives who have fever is extensive enough to be effective in isolating the thousands of new patients that were reportedly presenting each week lately.
As the season changes, practices of hunters or of the presence of ebola in fruit bats and native populations matures, the infection of new villages and households may well fall, explaining the recent apparent (and hopefully permanent) drop in new cases.
Epidemiologists, of course, need to be loved and, like all of us, want to be seen as relevant, or even as leaders who are important to mankind. They will claim that their as yet un-finished schemes to handle the ebola outbreak are working unexpectedly well, but it may well be that they caught a chance wave which they are riding without really understanding what happened as this outbreak fades.
At least, that is what I hope, selfishly.
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Two depressing thoughts
Nov 8th 2014, 00:40
The media should be more careful about criticizing money in political campaigns; the billions of “unregulated” money flowing into ads goes to stressed newspapers, radio and tv stations, paying guys who rehash the same scrip.
Has laziness has displaced incompetence?
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The gains for gridlock
Nov 5th 2014, 18:39
“one shouldn’t read too much into these numbers.”
This trip down superstition lane should not lend credence or pay homage to the fictions perpetuated by the middle brow media like NPR or Fox- that the week to week, or day to day fluctuations in markets have facile explanations.
Careful observers like Taleb or Joe Grandville preach that explanations are available only in hindsight.
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So, is it suppressing voters?
Nov 4th 2014, 12:41
I don’t see any evidence in this blog that the census in 2010 had an effect on the subsequent re-apportionment and allegiances of voters.
Changing barrels when going over Niagara Falls might be disconcerting for some.
The brouhaha about “free speech” and “censorship” (it wasn’t true censorship in Charlie’s case because the government did not intrude) in Paris should make us reflect on suppression of expression in America. In the USA, it is true censorship taking place in public schools, FCC sponsored television, and in governmentally sponsored universities. I refer of course, to political correctness that has become a joke among high school students (at least to our kids.) There is also a gathering of laws and suppression of “hate speech” the kind of free give and take that allowed buddies to jostle. A 7 year old who bites his cookie into the shape of a pistol is expelled. Hatred of white males is the party line at our state universities. Capitalism is the only bad guy in the curriculum.
Several weeks ago I referred to the Islamization of Europe in a blog to the Economist; it was pulled. Our government has done a survey of rape on US campuses and the rate is virtually zero yet I’m listening to an account on NPR about how rape allegations are being unfairly lampooned.
Foley justifiably criticizes Pure Michigan for editing out African Americans but unaccountably ignores the ocean of topics that are available for serious criticism.
Some basics here;
In the USA we have the first amendment to our constitution that prevents Congress from making any laws regarding expressions of non-violent opinion and of religion.
“Censorship” revolves around the actions of governments to suppress speech of which it does not generally approve.
Then there is libelous, or false and dangerous speech; you can’t lie about someone or yell “fire” egregiously in a crowded theater, and the like.
In Charlie’s case, there existed a tension twixt the commercial and entertainment proclivities of the cartoonists and a large, often violent and poorly integrated Muslim minority that was resolved last week; thugs with motives that many in the media approve, broke into the offices of Charlie and shot the place up; they were pursued, resisted arrest and met their fates. This is ordinary criminal law and we need not probe the motives to reach justice, but the media need to perseverate so we hear it over and over.
This brouhaha about “free speech” and “censorship” in Paris made me reflect on suppression of expression in America.
In the USA, there is true censorship taking place in public schools, FCC sponsored television, and in governmentally sponsored universities. I’d guess that similar practices and laws exist in Europe.
I refer of course, to political correctness that has become a joke among high school students (at least with our kids.) There is also a gathering of laws and suppression of “hate speech,” the kind of free give and take that allowed buddies to jostle 50 years ago. A 7 year old who bites his cookie into the shape of a pistol is expelled from a public school. Hatred of white males is the party line at our state universities. Capitalism is the only villain in the curriculum. One political party terms anything the opposition posits as “racist,” the other “Marxist.”
Phobias of everything (gay sex, women, Hispanics…) rule the airwaves. Our government has done a survey of rape on US campuses and the rate is virtually zero, yet I’m listening to an account on NPR about how rape allegations are being unfairly lampooned.
Several weeks ago I referred to the Islamization of Europe in a comment on a blog in the Economist; it was pulled. This is not censorship, but does signal the prejudices of this newspaper in the last 7-8 years.
Our blogger muddles over transatlantic differences but unaccountably ignores the ocean of topics surrounding the much more dangerous censorship that is available for serious discussion.
Wow, a lot of icons being worshipped here; I almost expected white slavery to be condemned and the 95 theses to be brandished above the briny waves.
Our writer sounds like the dog who hoped to get fat by eating his own tail. The backbone of his thinking revolves around “urban planning,” and he manages to point to the disasters that these worthies have inflicted on cities in the past (stuff like zoning initiated by the KKK, public housing projects, urban renewal, building interstates through city centers, pedestrian malls, and most recently, hatred of automobiles as embedded in new urbanism “smart cities” and the like)
These academics imposed their big ideas on cities possibly leading to the destruction of many weaker ones (I know of no good studies to support this.)
So the essence of urban planning is in correcting the mistakes made by previous planners. We are now told that Bright Young College Grads (implied to be computer savvy, itching to start the next Google and create “jobs” for the local serfs) leave Michigan to go to Chicago, California and the like because they want to live in inner cities, use public transport, walk to work and bars, commune with nature and similar blather. They will go to “a place” even if there are no jobs.
Our Michigan state government listened to the academics (at MSU as I understand it) and is foisting the following swindle on our communities. You must build walkable downtowns with street level entertainment, great public transit, use your waterfronts, make using cars miserable and have folks get around on bikes (January in Lansing, Yeah.) I always fantasize that the cities proposed by these visionaries should look like a tourist trap.
When the bright kids see how Michigan cities comport to their fantasies, why, they’ll leave jobs in Houston and move back to Flint! Great!
One could object that these young, bright, college Grads (Harvard with a degree in transgender studies) is capable of working, much less starting a business.
Another objection is that why should a BYCG choose a city in Michigan if Buffalo, Allentown and Syracuse also look like a tourist trap.
Our author, who I otherwise enjoy reading on the front porch thing, here espouses a superstition generally called a “cargo cult.” Look it up.
If a backwash adopts the appearance of successful cities, it will become prosperous. And the bozos who destroyed Detroit, Flint, Erie, and the rest have now, only now, found the potion that will make it all better…Magic.
On the other hand, maybe the dog can fatten up by destroying his past. I dunno.
From Wikipedia on PBBs;
“A study was undertaken on 4,545 people to determine the effects of PBBs on human beings. These include three exposure groups – all people who lived on the quarantined farms, people who received food from these farms and workers (and their families) engaged in PBB manufacture – as well as 725 people with low-level PBB exposure……
No associations could be established between serum PBB levels and symptom prevalence rates…
no statistically significant differences in lymphocyte function were noted……
However, these studies are ongoing and adverse reproductive-system effects continue to be found in the grandchildren of those who consumed tainted farm products……
The grandchildren! Have the poor, self deluded opportunists clinging onto the wreckage of a now ancient incident described some sort of hereditary toxicity?
PBBs are rapidly inactivated by UV light and would have long since disappeared if the contaminated animal carcasses and feed had been left in the sunshine. Our professional engineer has found a report of the half life during which PBBs will deteriorate; after 4 half lives, levels today will be 1/16th of peak-I know enough physical chemistry to do that calculation, and that those should be well below controls in the 1970s.
I empathize with this one journalist who has only one issue that he can flog to make a living, but why would Bridgemi perpetrate the exaggerations and superstitions, the “possible” and vaguely menacing tone of an accident that had dramatic impact on farm animals decades ago? Anecdotes and testimonials do not create diseases except among credulous environmentalists. Plenty of study has been done on PBBs and the spot contaminant incident, all reassuring.
Journalistically, it’s a good story, even if it’s bullfeathers.
The Woozle effect occurs when frequent citations of numerous previous, flawed publications that lack evidence misleads individuals and the public into believing there is evidence, and so ingrained as to become urban myths and in this case (shudder), laws.
In general, the results of “social sciences” (sociology, education theory, economics in this article) are fun to use in discussions but are not robust enough to engineer society.
We can discount the nonsense that poverty is increasing; it is “measured” by finding the average income and then declaring those who are more than a few standard deviations below this level to be impoverished. There will always be a tail to the normal distribution, and occasionally it will be “fatter” but one can never get rid of poverty any more than one can discard one’s shadow. There will eventually be a few struggling millionaires among the billionaires.
It may well be that being on the poor end leads to being single and having to raise one’s kids, Which came first?
Education does not lead to greater prosperity; folks who start life off with educated parents, prosperous and calm childhoods, brains, money to go to colleges and the like will be much more likely to do better in life; it may well be that going to college makes them poorer. Articles like this one conflate cause with correlation.
The Pre K schooling is another pseudoscience. There is no good experimental study that shows that beginning “education” earlier makes any difference. There is a host of poorly done studies, all published by self serving experts that really just show the failure of this strategy. Indeed, one purports to demonstrate that kids subjected to Pre K don’t do better in school, but end up as better adjusted young adults (one can massage statistics to say almost anything, but this is an over reach.)
Our media and the politicians have bought into the myth that more education is some sort of investment in the future. To some extent it is like putting manure on a cornfield; too much can create a toxic soil as instruction becomes ever more intrusive and stifles curiosity and creativity.
And if more education led to more prosperity, then the following would be an outstanding example; some years ago there was a lawyer in western Michigan who earned 3 million a year suing obstetricians who were unlucky enough to deliver a “bad” baby. The education enthusiasts would have us believe that we could train all of the graduates of some inner city high school each year, producing hundreds of lawyers (becoming a plaintiff’s lawyer take brains made of oatmeal) who would go about the business of suing obstetricians, each making 3 million, each spending all that money in their community, each investing all that money……. The wealth creation, the gain from just “investing” a few dollars in education!
Poppeycock.
It turns out that there was a fairly severe complication of “atypical measles” and failure with the original Killed-Measles vaccine which was tested in Grand Rapids in 1961 and used on most kids in the USA and elsewhere from 1962-5. (I understand that the live vaccine occasionally results in this atypical measles immunologic complication.) I was privileged to be the lead author in a 1976 account of the first occurrence in an adult;
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=347850
Vaccinations have been plagued ab initio with unforeseen complications like Jenner’s vaccination for small pox leading to progressive vaccinia and Kaposi’s varicilliform eruption, and with Koch’s disaster with a vaccine for tuberculosis. The early live polio vaccine was grown in cells that had been contaminated with an sv40 polyoma virus, since shown to be associated with brain tumors.
I knew one of the two women who developed the original Whooping Cough vaccines in Grand Rapids in the 1940s and know much unpublished material about its development; it was much more effective than the current slop, but caused a few kids high fevers and seizures that must have been terrifying for the parents-leading, I suspect to the current disdain for vaccinating kids. This current whooping cough vaccine has a much shorter duration of effectiveness and is not effectively providing herd immunity. This failure in itself strips away the hallowed argument for the “mandatory vaccinate everyone to provide herd immunity crowd.”
When I was in the US Army in the early 1970s (they had lower standards in those days), we were taught that 1/3rd of army officers died of cirrhosis because of alcohol abuse. Since then it has been found that the yellow fever vaccine (administered to all WW 2 soldiers who were about to be deployed to the Pacific theater) had been diluted with pooled plasma, much of it admixed with Hep b and c virus; many of these soldiers stayed in the army, rose in the ranks and retired only to die early from their unrecognized vaccine-associated hepatitis and liver disease
We still don’t know for how long these vaccines are effective. It is possible that the measles or chicken pox vaccine wears off after 50 years, leaving millions of aging adults liable to infection and leading to a massive public health disaster.
Our writer (and I suspect the younger Paul) probably does not know the history of the many screw ups from vaccines, but those of us who have informed ourselves view this bruhaha with more tolerance for human foibles and with more than usual skepticism with public health authoritarianism. (I attended tha graduation ceremony of the Univ of Mich School of Public Health; talk about wackos….)
My own stand is similar to Paul’s; if you want to protect your kids, vaccinate them, they belong to you and not to the state.
We vaccinated our kids to protect them from the predictable failure of the state and of the chaos out there in the commons. I cite the 60,000 central American kids who were introduced infected with every 3rd world disease including measles, lice, TB, leprosy….into every community in the USA, courtesy of Obama’s Dreamer political scam. I didn’t see our writer waxing eloquent over our freedoms to be protected at that time….
Debt, the leak in the kyke that demands the hole be plugged now and the bilge pump be manned, else nothing else can proceed.
Paul Krugman the Nobel Laureate in economics writes in Monday’s NY Times that debt is good, that attempts to pay it off are bad, and that nations and individuals should take on more becasue it will help “the economy.” Elsewhere, he claims that borrowing is OK as long as we can pay the interest. “We owe it to ourselves.”
What? Krugman has apparently never personally experienced the downside of fixed income securities, or “paper” as it’s known in the trade. Many of us in Kentwood know the stress of having to make a car or a mortgage payment when times get tough. The feeling of being trapped, of having to mooch off of friends or relatives, of scrambling to make a few more dollars to keep what you have; if you fall behind, the bank or owner of the paper will take it back and blacken your credit. Paul Hense, a former CPA who had offices in Kentwood often pointed out that wealth is not an excuse to not work, but rather allows people to make better decisions. On the other side, the threat of loss from not paying one’s debts causes panic, the irrational and desperate thinking that gets nothing done.
What Krugman misses are the basic features of paper, that the principle will have to be repaid, that debt interferes with one’s ability to borrow more, that buying stuff on credit when times are good is easy and pleasurable and payment unnoticed, but that economic times can get tough making servicing those debts becomes a hell.
What I hear around city hall is that the economic slowdown of 2008-11 caused real pain with layoffs and projects defered. Another theme is that we should be saving up for small purchases like fire trucks and computer equipment, but that borrowing for the big stuff should be standard and is even better with our current low interest rates. Of course, we are refinancing all of our previous bond issues to save a few hundred thousand here and there, to great self praise.
The city has a AA credit rating, good for a Michigan city but we had to pay Fitch and S & P to be rated before we could borrow. Our total long term debt as of 2014 is nearly 22.9 million, 19.4 million are in bonds issued since 2002 to pay for the 4 modern buildings from the city complex (I’ll bet that most folks in Kentwood have never seen them.) We paid off 1.9 million last year and borrowed a new 2.9 million from a “Drinking Water Revolving Fund.”
Besides debt, Kentwood finances are at risk from now abandoned defined benefit pension plan. We must provide a fixed amount of money for these retirees. This is funded in part by gains in the stock market from which we assume an annual return of 6.5%, conservative among Michigan cities, but higher than the 5% suggested by the Economist Magazine. If there is deflation or some other major disruption in the US economy, Kentwood could be at risk for spending millions to make up for the pension shortfall.
Times, right now, are good. The national and Michigan economies are stable and no one frets about debts. I’m a gloomy sort and fret about hard times; they will come and we have made many sacrifices already. We’ll have to find more. I don’t detect any enthusiasm to raise taxes.
Our interest payments were 588K last year plus the 1.9 amortization show that abpout 2.5 million must be paid, or else. Two and a half million in a 33 million per year operation seems manageable until the income stream is compromised because housing prices are in the toilet or the unemployment rate is over 10%; then the panic sets in, and crazy stuff can happen.
It might be prudent to study ways to cut costs now when everything is calm. Certainly it’s not wise to increase our expenditures; rather we should be putting a bit aside to buffer a huge downside move in revenues. In Kentwood, there is still room to expand, so new residents and businesses ought be welcomed to increase our tax base.
Krugman sees the benefits of borrowing from the banker’s and economist’s vantage; he ignores the other half of the balance sheat.We in Kentwood have to deal with making repayments. These demands for cash continue even in hard times when our attention should be directed at solving cost cutting problems. Fear and having to resort to panicky “plugging in the dyke” solutions which solve little is the high and poorly understood cost of living in a pawnshop economy.
Debt, great for businesses, poison for governments.
A lot of politicians tout business experience; I certainly do.
I like to get into numbers, look at cash inflows and outflows, do projections, trade offs between short and long term costs, estimate interest rates in my head, judge the stability of some revenue source and the like. But Kentwood is not a business.
A businessman borrows at let’s say 5% (market rates, the perceived risk) and invests in inventory, equipment, speculation or whatever, hoping that his return will be 10% so allowing him to retire the debt and to continue borrowing so that he can make money.
Kentwood and the city commission are not in the money making business; we have only to run a city on behalf of citizens who trust us to maintain the streets, maintain public safety with police and fire, provide for some recreational opportunities and allow them to seek their own happiness in a peaceful manner. We have no mandate to make life better, to provide jobs, business opportunities or to entertain and inspire the taxpayers in Kentwood.
Taxpayers (renters pay for city services indirectly) should however pay for the streets and public services that they need for a civilized life.
If a townhall, library, firehouse and Hall of Justice are necessary, then these should be provided at the least cost for the involuntary users. They should not erected for the edification of politicians who put their names on the brass plaques. The city should provide only those facilities that function efficiently for the city employees and that can easily be accommodated for future needs.
Kentwood had no debts and some decrepit governmental buildings until 12 years ago when the flash inspiration to rebuild swept away thrift. We built 4 contemporary buildings on an otherwise empty patch, a few apartments, an abandoned church and a toxic waste dump on the horizon. Total cost, over 20 million. There were no businesses or other reason for most of us in Kentwood to go near the place. About tastes there must be no dispute, but I’m unimpressed. None of my neigbors knows where the city complex is, so I can’t get their opinion about fluff like inspiration and public involvement.
A very long pole barn would have been much cheaper, could be easily accommodated to the shifting needs of government and would fit in with the numerous assembly, manufacturing and distributors’ buildings around the airport. Why would the city government want look better than its best taxpayers?
The point is that we borrowed and now have to pay for something that few of those who pay would want to buy. There is no market demand, no hope for profit or great outpouring of public enthusiasm for the governmental complex. No business or homeowner has ever moved to Kentwood because of love of great rococo architecture or for the view.
Borrowing capacity is necessary for governments to fund unexpected emergencies and the function must be retained and carefully nurtured. Our citizens should pay for what they need and nothing more. I doubt that many would fritter away the margin of safety in being able to borrow when the crunch is severe for having trendy buildings and the millstone of debt.
The Planning Commission echos the City Commission-and Professors with Big Ideas.
A proposal to change the zoning and planning requirements for building a 107 single unit housing development, the Wildflower Creek thing, caught my eye.
The project has been rolling around since 2003. It’s an empty field near 52nd and E. Paris. There have been fitful attempts to build since, all for naught. The experienced builder, VD Hoff has recently acquired the land after the bank foreclosed. He can’t make any money if he honors Kentwood’s building codes and so won’t build.
Two features stood out. The first concerns “large caliper trees” that will need to be preserved by building a retention wall. Sounds expensive, and VD Hoff plans a way around the wall. I’m a farm boy of sorts (the need to steer speeding tractors backward and weeding/picking strawberries drove me into medicine.) Trees are the enemy! No one else on the city commission has ever had to deal with these gigantic weeds. Instead we have seem to have elected pagans who have not yet shed their Teutonic worship of the oaks! If a homeowner wants trees, fine, he should plant what he wants, wait a few years and then deal with the consequences. But protecting trees on a plat as a matter of public policy?
The second is actually more serious. Apparently the city code adopted in 2006 specified that new houses be built closer to the road, that each have a front porch and that garages be placed behind the house requiring long driveways. They seemingly specify verticle windows.
You, of course, recognize the stinking footsteps of “New Urbanism”, aka “smart growth” and the”Cool Cities” of the Granholm song and dance.
New Urbanism is the current fad coming from the urban planning departments in universities. These are staffed by professors without real world experience, whose only qualifications seem to be an imagination akin to that of fashion designers of high end women’s evening dress (actresses wear them at awards dinners), an inablility to do math but yet create statistics and pseudoscientific self referential “surveys” and affable manners that mask their bottomless shallowness. “We shape our cities and then our cities shape us.” They award each other advanced degrees, lobby for government jobs and perpetrate their santimonious pieties among impressionable politicians.
City planning departments in universities have a pedigree that blessed zoning when Denver Mayor Stapleton first proposed it in 1926 and later that year came out as an agent of the Ku Klux Klan. During the 1930s and 40s, they arranged for private, money making streetcarscompanies to be regulated out of existence by city commissioners and replaced by buses made by General Motors-the class action law suit was finally settled about 20 years ago. In the 1940s and 50, they sponsored urban renewal which destroyed GR downtown and other established neighborhoods. Their cure for urban problems was “housing projects” in the 1950. Since then, these schoolboys advocated putting extensions of the interstates into downtowns, and “pedestrian malls” like our own Monroe Mall (and one in Kalamazoo) of unhappy memory. City planners today see all of these as causing the contemporary malaise and certahinly, do not wish to be reminded of their past. They make a living by railing against and correcting their previous mistakes.
And so we arrive at the latest ruction from urban planners seems to revolve around a hatred of the automobile, and the fantasy that twenty-first century Americans want return to the life styles of a hundred years ago, you know before TV, the internet, supermarkets, and office jobs. We should slow down, walk to work and shop, get to know our neighbor and “build community.” We must have an excellent public transit systems or use bikes, preserve farmland, be good environmentalists and save the world. Roads will be engineered (bump outs, narrowing, center green spaces) to slow traffic so discouraging car use and new construction allowed only along approved thoroughfares that will allow workers and students to commute using light rail and the like. We sill be crowded by housing built on lot sizes, living in apartments and community housing (recent media push on co-housing.) Public spaces will encourage us to venture into the commons, meeting our neighbors on porches and at community fairs. Housing developments wil be “mixed” with small stores and shops, office and factories, schools, parks and biking trails within walking distance We will be encouraged to bond in neighborhood restaurants and cafes with open air, sidewalk dining areas (in a Michigan snowstorm.)
Very romantic and many would love to live in this ideal community. Some think that this must be patterened on Europe, but none of my 20 cousins in Bavaria would live in such squalor.
Just think about it.
The New Urbanists want you to live in crowded conditions very much in public view. Everyone else will know your busines and any one of them will be able to criticize what he deems offensive.
Contagious diseases like tuberculosis and the Spanish flu (killed 500,000 Americans in 3 weeks) disappeared when folks moved to suburbs and I don’t see any good reason to risk a return to crowded conditions.
Public employees will run the transportation systems and if they choose to go on strike? The neighborhood kids will now form communities, or will they be in gangs?
The noise from any party will murder sleep.
As in our city plans, garages will be behind the house and so the owner must shovel an extra 50 or 60 feet of driveway every snowfall for the rest of his life, and where can he throw it if the driveway is next to his house? Emergency vehiles will have problems navigating the narrow streets and any mugger can disappear in the multiple warrens created.
And if we habituated “restaurants and cafes” so as to meet neighbors, my family and I would miss our cooked evening meal together, be bankrupt and dissipated in alcohol.
I don’t think that Americans want to live in an environment that resembles a movie studio.
But, I am concerned only with our planning in Kentwood. VD Hoff, an experienced builder of private homes states that buyers will not pay for houses that the city demands that he build. Buyers want the garage at the front of the house and don’t see the need for a porch. They will not be forced into paying for ideology.
No one is making money as it now stands. And the Urbanist goal of “fill in” of empty lots is bypassed as new home owners buy or build in outlying rural areas.
Update and correction on New Urbanism
I enquired about the city planning commission’s remarks on Wildflower Creek building codes. The plans on this development had been submitted by another builder and it was these bizarre plans that had approved by the commission in 2006, that long forgotten era when almost any clutter on a field could be collaterized and flipped for obscene profits to someone even more gullible.
Apparently, VD Hoff has used this application and now wants to amend it to make his buildings salable. The planning commission is going along, but I’m unclear about how much.
The lot sizes will be very small, but investors will get what they pay for….
The New Urbanism has not yet captured city hall and I apologize for my misunderstanding of the planning commission’s minutes.
ram the a planned unit development caught my
Our writer sounds like the dog who hoped to get fat by eating his own tail. The backbone of his thinking revolves around “urban planning,” and he manages to point to the disasters that these worthies have inflicted on cities in the past (stuff like zoning initiated by the KKK, public housing projects, urban renewal, building interstates through city centers, pedestrian malls, and most recently, hatred of automobiles as embedded in new urbanism “smart cities” and the like)
These academics imposed their big ideas on cities possibly leading to the destruction of many weaker ones (I know of no good studies to support this.)u
So the essence of urban planning is in correcting the mistakes made by previous planners. We are now told that Bright Young College Grads (implied to be computer savvy, itching to start the next Google and create “jobs” for the local serfs) leave Michigan to go to Chicago, California and the like because they want to live in inner cities, use public transport, walk to work and bars, commune with nature and similar blather. They will go to “a place” even if there are no jobs.
Our Michigan state government listened to the academics (at MSU as I understand it) and is foisting the following swindle on our communities. You must build walkable downtowns with street level entertainment, great public transit, use your waterfronts, make using cars miserable and have folks get around on bikes (January in Lansing, Yeah.) I always fantasize that the cities proposed by these visionaries should look like a tourist trap.
When the bright kids see how Michigan cities comport to their fantasies, why, they’ll leave jobs in Houston and move back to Flint! Great!
One could object that these young, bright, college Grads (Harvard with a degree in transgender studies) is capable of working, much less starting a business.
Another objection is that why should a BYCG choose a city in Michigan if Buffalo, Allentown and Syracuse also look like a tourist trap.
Our author, who I otherwise enjoy reading on the front porch thing, here espouses a superstition generally called a “cargo cult.” Look it up.
If a backwash adopts the appearance of successful cities, it will become prosperous. And the bozos who destroyed Detroit, Flint, Erie, and the rest have now, only now, found the potion that will make it all better…Magic.
On the other hand, maybe the dog can fatten up by destroying his past. I dunno.
The media should be more careful about criticizing money in political campaigns; It’s all based on the Citizen’s United decision and that, in turn, was based on the first amendment provision for freedom of the press. It seems that there is no bright line that distinguishes the corporation of the NYT for example, from that of a labor union or of Soros, Adelman, Koch…..
If Mlive can publish their political opinions and blindside the voters and issues on the weekend before election Tuesday, then what objection can they make to mere money doing the same?
I have actually used the Citizens United to devise a way to cut government costs; Private companies and entrepreneurs who successfully lobby and campaign to eliminate costly government programs should receive 10% of the money saved for five years after the program has been terminated.
the billions of “unregulated” money flowing into ads goes to stressed newspapers, radio and tv stations, paying guys who rehash the same scrip.
Has laziness has displaced incompetence?
I certainly congratulate Mayor Kepley and his staff for gaining Trader Joes for Kentwood, and agree with the notion that other grocers (except for Horocks) will not be impacted. Their demographic is unique.
I’ve never been in a Trader Joes, but the chain is often paired with Whole Foods, and I did venture into one of their stores in Houston.
I was working an especially strenuous contract, 12-14 hour days and no time for dinner. One evening I hankered for chicharones and walked the few blocks to the Whole Foods in River Oaks. I could tell something was special, what with all the Beemers, Volvos and Acuras in the parking lot, but it wasn’t until I got inside that I got the message.
Very quiet shoppers, all in their 30s and wearing their hemp safari threads and fiber sandals. They all looked athletic and healthy, studying labels on the food on offer, quiet discussions. None of those women would ever have children. (I’d guess that a lot of the customers had student debts and had rented the cars in the parking lot, but maybe my intuitions are a bit jaded.)
I, of course, felt horribly out of place. I’m just another peasant, lumpy, bald, red faced, 70ish, and stuck with big spade like hands. I wear 20 dollar cargo pants from Sears and pocket T shirts, 3 for a dollar at Meijers.
I tried to find chicharones, after all this was Houston, a kind of northern Mexico.
Alas! Whole Foods would never, ever, sell fried out, salted pork skins; they are not considered “healthy.”
The reason I made the special trip to Whole Foods really was just hoping for a bigger bag, maybe 3 ounces for $1.29 instead of 2 ounces for a dollar. Nothing that cheap would ever be sold in that excellent store.
I finally noodled all of that out and bought a 2 ounce bag of porkies as well as a pint of light beer for $2.25, total, in a service station on my way home. The beer, to help me blot out my tactlessness.
Haas’ law of borders
I did a lot of car travel around the USA while working contracts to provide medical care after 1999. One soon finds restaurants and gas stations, and eventually comes to associate them with entering or leaving a state. The state that has the businesses is growing and treats their citizens like adults while the state without takes care of their people and has multiple programs to improve its economy and people. Businesses near political boundaries have a choice and find their way to the most profitable situation while avoiding unnecessary hassle.
There is nothing on the Michigan side of I69; the huge truck stops, liquor and cigarette stores are all in Indiana. There is a road in the UP that goes in and out of Michigan and into Wisconsin. The bars, stores, villages are all in Wisconsin, the abandoned fields in Michigan.
‘South of the Border’ is a village that caters to travelers going down to Florida from NY City and points north on I 95. It advertises for 75 miles in each direction and lurks in South Carolina just before North Carolina.
As one goes north from El Paso on I10, the 200 store manufacturers outlet (visible, I used it all the time when hiking the Franklin Mountains 20 miles away) and Petro, Flying J all crowd on the Texas side. A few miles north in New Mexico there are 3-5 miles of Holstein cows (7200 on one count) eating alfalfa on the windward side of the interstate; one can feel one’s lungs turning brown. Further north on I25, the resort town of Raton in New Mexico denied Walmart’s request to have a store built there because they didn’t want commercial activity so the company went 25 miles further north into Colorado and Ratonites have to go that far over a mountain.
The Trader Joe’s and its probable minimal impact on us ordinary folk reminded me that we in Kentwood face lesser problem than going 25 miles over a mountain when shopping for ordinary groceries and other minor purchases but we do face irritants. There are 2 Walmarts, one in Cascade and the other in Wyoming, and 3 Meijers, one in Cascade, another in Gaines township, and the original on 28th on Kalamazoo. The Family Fare hovers just north of 44th street. They form a nearly perfect circle around Kentwood. There are several stores for groceries in Kentwood like Horrocks, Green market and Sam’s, but none are not family friendly (25 lb sugar bags at Sam’s, ladies at Horrocks walking around carrying wineglasses-exotic for average American diets and pantries.
Almost everyone in Kentwood has to get into a car to do weekly shopping, and the trips are usually several miles. We go 2.5 miles one way to the Meijers in Kentwood. I have walked or biked over there, but traffic on 28th street is a hassle and it’s cold sometimes…..
I’d hate to apply my law to a small entity like a city, but having to use a car is an ongoing vexation. The relevant governmental question is of course, are these large retailers avoiding Kentwood because they don’t need to be troubled by our welcoming stance and help, or is it purely random placement, the zoning, traffic and open land in Wyoming, Cascade, etc, being propitious when they were ready to build?
The Meijers on Kalamazoo and Woodland mall were there since time immemorial. Other big stores like Home Depot and the assorted furniture, baby places have settled here since the city was founded in 1967, and they are probably indifferent to political boundaries.
But we shop weekly for groceries, and only yearly for hardware. The costs of that trip are substantial for a lot of us.
Harvesting Ice and Organic Neighborhoods.
We hike or bike daily, and a favorite is in an Amish area where we recently witnessed about 10 young men harvesting ice which, as one explained, they would store insulated underground and use for keeping food cool in the summer. I dunno whether that’s practical since they use kerosene or natural gas for refrigeration, but these young fellows learned a lot of physics that day.
The blocks of ice on several wagons up there reminded me of the icebox in the hallway of the upstairs apartment where we lived in Pine Hill just outside of Buffalo. It was about 4 by 2 by 2 feet, oaken on the outside and had a galvanized box inside where the ice was deposited next to the milk and other groceries to prevent spoilage. My father would bring home a 50 lb block weekly from Rheinhard’s who ran both the Icehouse and Coalyard about 2 blocks away. The box leaked at long last, and my parents got a Servelle gas refrigerator around 1950 that functioned until around 1973 when I took it apart with a sledgehammer because no one was strong enough to move it in one piece.
In any case, Pine Hill had been built up as mostly crowded together 2 story duplexes, many with porches and single car garages in the back, during the 1920s before zoning and planning. The German-Americans had been trashed during the Great War and were chary about pretensions about liberty and the rule of law then prevalent. The early settlers got into bootlegging and made money. Folks kept their affairs private and no one talked. The sons became township police to protect the trade. The end of prohibition ruined that business but WW2 featuring rationing and black markets in meat, sugar, tires, nothing to sniff at were in full swing when we moved in. The housing was cheap in 1943 and my parents bought a beat up place without a basement for 2000 dollars, cash. The war was in full tilt, but my father got whatever it took and made whiskey; I got rid of the family still when we moved to Kentwood 11 years ago.
Pine Hill was about 4 blocks wide and 5 blocks long around the axis of Genessee Street. I once counted 17 saloons (including the Big House, a brothel) in those 5 blocks. It was otherwise lined by small stores including 2 butchers, one baker, one Loblaw, the small supermarket, the five and dime, as well as the Nemmer Furniture store. The latter had a factory and 2 warehouses on the block opposite us. There were 2 funeral homes, a hardware and a soda shop, no restaurants in sight. The house where we lived was on a side street, away from commerce but had an abandoned store in which I played.
Women stayed at home and raised the kids. That family had 10 kids, another 7, and that one only 5. There were no freezers and so groceries had to be fresh and lasted for possibly days in the icebox. They shopped every 2-3 days, many using carts or baby carriages to cart the stuff. I still remember Hazel, the 50 year old check out “girl” at the Loblaw. A dairy-truck came around twice a week and left quarts of fresh milk in a box that was built next to the front door of each house. A baker who had a source in NYC brought heavy rye bread to the door weekly. Guys and some ladies went to the saloon daily and staggered home. The public school and Catholic elementary schools, about of equal size, were a few blocks away and all of the kids had to walk. We came home for lunch; I always had bacon and 4 eggs. There were two public parks adjacent, one had a swimming pool where I lived during the summers except when I was gardening in our patch or farmed out to my aunt who grew and peddled vegetables from a small farm north of Buffalo. This was before television. Folks listened to radio and often sat out on porches to socialize. Sidewalks were used and everybody knew who belonged.
My father (and most families) had a car that he used to go to work (malt for beer) and for major shopping. He would go to a real farmer’s market (not hucksters) on Clinton street to buy 10 bushels of grapes to make his (illegal) batch of wine or 3 bushels of cabbage for sauerkraut. A bus route ran along Genessee Street that could be used to get around Buffalo, and I used this public transportation when traveling to parochial high school and college, or to work. My mother never learned to drive.
All very romantic, but of what relevance to current problems?
Well, a lot. The New Urbanism has tried to resurrect this world and peddle it as the way to cure all of America’s social ills, starting with global warming, college grads leaving Michigan, poverty, autism, anything else that bothers you, and ending with childhood obesity.
Problem is, we’re in a new era. Husbands and wives both work and the couple feel exhausted after they have even that one precious child. The kid is pampered, protected from germs or affront from offense, and guided to greatness. The sion is to be raised scientifically by dedicated professionals who will feed, discipline and mold him in daycare and public schools. His play will be supervised. What cooking is done is often microwaved from something frozen, or, for festive occasions, fashioned from exotic spices and herbs found in small shops scattered around the city. Everyone needs at least one car to support job or hobby, and they need to be parked somewhere convenient where they can be easily driven away. No one walks or bikes to go shopping or to go to work; 60 years of Urban Planning have separated neighborhoods from stores or workplaces. A few of us (probably all college grads) drive long distances to hike in the virtually abandoned North Country trail or hike the Musketowa trail. Someone uses a car to do the weekly shop to stock the fridge and wine cellar. If cooking can’t be done, why, it’s off to the Chipottle a few miles off!
Who has time to meet one’s neighbors, or to listen to radio when there are internet conversations to maintain or games to play? A pill will take care of obesity and whatever ails you, fewer drink beer and more use marijuana (quietly, so at least the veneer of being law abiding is maintained.)
So the New Urbanism languishes but never gives up. They build a few experimental projects and are successful in fobbing the neighborhoods off on a few zealots. They then survey these investors, made enthusiastic because their life savings and reputations are at stake, and find great happiness among these captives which they can use to claim success for the swindle.
win Haas · Kentwood, Michigan
I’m on the Kentwood City commission and we also have our EDC, albeit smaller and unpretentious.
We were confronted at nearly every meeting with “Company x is going to get a new machine and they will create 2 new jobs. They have in the past increased (or decreased) the number of workers after we gave them a tax abatement. Could you approve exempting the new machine from taxes?” And of course, we always granted the tax relief. (The unlamented personal property tax is no longer applicable so at least that aggravation is quiescent.) I’m always in favor of lowering taxes so voted “Yeah.” I’m not sure what role Kentwood had in “creating jobs” but the planners were enthusiastic.
What the “experts” at Mackinac have never copped to is the Cobb (Cobb, copp not related) Douglas production function, one of the very few economic ideas that has actually been tested and verified. It seems that one can substitute capital for labor and vice versa. An example; it took 10,000 Irishmen 10 years to dig the Erie Barge canal using shovels, pickaxes and wheelbarrows. Had they used plows, oxen and scoops, (more capital,) 5,000 men could have done it in 2 years and if one used contemporary earth movers, bulldozers, 500 men one year.
The unappreciated effect when companies came to Kentwood to get tax abatements for machinery and hired 2 guys was that they would not have to hire 20 guys to produce the same increased output. The economic effect of tax abatements for buying machinery was to reduce the simple, knuckle dragging jobs so dear to the hearts of Snyder, Granholm…..
My understanding is that the current substitute is $150k for one job.
I always ask these companies where the machines are made. Many come from Germany, Japan or the USA, the three countries where most robots and machine tools are produced. Making these machines is the real labor requiring bankers in London or NYC, computer guys in Kerela, craftsmen in Stuttgart, process engineers in Detroit, Sales engineers, investors from China and Mexico hiding their money, truckers who move the goods and a few guys from around Michigan who know how to install the robots, do the electrical work and the like.
BTW;
Cobb was the math guy and Douglas the economist working at the Univ of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s. They actually did experiments to demonstrate the validity and relevance of their equation. They won a Nobel Prize for same. These guys were solid thinkers; Douglas served as the Senator from Illinois for 12 years.
The substitution of capital for labor was well know 50 years ago, but is, alas, now sadly forgotten. Even the Mackinac with its libertarian impulses can’t properly analyze the basic dynamic of capital and labor which is oft in play when companies use government money (really capital) to “create” jobs.
With MEDC, there is more than one scam in play. It would be fun to tie the bureaucrats and their friends in the media into knots with the simple math of Cobb Douglas. Too bad the Mackinac isn’t up to the job.
characterless young, raised to ignorance and Appropriate Thought by government schools, will question nothing. “
I’m a public official and am constantly beset by the new urbanists, tenured frauds.
I didn’t read Haglund’s article, but I did see Grand Rapids mentioned. Real estate prices in GR are half of what they were, the population is stagnant, the city doesn’t have the money to open its swimming pools and couldn’t plow its neighborhood streets last winter. It peddled the Silver LIne which has had a troubled rollout and has not stimulated any economic activity.
But GR does tout its green credentials and promotes a downtown for young “educated” people. The job creators are the 50 year old Dutch craftsman and store owners, and German/japanese manufacturing companies tying into the furniture and plastic injection molding traditions here.
The Silver Line is named after an allegedly successful progenitor in Cleveland which “stimulated 5 billion dollars in new investment” along its route. Much of that was by the on route Cleveland Clinic which built new ventures as they received an ever increasing number of Canadian patients; I don’t think that they came because of the bus line.
In any case, we now have our esteemed, long anticipated Silver Line with poor service, sketchy finances, poor participation that I observed by the workers and peasants so dear to the hearts of the gullible politicians and their cheerleaders in the media, and ten years of taxes imposed on folks who will never use this service.
In the wings are self driving cars (you can buy limited self driving Mercedes and Cadillacs even now, I’m told. Also, computers and the internet are making work and study at home ever more available and attractive. The MOOCs are going to eat weaker sister colleges alive, and already all sorts of smaller places in GR are losing students; the trend will only accelerate. Plus, public transit carries at most 2% of workers. There is no reason to believe that downtown GR will not continue to stagnate.
The roll out of this Silver Line was at least 3 years in the making, accompanied by endless drum rolls, and has been operational for 6 weeks; I detected nothing that was worthy of exaltation, but then I have poor expectations for governmental services, so am not disappointed.
So we confront the unappetizing prospect that the GR area has a 40 million dollar white elephant on its hands and will continue to bleed tax dollars that could be used for genuine economic development.
The various communities that were passed over feel snubbed and want their infusion of Federal and State pelf.
I’m not sure why anyone would fantasize that having the exalted bus line go down So. Division would lead to businesses and young people moving there, but it hasn’t happened. No one is investing in the trashed out buildings or weedy lots along that route. We have not had any requests for zoning or development licenses from that area. Markets move in anticipation of future price trends, and prices and economic activity in that area would have skyrocketed had anyone seriously thought that So Division would prosper. There have not emerged any of the financial indicators that it will ever develop.
So, a sunk cost, and who will stand up and be responsible? The politicians have long since moved on, and their votes and opinions lost in a pretentious muddle. The media have no skin in the game and why should they care; they filled out their quota of filler and there’s no future in criticizing the mistakes of the past. The Rapid? their misdirection was bought with money and the taxpayer won’t get that back. Maybe get rid of some of their more flagrant executives if they can’t get the few very visible failures corrected, and soon, but still, no financial redress.
No, the taxpayer wins the victim’s sweepstakes. Poor schlep has been told how good he has it with rapid transit, the swindle.
One of my roles as a city commissioner is to monitor public functions and so I roused before dawn, loaded up my laptop into a backpack so I could use the WiFi, drove over to the 60th street, parked my Ford in a half empty parking lot and dragged my sagging hams to the bus stop. It was about 8:50 There were no real directions, and maybe 5 people ultimately showed up. Tried to buy a ticket but the screen repeatedly locked and then kept on rejecting my credit card. Finally asked two young people about the machine and both acknowledged that the ticket dispensers don’t work very well. Pulled out a 5 dollar bill and tried that, but the screen would not prompt me to insert my hard earned money. Then the bus driver, who seemed very kind approached me, asked if I wanted to go along, and instructed me to just push my 5 into the cash slot. A day pass emerged and 2 Susan Anthonies (which I peddled go Speedway for coffee.)
Got on the bus; there were maybe 6 other souls all told. Went up Division, looked the same, pawnshops, used car dealers, boarded up massage parlors….. The bus was possibly supposed to go through signals, but seemed to stop at each one. One stop was not close to being completed. Got my computer out, and then the young fellow behind me informed me that they had planned WiFi for 1 Oct, but the company that was to install it had backed out, so that service not available until ?. Asked the young fellow, he’s a freshman at CC and likes the service. It’s never busy in the morning, but crowded when he returned at 2 PM. Likes it because he doesn’t have to drive his car downtown, and gets nearly free rides as a student. So we clunked along, stopping at most of the cross street lights, picked up a few more, but I doubt that there were any more than 20 all told going down. One derelict got on at 60, fell asleep, had to be wakened and told to get out at the main station. He got back on and returned with me, sleeping the whole way. The bus was warm, peaceful and dry, I guess, and for a 3 dollar pass, worth it. Got to the main station, the busdriver took a 10 minute break and we returned, pretty much the same story, only a few fewer passengers. Took 33.5 minutes on the way back.
All this for 40 million that is now in the hands of the contractors, designers, computer whizzes, and sellers of expensive,”green” buses.
http://bridgemi.com/2015/02/big-ambitions-for-detroits-m-1-rail-system/#comment-723618
I did see Grand Rapids mentioned. The city touts its “green” proclivities and New Urbanism. They ignore that real estate prices in GR are half of what they were, the population is stagnant, the city doesn’t have the money to open its swimming pools and couldn’t plow its neighborhood streets last winter. The local M live, trying to push the increased sales tax to fix the roads, took pictures of potholes; I was impressed that the only pictures that they could find were taken in the City of Grand Rapids. The public schools are emptying out as people flee, moving to Kentwood and other suburbs.
The media and various political ward heelers (contractors, unions working for the transit company) peddled our Silver LIne along So. Division in GR as a cure-all. No one at Bridge noted the troubled rollout. Fare could not be collected, buses were late, Wifi didn’t work, ice on the fabled level access platforms made approaches impossible….
It has not stimulated any economic activity even after 4 years. Markets move in anticipation of future price trends, and prices and economic activity in that area would have skyrocketed had anyone seriously thought that So Division would thrive. We, in Kentwood, had that one lonely application for a new marijuana clinic along highly touted route which the planning commission trashed. I thought that this was unwise; at least the marijauana store was a beginning.
The Silver Line is named after an allegedly successful progenitor in Cleveland which “stimulated 5 billion dollars in new investment” along its route. Much of that was by the on route Cleveland Clinic which built new ventures as they received an ever increasing number of Canadian patients fleeing their collapsing medical system; I don’t think that these desperately ill people came because of the bus line. The city of Cleveland still lost 17% of its population 2000-10 and another 1.7% 2010-3, but their Silver Line stimulated economic activity. Behind mountains, more mountains.
In any case, we now have our esteemed, long anticipated Silver Line in GR with poor service, sketchy finances, poor participation by the workers and peasants so dear to the hearts of the gullible politicians and their cheerleaders in the media, and ten years of taxes imposed on folks who will never use the service.
In the wings are self driving cars (you can buy limited self driving Mercedes and Cadillacs even now, I’m told.)
Also, computers and the internet are making work and study at home ever more available and attractive. The MOOCs are going to eat weaker colleges like Wayne State alive. I’ll bet that its student population is stagnant and that trend will only accelerate.
Public transit carries at most 2% of workers. There is no reason to believe that Downtown Detroit will suddenly become populated with lots of new workers happily carrying their lunch pails to their government jobs because this rail line might be able to deliver one or two thousand extra each morning.
The GR area has a 40 million dollar white elephant on its hands and will continue to bleed tax dollars that could be used for genuine economic development. And now Detroit will follow, wasting 140 million based on disinformation about GR published by the feckless media.
The taxpayer wins the victim’s sweepstakes. Poor schlep has been told how good he has it with rapid transit, the swindle.
Detroit should make original mistakes-don’t repeat the mistakes that others have made.
I recall Napolean’s Mules as we replace a Commissioner.
The process consisted of interviewing 20 candidates who wanted us to appoint one of them to the city commission. Can you imagine hearing “building community” “ Vibrant” “Partnering” and “serving” every 10 minutes for four hours? In any case, we needed to whittle the field down to 3 or 4 who would receive more vetting. Criteria varied and mine were distinctly at odds with my fellow commissioners.
It seemed that a history of volunteering, of experience and knowledge of how things ran in Kentwood’s city hall was important to the other commissioners. One heard about how much one or another candidate had volunteered or was known to the participants. Many of the interviewees were on a first name basis with commissioners; I knew 3 or 4. Only a few comments addressed the personal vigor or to the occasional criticism voiced by one or another of our 20 candidates.
I thought that a mistake; we need fresh faces, ones who can see and deal with the accumulated deadwood, but I will be outvoted.
It did remind me of a probably apocryphal account of what Napolean, who specified experience when he needed to replace a general who had fallen. It turns out that 2 mules had been with the emperor on every campaign for 15 years; Napolean had only to choose which he wanted to lead that division.
The State of Michigan Land Division Act (Act 288 of 1967) requires the
Tentative Preliminary Plat Approval step. The Planning Commission will only review the
proposal once and make recommendation to the City
Phase 1 is 30 homes with front
facing garages and 20 homes with garages in the rear
The Committee did not want to see homes where
the garage is the prominent feature as seen from the street; it was felt that allowing homes
with protruding garages and no front porches would not be consistent with the intent of the
PUD. The Committee was supportive of permitting a larger percentage of homes to have
front facing garages.
a final tree preservation plan
Build out for Phase I, from approval of the rezoning (2003) to construction of
the final home, will have taken approximately 12 years.
to allow for diversity
in the type of housing offered within the development and 2) allow for larger rear yards
and more in-lot open space without reducing the finished living area of the homes
no
two homes with forward facing garages could be adjacent to each other;
traffic calming measure
Chris VD Hoff with Bosco Construction. neo traditional plan.
“They could not get it to economically to work” “homes that have the garages in the b ack are the most difficult to sell, they are more costly to tmen because of the driveway ane the associated sales on them. …most customers do not like their driveways in the back, they want the traditional fron garage. …Most of the people who boght te rear load garages they do not use their garages. ..this was the main reason to build the garages more to the front.
No one liked my proposal that the Michigan Film hustle be directed at making pornographic film; I was deeply hurt when one commentator wrote that it wasn’t funny. I need to re-apply myself to recover from the sting. Mackinac makes arguments that border on the banal; no imagination and little inspiration. Maybe another idea of mine will resurrect their free market pretense.
Fifty million is plenty of money to stimulate the formation of small businesses. We should look to other successful states where there are plenty of jobs and stable industries for patterns that we can emulate. I know that I can grow lemons and limes in my 4 seasons greenhouse on our condo in Kentwood and propose extending this as a venture that the state of Michigan should subsidize.
We in Michigan pay good money to buy lemons and limes from Florida and Texas; we should grow these in Michigan to diminish the outflow of money to the south.
Farmers in areas of the state where it’s difficult to grow corn or soybeans would be encouraged to use these subsidies to erect green houses stimulating construction, consultants, economic activity and rural revitalization in parts of the state that are withering.
Especially exciting is the appeal to humorless leftists as part of a locavore movement. Just think of farmer’s markets featuring yellow lemons and green limes among the limp vegetables peddled by hucksters at these fairs.
Democrats in the state legislature would join all of the Republicans in support of this move by our state toward citrus independence and even, with enough millions, our own export business.
Young college graduates would return from Houston and Pasadena to relax in the weak watery December sun filtering through the glass of a greenhouse, dripping with condensate.
Our governor would no longer have to wait for local cherries or apples; with fruit grown indoors he can go to regional or even national governor’s conferences year round bestowing a bushel of golden lemons on his envious fellows.
Some might object that it’s cheaper to grow citrus outdoors in climes sympathetic to it, but that’s not what’s at issue here. We need to stimulate jobs. Just think about the fellow who anecdotally “knew a lot of people in Michigan who work in the film industry about six months a year, earning more-than-average incomes.” I don’t know how he learned the income of these film makers, but he could now find thousands of illegals picking our exotic fruit and guess at their incomes.
I Look at what Planning has Wrought.
One of my peeves is the primacy that we humans put on our thoughts and of how we manage to ignore, willfully misinterpret or embrace what happens as a result of what those thoughts entrain. If we deem something good, it must be good and “Please don’t bother me with details!” Innumerable feed back loops have evolved over the eons that constrain extreme deviations from the physiologic in health and when these are lost, the organism or system disintegrates. We humans suffer from an arrogance that encourages follow through with plans and damn the results.
I hoped to get primal feedback and so dragged my drooping buttocks over to Wildflower Creek Planned Urban Development last week. It was Friday and I had the Planning Commission recommendation in hand.
To summarize, this parcel of land has been in play since 2003. Apparently in 2006 it was approved for 107 homes to be built in an architectural style called “Neotradtional.” This is an attempt to recapture the small town feel of a hundred years ago as imagined by New Urbanists. Garages should be behind the house, porches where residents sit and meet informally with neighbors promenading on the sidewalks.
The area was quiet and I managed to talk to one young man who was shoveling his driveway. Most of the sidewalks were snow clogged. A few houses were in construction and two had the number of the builder, Chris VD Hoff, so I called. He was nearby and, much to my pleasure and instruction, came over, showed me the inside of the places he was building ( quality with copper pipes and stone floors, closets, solid doors, other houses built 5-6 years ago by a now bankrupt builder (the front porch roof of one was visibly sagging, an early slum?) and the overall scheme of things.
I focused on several issues;
the demand that a tree stand on the property be preserved at all costs; is this part of some pagan Teutonic worship of the mighty oak?
Driveways that have to stretch around the house to the garage and sidewalks are expensive and shed water directly into nearby streams; not environmentally sentient. They also demand that the owner face a lifetime of shoveling this expanse, and where will he deposit the extra snow? Also, the drive between two story houses gets less sun and that part remains cooler during snowmelts. Water is right at the freezing point when it flows onto the shaded concrete where it freezes. See my pictures above. The ice lurks under the snow waiting to mug the next passing osteoporotic oldster.
As Chris pointed out, it’s difficult to make the turn to get into or out of the garage behind the house, and so owners tend to park their cars serially in the drive causing even more hassle. Houses with rear garages sell less well.
The neotraditional style demands 2 floors with a front entrance through the porch. Almost all of the houses had several to many steps up to the front door. The one that I visited had probable 7 concrete steps with a net elevation of 5 feet. It was snow covered. As I gingerly mounted the steps I wondered who would want to shovel this rock pile? And, of course, how does this fit in with the need that the disabled to have wheelchair and other easy access to housing? This two story approach accommodates young people, but one day, they too will become senile, and then who will buy these piles?
Chris told me that the houses are selling well and that there have been few secondary sales. I’d counter that private homes in Kentwood sell well during a good economy and as folks flee Grand Rapids. Even turkeys can fly in a rising wind. He would like to build more contemporary style houses as have been built on the adjacent Breezewood, but trying to change the existing plan is too much bother; it’s been 12 years to get this far.
I noted some troublesome issues above which the existing plans will encase in concrete that will problems for the hundred years lifespan of this neighborhood.
The major policy issues are buried in the 12 years during which this plan has evolved.
Is the Neotraditional style locked in by some understanding with the existing neighbors? If so, is there some mechanism for them to agree to alter this?
Some of the houses in Wildflower Creek were built cheaply and are already showing the deterioration that will impair the prices of the other homes. Is there some building standard that will make construction in any one area more consistent?
Who and what body wanted or demanded the neotraditional style? Did the original developer propose this style? Or is it tied in with some pet ideology of the zoning and planning commissions like “smart growth?”
Why does it take so long and so much effort to get plans through the planning and approval?
Storm Water Rules; if only my Septic Tank could Speak
We lived with 3 kids and had 2 medical practices in our home on the Eastbeltline SE in GR for over 25 years. There had been an old septic system and we intended to hook up to city services, but I was misled by the civil engineer supervising the reconstruction of the then new double lane divided highway, so the tank and drain field remained-right next to East Whiskey Creek and about 3 feet above the water table……
I once mentioned it to a GR city planner who said that she knew about our drainfield. She visibly wrinkled her nose and shivered at the affront. Let me aver that GR City Planning Commission was in no moral position to look down at raw sewage in those years. I hear that this unelected body has radically improved its observance of right and wrong behavior since.
The drain field was on the lawn, according to code, where grass and sun could help dissipate water. Predictably, it would freeze in the winter and then thaw in the spring, leaking small steams of septic fluid and disgusting smells onto the nearby parking lot and driveway. (BTW, East Whiskey Creek arises in Calvin College’s woods from a seep that also smells of a septic system; I know it well.)
I tried everything to get the water to drain into the soil (acting on my own, no contractor would touch it.) New gravel, reams of perforated pipe, extending the field, digging a separate drain for the washing machine, working frenziedly on weekends, and yet fermented (biologically safe but smelly) sewage continued to float to the surface.
One of our kids cited one of his teachers at City saying that weeping willows each dissipate up to 500 gallons of water daily. I planted two. These trees were well fed and sported 4 foot diameter trunks 15 years later when we sold out. But the real change happened when I dumped all of our leaves on the lawn in the bare spot between the two trees in the autumn for a few years; no more leakage. I dug down once finding at least 2 feet of mulch, loose, feathery light soil, laden with earth worms and beetles, drilled in every direction by moles. This leaf dump, established by accident, soaked up a huge amount of fluid. It was insulated from the cold in the winter so it never melted in the spring and remained metabolically active year round allowing turnover of water. I eventually recruited wood chips and more leaves from elsewhere, covering a larger area where soil was composted and into which the septic juice could percolate.
End of Problem.
My tinkering, trial and error and tincture of time worked. The formal rules governing septic systems, well supported by research, failed. Men with larger heads are easily mystified.
Storm Water Rules; Septic Systems and Unorthodox Approaches are smarter than our national Politicians.
The memorandum about new rules filtering down from the US EPA through our Metro Council to the City Commission announces a new proclamation; shedders of storm water have to filter out 80% of sediments before release to the Kentwood system. More seriously, none of this storm water can flow out of our city except during intense storms.
I lost my way here.
The rule of thumb in hydrology in our region is that one third of rain water evaporates, one third sinks in and the last third enters rivers and is eventually flushed out of the system over Niagara Falls. Rain is rain whether it be a trace one day and 2 inches over an hour the next day; what turns mutually rain water into storm water?
Transcending these epistemic problems, what solutions does our Metro Counsel and city engineer propose? Well, we can politicize so that the bureaucracy will let us offload some of our rain into the national waters; warmhearted of them, but, I think that the threat still lurks since the rules are still in place. Water has to be retained on site and allowed to seep away, and not slowly released as it does now from detention ponds. Much of the soil in Kentwood is heavy clay, relatively impervious to seepage.
I can think of several solutions beyond what our engineer proposes. I found that covering my otherwise refractory septic drain with organic debris allowed for great drainage. We might harvest leaves collected during the fall and spread them over otherwise empty areas in parks and woodlands; it’s a bit hard to divert water from sites that shed water to these unorthodox sponges, but still, if you have a woods at the bottom of your development…..
Another feature of Kentwood is its gypsum mines off of E. Paris. They are said to be full of water, but does this stuff flow or dissipate to deeper levels? If so, why not pump the extra water down to this sump?
Going further; we could dam up any of several creeks in the raw land apparent on any map of Kentwood; the aggregate detention of water might be such that we might not have to discharge any into the “state waters.” This would build up a lake or two with the associated aura of waterfront property, swells building mansions on the shores, swimming beaches, ice fishing and boating. Oh, so many blessings from the rules that we keep our water for ourselves!
As you all know, I harbor a avaricious streak that metastasizes to my surrounding; nothing thwarts my suggesting to Kentwood ways of making money from the tatters of our civilization. What if we tapped a well into one end of the gypsum mines and sold it as expensive bottled “mineral water?” Enough of these sales might lower the water table enough to allow for room to pump our excess but purified storm water down at the other end of the mine. It would be saturated with the gypsum salts, aka alabaster or selenite as it filtered along the mine and we could sell it to Wyoming and other neighboring, less enterprising burgs.
Well, enough of this governmental caterwauling! I live in a state sponsored whorehouse, I’ll never admit to how much I enjoy writing about its perversions, and no one pays me a red cent.
the shimmering scum floating on the deep river of productivity
Serious Thoughts on Commerce on South Division, how its expansion parallels and complements that of our Ford Airport.
Published as a comment on Mlive
Talking about studies that have been cobbled together. Here is one that I generated, and offer gratis; I refuse to let my work be contaminated by pelf.
The prostitutes along So. Division have increased their business by 2 million dollars per year. They attract an additional 5 million of business to local bars and stores, the increased auto traffic from Johns cruising uses one million dollars worth of gas and the indirect costs on the autos is 3 million. There is of course the use of streets that I estimate accelerated the deterioration to the tune of 1 million. Added to this is the increased medical care costs from VD which I recon at 4 million. Then there is the associated crime and need for police; this is serious money, probably 100 million.
So prostitution adds at least 116 million dollars to the West Michigan economy.
Ji’an, a 10 million sized city surrounded by Beer Gardens; Building Community and can it Work in Kentwood.
Kris and I just got back from a fact finding tour of China (just like the US Senate, but we paid for it ourselves.) The Terra Cotta Warriors are located near the city and we would visit them the next day. Meanwhile, we had an afternoon and the 600 year old wall surrounding the old city five minutes walk away. We ambled over.
Turns out that the wall also had a moat about 100-200 feet outside the wall, and the entire complex was well maintained including building a long linear city park. We walked this space for a distance of a mile or more.
The sky was partly cloudy, and temperatures around 60 F. Unlike our parks, this was an alk
Posted on Proposal 1: The right kind of fix for Michigan roads?, from Mlive; modified.
Another cacoon of uncertainty shrouds this proposal; there is a bill nearing approval in US Congress that will attempt to force the sales tax to be collected on internet sales. (Reason Mag, this month) It will apparently be collected by the seller applying the sales tax in the state in which he is based. (I’m not clear about some sort of minimum rate that these vendors will have to apply.)
A consortium of states is proposed that will pass the collected tax on to the customers’ state (I don’t know how or if that will work.)
States having a high sales taxes will impose higher costs on their internet businesses forcing them to go elsewhere. There are at least 4 states without a sales tax, Or., De, NH, and Mt. These will host all of the Amazons, Ebays…..of the future. None will locate in Michigan, another blow to our economy.
And Michigan won’t see a penny of their hoped for 65 million taxes on the books, records, clothes and whatnot that we buy on line.
Stoned for Adultery without the Pleasure
A state notorious for being the only one with a population loss in the last census, where the dominant industry has migrated to backward Asia and its major city sacked by political opportunists, will probably suffer from a poor self image, an inferiority complex in which any claim for being the worst is likely to fluorish. So it is that the conga line of construction companies, politicians with their media enablers, civil engineer groups and other ectoparasites gain an audience with their campaign to tax us to support their road building projects.
I spent 15 minutes compiling the following internet sites using “Poor roads in State x.” I excluded articles over 5 years old.
Each of these articles cites damage to cars of 3-500 dollars per year, dangerous driving conditions, need for more tax dollars and the general poor condition of “infrastructure.”
Familiar themes on radio and tv? We buy into this nonsense because it makes us happy to be oppressed, to be the greatest victim. Not much fun, you say, and you’re right. Think of it as being stoned for adultery without the pleasure.
Pennsylvania roads were rated worst overall by Overdrive magazine. and http://www.tripnet.org/docs/Pennsylvania_TRIP_By_The_Numbers_Report_May_2013.pdf
http://www.theindychannel.com/news/report-poor-indiana-roads-cost-drivers-hundreds
http://indianaeconomicdigest.com/Main.asp?SectionID=31&SubSectionID=66&ArticleID=65335
http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ohio/ohio-overview/
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/poor-road-conditions-cost-ohioans-billions-prompting-new-business-push-for-federal-highway–transit-investments-bill-119857199.html
http://newsarchive.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=164026
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-19/news/ct-met-illinois-infrastructure-report-card-0319-20130319_1_infrastructure-new-report-card-civil-engineers
and from Wisconsin; http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wisconsin/wisconsin-overview/
Wisconsin has 11,095 miles of public roads.
Wisconsin has 13,539 miles of major roads, 21% of which are in poor condition.
Driving on roads in need of repair costs Wisconsin motorists $2 billion a year in extra vehicle repairs and operating costs – $502.10 per motorist.
Troubling Features of Planning and Zoning in Kentwood.
Lifting all the barriers to urban growth in America could raise the country’s GDP by between 6.5% and 13.5%, or by about $1 trillion-2 trillion.
arguments go down in local planning meetings, they wilt on closer scrutiny. Home ownership is not especially egalitarian.
First, they should ensure that city-planning decisions are made from the top down. When decisions are taken at local level, land-use rules tend to be stricter.
Any restrictions on building won by one district should be offset by increases elsewhere, so the city as a whole keeps to its development budget.
Second, governments should impose higher taxes on the value of land. In most rich countries, land-value taxes account for a small share of total revenues. Land taxes are efficient. They are difficult to dodge; …a high tax on land creates an incentive to develop unused sites
Zoning codes were conceived as a way to balance the social good of a growing, productive city and the private costs that growth sometimes imposes. But land-use rules have evolved into something more pernicious: a mechanism through which landowners are handed both unwarranted windfalls and the means to prevent others from exercising control over their property. Even small steps to restore a healthier balance between private and public good would yield handsome returns. Policymakers should focus on two things.
The good news is that the world’s urban-land scarcity is largely an artificial problem. The bad news is that that does not make it a soluble one. Redressing strict land regulation is among the most politically fraught of policy issues. It is in many ways like other toxic issues, such as trade or immigration. The society on the receiving end of new imports or population inflows benefits as a whole, but those put out of business by competition or dismayed by cultural change feel a disproportionate level of damage, and organise in opposition. And in the case of land values this opposition will be rich.There are ways to address this with policy. Governments could aim specific assistance at those harmed by dense development, as they have to those affected by liberalised trade. Disbursing some of the tax revenue earned as a result of new development to landowners within a small area around that development to compensate for short-term hardship would reduce opposition to new building.
Or they could heed the advice of Henry George, an American follower of Ricardo who in the 1880s made the case for a land-value tax. It has many theoretical virtues. Most taxes dampen, distort or displace economic activity by changing incentives on the margins. But a land tax cannot reduce the supply of land, and it would stimulate economic activity by penalising those whose land is unproductive. And your tax base is always right there—a city lot cannot be whisked off to Luxembourg.
Two passing comments illustrate the threat to Kentwood’s tranquility posed by Planning and Zoning.
The first was by Chris VD Hoff in the formal city commission approval of the Wildflower Creek. He was obviously worried about having the project hung up yet longer by the city and just urged passage. During the debate he said something like, “We own the dirt for almost nothing,” and so can make a profit despite building less than highly desirable houses.
Wow! He got 30 acres of single family lots for almost nothing. Possibly land prices in Kentwood sank to nothing during the 2008-10 financial unpleasantness, but I doubt it; prices for houses and apartments lost 30-35%, a lot, but the drop was not down to “nothing.”
No, something else made this project stall after 2006, and I suspect that the dysfunctional neotraditional style written into the original plan 12 years ago has blighted this project, leaving everyone in the banking (which probably lost hundreds of thousands), as well as construction entrepreneurs leery of undertaking build out of what would ordinarily be a high value development. Yet, the insistence on using Neotraditional architecture was modified somewhat, and could just as easily been discarded by our zoning and planning commissions. The price of this land was rendered nearly worthless by bureaucratic fiat.
A second remark, made by someone at the commission, is even more disturbing. There is a fairly large piece of open land in the center of the city that has long been for sale. It was proposed that the city buy this (with borrowed money?) and then rezoned to suit some ill defined
which has left the entire project
Buying acreage, worthless land…..
“We know what we need to do to attract the young.”
And from the context, we realize that our author advocates the New Urbanism, aka Placemaking and similar nonsense as a cure for depopulation, if only we had “the political will.”
No data supports this fantasy. It is promulgated by our academic betters (in MSU, I understand.) There are maybe 50 trust fund kids, ivy league grads, who where taught that they have to live in downtown Grand Rapids and seek this housing. Since there is none, and the demand infinite, price skyrockets and makes headlines. But it’s still only 50 and none of these guys will ever start a business; it would be beneath them.
And there is no political action that will bring my three kids (Caltech, U of M, MTU and Geo Mason, 2 national merit scholars, a Fulbright, 3 master’s) from the East Coast. They each developed their own work and expertise, creating jobs not even contemplated in Michigan. The smart ones, the ones with a future, leave and along with them, jobs and youth bleed away, as detailed.
I can tell you where the jobs went. Texas is growing like crazy. There is a substructure of owners of small businesses, managers, skilled professionals that runs that state. All are from the northeast, the Great Lakes states and nearby Canada. The entire nursing staff of an ICU in Victoria were Quebecois. The chemists who captained a major oil- New Yorkers, the medical subspecialists from Michigan and Pennsylvania….
They left us 25 or 30 years ago, found less regulated and taxed wide open spaces to use their energy, stayed and prospered. Businesses and jobs center around them.
I spent a lot of time in Houston, a pleasant prosperous city that famously rejects the charade of zoning and planning is therefore really growing (see last week’s Economist Mag.)
Enron in Houston ( our own Consumer’s Power invested also-but they got lucky toward the end) speculated in energy derivatives and went bust. They laid off maybe 10,000 young, very smart folks one day. They all stayed and many started businesses. As was stated in the newspapers, opportunities were present, the costs of living and the burn rate through investment capital were low and gave these businesses the time to become established and to prosper.
Our author here is buttering his parsnips. The job creators left decades ago. The gene pool in Michigan and the rest of the rust belt is getting deeper at the shallow end. Young people with plain ordinary greed and plans find no reason to stay and will continue to leave.
The gullible swells who want to live in “walkable cities” and use public transit hate capitalism and will find themselves taxed and regulated into a penurious dotage in inner cities built to look like the broken down tourist traps up north.
The only viable public policy to stabilize the populations in Michigan is to decapitate public policy.
Urban Planning; Costly, Cyclic, Model Cities, 1960
Just got the Annual Budget for Kentwood; we had 3 days to review it (just to re-assure our patient taxpayers how we carefully consider their interests.)
Several areas caught my attention, especially in light of the recent Economist showing that urban planning adds substantial costs to life in the big city.
It seems that we may spend 25K to hire a consultant to guide us in re-zoning So. Division to encourage walkable re-development there. Another note mentions the possibility that we may need tax dollars to demolish some of the buildings down there. The Silver Line will not be the last waste!
This is reminiscent of Urban Renewal, you know, the 1950s vapor when excited visionaries got congress to spend good money tear down the original downtowns and established ethnic neighborhoods as they did in Grand Rapids, destroying the West Side and much of the picturesque Division Ave.
So far as I know, the Silver Line has not performed especially well; one hears little about its ridership leading me to believe that it’s not great, else the proprietors would have crowed loudly.
To keep the balance sheets accurately; we’ve spent 40 million to construct the Silver Line, 15.3 million in extra taxes imposed the 350,000 people who live in the 6 cities involved in The Rapid network (that’s 44 dollar for each man woman and child in Kentwood, or 2.2 million.)
There has been no interest on the part of investors in properties on South Div, no applications for new housing or businesses, not even any more hot pillow joints, none. The area is an economic zero.
I have no idea where the inspiration for sending more money down this rathole arose. Economically, eliminating Planning would save us a lot of grief, but saving money, like telling the truth, is an orphan.
I have personally published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and on the other hand, resigned my Fellowship in the American College of Physicians (publisher of the Annals) in part because of a wildly irresponsible article that they published 35 years ago; nevertheless.
I was not at the symposium, but I know a physician who was. The symposium was excellent, and disturbing. It seems that the Annals, which is one of the fairly reputable 5 general medical mags, gets hundreds of articles submitted for publication and sends most out for peer review. Many are graded as worthy by these “experts” in the fields which the article addresses.
These vetted articles are then sent out for statistical analysis, just routine number crunching to be sure that the research was relevant and valid. NINETY-SIX percent are rejected as being “underpowered” and/or as having other scientific irregularities. Only 4% get published in the Annals, but 80% of the rest show up in other journals, so the medical literature is overburdened by this flotsam.
These rejected articles often involve novel treatments (probably few are likely to cause harm, but….) on patients done as part of “research” but are so poorly designed that they will add not one Iota of insight into clinical problems.
One of the main points brought out last evening was that there is a lot of junk science out there in the medical wasteland that includes useless and even possibly harmful research.
The reason why I obsess over this “scientific” blather is my increasing recognition that “there is a lot more known than is necessarily true.” If we in medicine can’t design good experiments and our “experts” can’t recognize garbage when they see it, how much confidence can we place in the copious outpourings of the “social sciences” like sociology, political science, economics, psychology, drug rehab, anthropology and the like?
The hard science of physics and chemistry have reproducible, boring experiments that allow for engineering of stuff like bridges, computers and gasoline.
The biological sciences are a step down from the hard sciences,and are a lot less predictable and reproducible. If we try to apply biology, as we do in medicine, the reproducible is much harder to achieve which is why physicians, especially recently trained ones get a thorough grounding in statistics and the scientific method. Nevertheless, a lot of nonsense and superstition creeps into medical practice.
You’ll notice that hard sciences are boring, and that the semi-hard ones like biology and medicine are often discussed.
The soft sciences as detailed above are part of the daily conversations on the streets and workplaces yet they rely on “surveys” “scholarly opinion” and armchair reasoning; no basis at all to command our allegiance. Yet we use these to structure our government programs, to make things happen, stuff that’s often tragic for a lot of people.
Sociologists told us that we needed a welfare program, and then seem puzzled that the African American family and more recently white family disappears. Educational experts deemed more education as a cure for economic malaise, and then seem mystified when college grads and even Ph.Ds work at jobs where they wear paper hats. Political and Military scientists sent my young butt to the Central Highlands.
So, the point of that excellent symposium funded by the Devos family is not some blather about the internet, but rather that we should be skeptical about the whole “scientific” jape.
http://reason.com/archives/2015/04/14/online-sales-tax-cash-grab#.5aqwod:eQMi
“Online Sales Simplification Act of 2015—that would make it easier for states to tax online purchases, while also limiting the states’ power by allowing for something known as an “origin-based” sales tax. States would tax Internet sales based on the seller’s location rather than the buyer’s,”
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use-worlds-greatest-cities-carries-huge-cost-space-and-city
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21647622-land-centre-pre-industrial-economy-has-returned-constraint-growth
I’m not conceding that the BP oil spill was a good thing, but this one sided presentation is a bit over the top. In fact, as I predicted in an article published in Lewrockwell.com 5 years ago, there was an explosion of life in the “afflicted” gulf. Shrimpers are having record harvests and many fish stocks are at unprecedented levels. The die off of salt water mammals seems miniscule and its documentation anecdotal at best, I mean,”consistent with the timing and spatial distribution with the (Deepwater Horizon) oil spill,” is as “scientific” as it gets. Heaven help us if these are the bozos who get to spend a billion or more on pubilisizing their ideology and self interest in a long career parasitic on the fines from BP.
I’ll reproduce my article, just to infuriate nitwits;
I don’t understand the commotion over oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico when a drilling operation went sour. Oil has always oozed out of the ground to foul land, lakes and oceans. That’s how people first discovered the stuff.
In nature some oil on the surface evaporates off as naphtha (probably the basis of Greek fire). Other oil is digested by bacteria converting it into simple organic compounds that other organisms feast on, leading to a localized exuberant biodiversity. The heavier components of oil remain as lumps called bitumen or asphalt.
The Dead Sea was called Lake Asphaltites because of the gooey pebbles that floated onto the surface from underwater seeps. This asphalt was used on Egyptian Mummies. Oil found floating on lakes or in puddles was used by Indians to caulk canoes, and as medicines. In ueber environmentalist Santa Barbara County in California an estimated 11 to 160 barrels of oil seep into the ocean daily and have for countless centuries; the locals have made attempts at capping it.
Oil exists under the surface of the earth under pressure that causes it to seep to the surface by any available route. When a well is drilled into a pocket of contained oil the pressure forces it to gush out and over the wellhead. The pressure in the pool of drilled oil gradually falls, and the seep ceases. In this way, oil drilling actually has stopped numerous spills of oil onto the surface where it fouled land and water for eons.
The British Petroleum accident allows environmentalist to make arguments against offshore drilling. If environmentalists really wanted to preserve pristine nature, they would be appalled that drilling for oil has interfered with widespread oil seeps that enriched the environment before man messed things up.
www.kentwoodblog.wordpress.com
The lingo used in this article is some sort of shibboleth; “ As we fire through the latest and greatest devices faster than ever – cell phones, tablets, TVs, laptops and more – it is critical that consumers, businesses, and communities safely recycle their toxic tech” is possibly poetry, but only aspires to English prose.
Economically, recycling in the USA is generally pointless. As was pointed out (I think), general household trash needs government subsidies and the only participants are the simple fervent environmentalists from the 1970s still mumbling about their messiah.
Nonetheless, there is a point lurking here about toxic heavy metals that goes beyond poisoning the lakes and pregnant women. I think of it as being part of the “oligodynamic effect.” This has been detailed in numerous environmental and microbiologic article of which I cite a recent one http://jjmicrobiol.com/?page=article&article_id=8085.
It seems that essentially all of the heavy metals, especially silver and mercury act like antibiotics to select antibiotic resistant strains of micro-organisms. If one samples bacteria from an environment,say a field of corn, where there has never been the deposit of metals, the bacteria will generally be sensitive to our usual antibiotics. The soil or tailings near a tin or lead mine contains microbes that are resistant to not only heavy metals, but also antibiotics like tetracycline or streptomycin type drugs. These effects result from almost vanishingly tiny concentrations of metals, concentrations that might result from the mercury emissions from coal burning power plants or the disposal of electronics.
Antibiotic use in the veterinary and medical fields probably does not lead to the emergence of the genetic elements that lead to antibiotic resistance. Darwin’s spontaneous generation does not occur in hospitals. However, antibiotic use as well as the tiny amounts of heavy metals that bleed into the environments of farms and modern hospitals do select out the resistant strains, so leading to the clinical problems of failing antibiotic effectiveness and the increasing need for newer and more expensive medications to treat always more resistant strains.
I guess that I’d agree that we need to recycle our electronics along with discouraging coal burning. (I don’t know what happens when I turn my cellphone back to MetroPCS next week for a new one, but I trust that a major name brand would dispose of it responsibly.)
Once these metals get loose, there’s no way of getting them back. And there are consequences that greatly increase the costs of medical care.
Public Planning and the Destruction of Wealth.
We were among the victims of Planning and Zoning in Grand Rapids. We owned 3 acres of mostly swamp on the East Beltline SE and foresaw selling it. The property to our south, a magnificent seven acres on high ground and wooded, was for sale. We and that neighbor were surrounded by office buildings and a half mile from Woodland and Eastbrook malls. Neither of us had garbage collection, water/sewer connections, public schools, parks or grocery stores in sight, but nevertheless we were zoned residential when commercial or even industrial seemed reasonable. The owners of the seven acres who tried repeatedly to change the zoning, all to no avail.
Burton Ridge apartments, quiet, prosperous and settled rental units were on our north. They owned 40 acres of developable land behind us that were platted and prepared for apartment construction at least twice. Burton Ridge were the real victim here.
They held out for about 12 years but finally acceded to city planning. The one called me up and asked me to buy it instead of letting the city steal it; the price was ridiculously low but I saw no future in owning two properties coveted by unscrupulous bureaucrats.
The city plans, based on some transient theory, dictated a low income housing project be built on the seven acres, and sure enough, the buildings went up and were occupied. Things started to disappear and vandalized from our garage, and I tried to institute security to no avail. Burton Ridge renters were really aggravated. I heard complaints of attempted break ins, cars damaged and of confrontations with young thugs. Two of the long term occupants that I knew by name left.
About a year after the housing project was finished, the developer, wanting to build another 36 units, approached us with an offer that was $100,000 short of our asking, but it was better than nothing so we took it. Best thing that we ever did since it got us out of the high tax, no services City of Grand Rapids and into Fox Chase Condos in Kentwood with it’s low taxes and a wonderful life style.
We count ourselves winners. It was worth $100,000 to get rid of the aggravation related to our new neighbors.
The owners of Burton Ridge lost good renters and the the 40 acres of land behind us has and will not be developed; who would? The mainly elderly occupants who moved had to find new lives elsewhere; their lives were disrupted.
But the minor irritation imposed on me by GR zoning and planning commission did not start with having to move and losing a few bucks. I understand that you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, and what right do I have to enjoying my egg when great social goods need to be satisfied?
No, the outrage started after we agreed to sell.
The developer, call him Charlie, was a 40 year old from Cleveland, a nice guy who would fly in and manage the project through completion. I got to be his buddy citing my erstwhile real estate license and wanting to learn how the business works.
The sleaze became first showed itself when a young fellow with hot, burning fanatical eyes, showed up with his brand new SUV marking him as an “An Environmental Engineer.” He asked permission and then spent 3 days wandering our 3 acres. He asked to see my basement with its old paint cans and epoxy left over from building many boats. On the second day, he called in a consultant and I overheard them saying “Of course it’s wetland, look at those trilliums!” (Had I known, I would have mowed that portion of lawn or spread Scotts weed and seed to make it dry land, but wet lands it would be.) The environmental engineer proceeded to mark off most of the front and sides of our acreage. Not much room for 36 apartment and it looked grim, but not for long! Two weeks later, the engineer re-appeared and moved all of his flags at least 75 feet down the lawn and toward the swamp, room enough for our project to proceed. Oh, and then, when the plans changed a year later, he re-appeared and moved the flags to the side of the property to accommodate a parking lot and road. Strange how wetlands can change like that, but who am I to impute financial pressures on our environmentalist that it may have been necessary to deploy?
Charlie took me to at least two city planning commission meeting where he presented his case. He was introduced as “a developer who is well known….skilled…does good projects” as though this were necessary. He and I would sit at the back where he would mock some of the commissioners, telling me what each would say and the like. Not that the commissioners didn’t make fools of themselves on their own. One mentioned that the current recommendation that he’d read about, was for office buildings to be placed next to the road and parking be behind the building.
The commissioners all called Charlie by his first name, and he knew each by their official title. Cozy, you might say. The project went through.
Kris and I did have to go to Okemos for the closing; seems that Charlie was in Michigan that day to play golf. I was too polite to enquire further.
spoliation
Manufacturing, especially in mature industries like autos’, has a dismal future. Cars have become computers with some mechanical elements. GM/Ford, as businesses, make their money from finance, and as corporations, function as defined benefit pension plans that sell the occasional unloved car. But the business and state bureaucrats and legislators live to fight the last battle, so subsidies, training of workers and tax breaks for robots that replace workers go on despite the contradictions.
A robot replaces one workers if the machine costs less than 150k (my latest info.) There is money to be made in designing, building and marketing this automation of work and there are some in Michigan who have undertaken this business.
The underlying fatal flaw in these reports (boilerplate? Haglund is notoriously devoid of ideas) is the attitude that “MIchigan” is responsible for our livelihoods and flourishing. He says:iIf only some thinker could design the winning formula that would turn our few kids (low birthrates) and the many unemployed auto workers, born into original stupidity and supplied with 16 years of schooling by society, into wealthy ward heelers, team players dancing in a conga line with the state of Michigan where, properly conditioned, they will lead the good life. All that social engineering! In school they are “socialized,” hear that capitalism and greed are bad, and that being crowded into inner cities with great public transit and no cars is the boot camp for heaven. The media/government/education cabal obsess that “we” need to become team players and of caring for the less fortunate.
These resulting trained fleas will hum along smoothly and never deviate from familiar humdrum into unsettled circumstances where they have to innovate, improvise, or evolve into something new. Haglund and the the social engineers who write this balderdash envision “Michigan” as God marching on Earth.
There are possible solutions for the penury into which some folks in Michigan are sliding. Greed, no training by the State to become like the next manufactured man or woman, get rid of dysfunctional regulations, taxes and the accompanying rigidities, get rid of planning and zoning (these, according to the Economist, costs the US economy 13.5% of its potential growth and is the major cause of the poor getting relatively poorer, we need to learn from Houston>) Let people sin, make terrible mistakes, and never envy the individual his enjoyment of whatever prosperity he earns.
Libertarians generally believe in individual responsibility, relegating to the state only that which they cannot easily do for themselves. One such delegation is a monopoly on the use of violence to protect property and lives. We’re comfortable with a small army and of police answering 911 calls when some of our rights have been violated. The army and police are distinctive in the USA.
The history and rationale of policing is a comparatively recent. Until around 1800, cities were small and protection of lives and property was an individual thing using heavy doors, sturdy locks and weapons in the hands of householders. A night watch man patrolled after dark, called out the hours and raised the alarm when he witnessed crime. Sherifs who investigated crime and arrested miscreants worked with the county justice system. The industrial revolution made cities large, wealthy and crime more apparent. A theory based on a few anecdotes emerged that it was better to prevent crime than it was to merely punish criminals. Cities would hire men who would walk the streets watching for suspicious activity and that this surveillance would forestall crime. The name “police” was related to “polis” the greek word for city. New York City had the first police force in the USA in 1840. The image of the cops that most of us have is of a mildly obese, garrulous, red faced Irishman who occasionally uses his nightstick on errant youngsters to steer them away from a life of crime, but who is often in bed with the local mob. I grew up in an neighborhood where bootlegging had been a way of life; all of the distillers’ sons became township policemen, one needed to protect the business.
There was a crime wave after WW2 with violent crime peaking in the mid 1970s and all crime in 1980. Governments did nothing until the mid 1990s when President Clinton arranged to hire an additional 100,000 policemen nationwide. The “three strikes” laws were passed in about half of the states and the “broken window” theory was enacted by Mayor Giuliani in NY City, with the controversial “stop and frisk” gambit, directed at male minorities. These unconstitutional searches often found “illegal” weapons and chemicals deemed to be “drugs” leading to arrests. Prisons filled up and men disappeared from African American neighborhoods.
As stop and frisk became unpalatable, another subterfuge needed to be deployed. In Kentwood (and in many other cities) our police chief is very proud of his DDACTS program. The following is from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration web site.
Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS) is a law enforcement operational model supported by a partnership among the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and two agencies of the Department of Justice: the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the National Institute of Justice.
DDACTS integrates location-based crime and traffic data to establish effective and efficient methods for deploying law enforcement and other resources. Using geomapping to identify areas that have high incidences of crime and crashes, DDACTS uses traffic enforcement strategies that play a dual role in fighting crime and reducing crashes and traffic violations. Drawing on the deterrent of highly visible traffic enforcement and the knowledge that crime often involves the use of motor vehicles, the goal of DDACTS is to reduce the incidence of crime, crashes, and traffic violations across the country.
Our chief identifies about the 4 or 5 high crime areas of Kentwood (understand our public housing) where he concentrates his patrols. The cops look for minor infractions on of the fifteen year old beaters that impoverished minorities drive, and in which they “usually finding drugs.” Looking for crime in and area vastly increases the likelihood of finding crime which in turn validates the initial premise that the DDACTS areas are high crime areas. Residents in these areas seem to fall into two categories. The younger black men who are often unemployed and despise the public schools hang around in public
qualified immunity – an obnoxious doctrine that sets them apart as a special class under the law. A protected class.
Older, settled African American
I’m not denying that minorities are innocent here; the
Lately cops have become controversial. Their all too often abuses of their state conferred monopoly on power can now be documented on cell phones, published on social media, amplified by moribund newspapers, television and various political groups who thrive on controversy to arouse minorities into riot. Notice that the neighborhood was no longer being observed for evidence of suspicious activity, but rathe
Sturgeon’s Revelation states that 90% of everything is crap, so I immediately detected odor (not the first whiff in the commission chambers that evening) when our highly respected city judge proposed that his Kentwood court host a sobriety court, you know, the contrivances imposing substance-abuse interventions and treatment on defendants who plead guilty of driving while intoxicated or impaired.
Some background; I had served on the Grand Rapids Mayors Task Force on Drugs 15 years ago and researched the scientific literature. There was only one good clinical trial and it showed that even a well funded alcohol rehab trial was no better than threatening the miscreant with severe punishment if he were caught drunk again. Our judge cited some “case-control” studies (close to worthless, but convincing enough for the commission) to put me down. Some other political body would provide the $160k, it was a partial return to Kentwood of taxes that would be sent elsewhere. I voted “yes” with everyone else and he implemented the hustle. The judge was told that he should not expect ongoing funding from Kentwood when the 3 year grant ran out.
Not content with the status quo, the judge recently sent out a widely noised study funded by “The Michigan Association of Treatment Court Professionals” which touted the Ignition Interlock Systems that detect alcohol on the breath of drunks and prevents them from starting their cars. He misinterpreted it as showing the effectiveness of sobriety courts. The actual research focused only on Interlocks, commercial products imposed on clients in sobriety courts as allegedly diminishing recidivism as well as other crimes. The authors, trying to bolster their argument, included not just one but two comparison groups, one from a sobriety court and the other from a court using traditional probationers. On page 40, you’ll notice that there is scarce difference in alcohol recidivism between these two groups at 1,2, and at 3 years.
My point is not especially that sobriety courts are useless (although they are.) The main researcher, (a professor from GVSU, my old haunt) was doing marketing work on Interlocks, a series of commercial products. He never gave the data comparing sobriety courts with standard probationers’ courts a second glance; it supported his objective on Interlocks, so he innocently told the truth on sobriety courts. His job was to “Evaluate Interlocks, What are sobriety courts?” Like many social science “studies” that get reported, this one showed a favorable result for Interlocks, just like previous studies that compared standard probationers courts to sobriety courts showed the superiority of the latter.
This study illustrates the degradation of enquiry in colleges and universities; most of what the social sciences investigate is thinly disguised marketing research done to please someone in business, the press or for our purposes, government. Tools used to investigate human affairs, surveys, experiments with students as subjects, retrospective looks at large data bases and the like, always require investigator interpretation on input variables, what criteria and tools to use in analysis and what studies to report. Negative studies never get reported. Publicity always gets a better deal than integrity, and a researcher who finds unfavorable, even once too often, loses funding. Social science researchers tout their probity in the daylight. At night and in the dim light of anonymity, prostitutes want their money.
Rather, I want to point out the invalidity and irrelevance of the social or “soft” sciences. Social sciences are the non-physics and non Chemistry academic specialties. Some parts of biology are hard sciences, but, as our statistician daughter repeatedly points out to us, much of medicine is not. (My wife and I are retired physicians.)
The soft sciences start off with great ideas and try to do “scientific research”with statistics, surveys, even experiments to bolster their opinions and then implement them in government or industry just like hard scientific theories are applied in engineering. These soft scientists even think of themselves as “social engineers.” But their research and studies never reveal consistent results. When they apply their recommendations, the effects are often perverse and, instead of revising their theories, they constantly try to correct the
http://responsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2015-Michigan-DWI-Sobriety-Court-Ignition-Interlock-Evaluation.pdf
no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. quit living in his head all the time. Sturgeon’s Revelation” 90% of everything is crap.
I was drunk sounds better than I was stupid” He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts, for support rather than illumination. Lenten visitor-too old or drunk to perform-G Greene”
| Thanks for the followup; this is a case control study, not very sound in its methodology. What I don’t understand is why no one does a random controlled study. This paper has 600 folks in each arm; what’s wrong with assigning the locks randomly and then following the individuals?
Most social sciences research/surveys/studies are worthless, but this one contains information that the raw material is at least available. Good research is possible with correct, and not even very expensive. randomization and follow through. |
So, yesterday I looked up the “methods and materials” used to generate this report. It’s a flawed case control study, virtually worthless, but it’s likely to be cited as “scientific” by those who may have a vested interest. I put it to sleep.
But then, this morning I open my NYT and there at the top left hand corner is an opinion piece on a topic that is a sore point known among those who have been in departments where research and publishing is done. A light went on.
In any case, I revisited that state wide report which Judge Kelly had mistakenly labelled as showing the effectiveness of sobriety courts. It shows nothing of the sort.
The thrust of the report is that alcohol detecting devices that stop the miscreant from starting his car seem to have some effect after 2 of even 3 years. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, the research is still flawed.
Unconsciously the author (from GVSU, I got an MBA and taught marketing there 25 years ago; they have obviously since improved their standards) included the results of the sobriety courts compared to traditional probationers
See page 10 with the bar graphs. I can’t reproduce them here but the two left grouping show clearly no difference between sobriety courts and traditional probationers at 1,2 and 3 years. If anything, the sobriety courts have a poorer result.
Sorry about being so obstreperous. |
Our own Sobriety Court, the Nature of Knowing, and Clearing the Mind of Cant
The 62nd District Court in located in Kentwood and represents justice to our residents. It is local and to some extent under the control of our citizens, an excellent example of small government. This happy parochial scene was interrupted when we took on a federal grant to start a “sobriety court,” a program that aspires to combine punishment for repeated drunk driving with alcohol and drug rehab. I, of course objected since no one has ever produced evidence that these rehab programs are effective. The only real “random clinical trial” was done in the 1990s and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It demonstrated the long term reduction of one drink per day in the treated group compared to those who were told to stop drinking or else lose their jobs. Treatment cost about $10, 000 at a time when that was serious money.
Judge Kelly, whom I highly respect, cited some poorly done “studies” that supported the institution of sobriety courts. These consisted of anecdotes like “We instituted sobriety courts and our success is much better than in the next county where they didn’t.” This kind of “science” is unfortunately prevalent in the general population although it would draw jeers at any meeting of physicians or statisticians. The commission approved implementing sobriety courts since it cost our city nothing. I may have voted for it.
So the program is running and we’ve gotten enthusiastic reports of how well it’s being received.
Then Judge Kelly sent around a study that evaluated the use of alcohol detection devices on cars
If the state legislature really wants to improve the livelihoods and scenery for citizens of this great State, they would invest in the porn industry and not fritter our tax money away on cornball and cheesy Hollywood inspired movies like “Birdman.” (“Boyhood,” on the other hand, was a work of Genius.)
Fifty million would have a serious impact on this small subculture of the cinema business and could move the filmakers and marketing guys to our fair peninsulae.
I’d intuit that the out put from this art, which is video is distributed mostly on the internet necessitating bigger glass fibers around the state .
And if the legislators were serious about retaining young folks in Michigan, why, they’d have to love putting our young folks, ones who could perform several times a day, to work as actors. That would certainly help diminish some of the obesity that worries some.
Porn does not require a sunny, warm outdoors, rather the insides of a worn out apartment in the UP would do as well as a full professional studio. All one needs is some electricity, warmth, a couch or a bed. It’s likely to be hard on the bed though.
The costs of entry and exit from the industry are low and attractive to poorly capitalized, struggling rural and inner city entrepreneurs who, let’s face it, shouldn’t mind imitating and exhibiting what they admire on reality TV.
Let a thousand point of lighting brighten Michigan! Porn is the ticket out of our malaise.
Or to extend the Teamster’s mantra not just “… a good job creator for the state,” but the logical extension of our “Pure Michigan” campaign. Er. maybe we should reconsider that last bit of fluff.
“The public body is not allowed to consider differences between the quality of the bids,”
Nonsense. I just went through my 2 June 15 Kentwood city commission meeting packet looking for bids on projects that our city funded, parks, fixing up some buildings and the like. Costs were in the $2000-60,000 range so relatively small potatoes, contractors with a half dozen employees, guys selling stuff made in small shops….
We rejected the low bidder 2/4 times, meaning that we elected to go with slightly more expensive companies, based on our experience with using them, the time it would take for them to complete the job, the helpfulness of the bidder in pointing out inadequacies of the city’s own requirements, etc.
Using the “Davis-Bacon” formulae imposed on the state’s projects increases those hourly costs by 6 or more dollars per hour, and does nothing to protect the taxpayer. In fact, these provisions limit the bids made and the choices available to decision makers at the state and federal levels, interfering with the free markets on the one side and trying to confer monopoly powers on one construction union.
Prevailing wage provisions confers on this illegitimately coercing group the the extra money needed to continue to lobby the state legislature, an excellent investment from their point of view.
I’d look into the campaign finance of the state’s legislators who vote to retain this relic from the Hoover era to smoke out some sort of truth. And supporting Bacon-Davs should make the outfit that terms itself “non-partisan, fact-based journalism alive in Michigan” cringe.
Bacon Davis was passed at the behest of labor unions seeking to exclude African Americans from competing on federal construction contracts. Is that what you want?
The problem of South Division.
The city commission is to meet with the planning commission in a special session on 30 Jun 15; I will not be able to attend. The purpose is to discuss development of our portion of South Division. It seems that the Silver Line, touted as being a huge stimulus to redevelopment of that strip has failed to create investment even after 4 years of building stations and of politicians and desperate Rapid officials promising “economic development.”
Like all roads, it was merely a slit of public access in a sea of private farm land when designated in the 1830s. Later, the privately built and maintained plank road allowed team of oxen and horses to move between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, for a toll, of course. There would have been scattered inns and horse shoeing places along Plank Road, but no reason to have large commercial buildings.
The road way was probably taken over by the state around 1900 and renamed South Division. This highway would have started attracting stores, movie houses, motels and restaurants and a few private homes south from downtown Grand Rapids for two reasons.
The city commission is now bent on finding some way to “rejuvenate” South Division. I don’t know why we’d worry except that the strip seems to consume a disproportionate a amount of police resources, and the tax base could be increased if the population and businesses were to return. Many of South Division’s problems were created by governmental do-goodish. I don’t see giving these same actors that authority to reverse their mess.
Rejuvenate implies a return to a previous youth, a better time. So we need to review the economic history of South Division. We’ll see that the sorrows of those bygone days are nobody’s savior.
The road led to Kalamazoo and it paralleled the all important rail lines. Factory districts and working class neighborhoods like Cottage Grove, GM, and Steelcase factories developed because raw material and finished products could be moved to factories and stores. Organic neighborhoods with work places, stores and entertainment evolved all within walking distances of each other. Housing was inexpensive and not regulated. One bought a place near where the husband worked (often ethnic considerations intervened,) women stayed at home, cooked, sewed clothing, shopped every few days walking to the nearby supermarket, bakeries and butchers for fresh food since the iceboxes operated only fitfully. Kids walked to the parochial or public schools and quit when they were 16 years old. Men walked to the factories or used the family car for business. They patronized local businesses with whom they had personal connections.
South Division businesses also catered to the heavy truck and automotive traffic between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids. The daily shopping from the neighborhood and the needs of travelers along the thoroughfare supported the myriad of small shops and tradesmen in that simpler era.
All this came to an end about 50 years ago. The standard of living had improved and folks stopped having huge families. They could afford a second car and wives needed to go to work to pay for the nicer house in the suburbs. No one felt energetic enough to spend a few hours weekly walking to a local small shop when Meijers Thrifty Acres, Roger’s, Eastbrook and other malls were just a short drive away and offered so much more at lower prices.
The final blow came when 131 opened, robbing South Division of its traffic. Motels, restaurants, auto repair shops, distributorships and the like died. Buildings disappeared and the resulting empty lots hosted used car lots. Low end businesses came and went. It acquired a reputation where one could buy illegal drugs or sex.
Now come the Urban Planners who never yet saw a stable failure that they wouldn’t try to make worse. There was “free money” around and so they built a Silver LIne up the middle of South Division, promising that it would resurrect Lazarus, but there’s not been a flicker of life after four years. What to do?
Well, there’s always the deeper mysteries of Smart Growth. What our Planners envision for South Division is an eight mile long strip mall with stores on the first floor and apartments full of bright young folks on the second and third floors, all of them visiting their favorite bars and coffee shops daily, strolling among outdoor cafes while talking about internet startups, in January yet. The Planning Svangalis would re-zone this area into something called “form based” code which means moving 80 year old buildings festooned with awnings projecting over the sidewalks closer to South Division, parking cars behind the buildings, planting trees in the space between the sidewalk and street and slowing or even preventing auto traffic on the road by marking the pavement for bicycle lanes. Cars would be forced into the two central unmarked lanes greatly increasing the likelihood of collisions. (Cars are the enemy for these guys.) The buildings would house businesses that catered to the walk in crowd on the first floor and rental units on upper floors.
Politicians in Michigan and other failed states bought into the notion that computer savvy young people would return from Houston, California and Georgia based on “studies” and “surveys” that showed that smart, progressive young people were avoiding getting driver’s licenses, preferred public transit and living in downtown “walkable” communities which Urban Planners would provide. They would return in droves to Buffalo, Flint, Newberry…..A Miracle!
I’ve not been converted. There is virtually no vehicular traffic on South Division and with New Urbanism, there will be less. Why would a merchant or saloon keeper start a business if few customers see his signs? The neighborhoods along South Division are not the most prosperous and won’t support upscale businesses. The residents living within a half mile of the road have long since forgotten how to walk and it will take a federal program to re- inculcate that habit before the proposed sidewalks on South Division will be flooded with eager shoppers and gawkers.
The more fundamental problem arises in finding the businesses that our Planners assume will populate this 2 mile long strip. 28th Street and Alpine Avenue carry an enormous amount of vehicular traffic and have attracted almost all of the national chains that are today deliver the bulk of commerce, but our mayor has struggled manfully to attract just two franchised businesses to our 28th Street corridor even as Ruby Tuesday closed. Serious money will not go to a strip mall to which customers have trouble gaining access. The poorly capitalized and inexperienced businesses, small oriental stores, tattoo parlors, payday lending, a few off brand fast food joints, prostitutes and drug dealers are already there and struggling.
The bottom line is that the population and their earnings is a zero sum game that will support only so many retail outlets. These have long since been established elsewhere. If our Planners foresee new, upscale businesses for the South Division corridor, these will have to be enticed from elsewhere using tax money taken from successful businesses on 28th Street. I don’t think that those businessmen will be sympathetic.
I had played with the idea of getting rid of the zoning and planning for So. Division to allow for industrial and more open commercial use. Small factories and distributorships would have great access to the nearby 131 expressway and provide jobs for nearby residents. But nearby are the enormous and empty GM and Steelcase factories; the problem is, once more, that there are too few businesses to use the space.
I blame the public schools for preaching that success is fitting in and getting a good job after finishing instead of dropping out and making the effort of starting your own business.
Just because I have no ideas about what to do about the economic zero on South Division doesn’t elevate the schemes of our Planners to anything more than evanescent fantasy.
The sorrows of history are nobody’s savior
And South Division also Life in the 1940s and 1950s was far from idyllic, but as economically efficient as available resources allowed. It was probably paved in part beginning in the 1920s when cars and trucks overtook horses and oxen, but a big impetus to paving was that women in homes and businesses along the route hated the mud, dust and manure that tracked in.
The late Col. Arthur F Shaw was a prominent politician (city commission) and judge in Grand Rapids in the 1920s through 1950. We rented from him (age 94) and his wife when we first settled in Grand Rapids. He would sit on his porch in the Hill District and reminisce. The Grand Raids Downtown property owners owned the city commission and prevented stores and other businesses from starting within the city, so preserving their monopolies. With the increasing availability of cars, Development continued along
We just returned from a two week work/biking trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The county is a tourist attraction and there is enormous economic activity related to this. New restaurants, building onto hotels, buses with retirees from NYC and Philly rolling through the countryside pestering the Anabaptists, much to their irritation. It made me want to look into the highly touted Pure Michigan thing.
This began as an advertising campaign launched in 2006 by the state of Michigan as a subsidiary of our MEDC. The latest figure available to me shows costs to taxpayers 30 million per year. Supporters use the figure of 1.2 billion dollars spent in Michigan by visitors, peddling Pure Michigan as a handsome return on “investment.”
Maybe.
We can get a handle on Pure Michigan’s impact by inspecting the BLS labor statistics http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.mi.htm#eag_mi.f.3. I tallied the total number of jobs in 6 states in the north central USA and the number of jobs in the Leisure & Hospitality categories. Total jobs in the states fell in four of those states, rising only modestly in Indiana and Pennsylvania. Jobs in tourism related businesses like restaurants, recreation, and hotels rose in all 6 states but to different degrees.
Jobs in Hospitality (000) Jan 2005 May 2015 Gain over 10 years
Mi. 405 421 16
Ill. 505 565 60
In. 274 301 27
Oh 498 547 49
Wi. 252 272 20
Pa. 480 551 71
It seems that the 5 states that didn’t advertise their tourist attractions had a much greater increase in the number of jobs than did Michigan. “Pure Michigan” probably repelled visitors rather than attracted them.
Advertising is an unnatural process; it’s more fun just to do something to see if the thing makes money. The nicest thing about not advertising is that failure costs nothing.
The Cowardice of Politicians faced with Muscled Opposition, or was it an Impending Election and Memory of 2 Years Ago?
Something that I miss in political life is double entry book keeping, and I’m not just referring to financial statements. In Much is to be said for assigning expenses to one column and pairing it off with income, of explaining how a property is owned, the depreciation of an asset, and profit. Instead we are faced with disjointed statements of inflows or needs for funding something or another at one meeting, then two weeks later what to do about mountains of cash that have accumulated that are dedicated to some purpose or another. We are told of buildings that have been built but never depreciated. Then suddenly we are informed that one needs a new roof or to be point-tucked, but that there’s no sinking fund to pay for these predictable expenses.
The big noise last evening at the committee of the whole meeting involved the requests of about 5 (but about 10 burly guys showed up) homeowners who wanted us to allow them to keep fences, sheds and gardens in easements that served as drainage ditches for the excess water in their neighborhood. These structures partially blocked the flow of water in those shallow ditches, but everyone in the neighborhood had added something to this area of the commons, and the effect was water retention in the neighborhood. If every owner inserted enough into the commons to back water up only one inch, the effect of having 12 such obstructions would be to raise the water table by a foot. This extra water would keep basements damp and cause an occasional flooding. More generally, the excess water provided areas where mosquitos could breed, water for termites, prevented many plants and lawns from growing because their roots were under water, and increased molds in the soil.
It was pointed out that most of the owners were not aware that 1) what easements were and that their property was burdened, and 2) the effect on their property if drainage were impeded.
“Michigan must remain focused on improving education to produce a smarter workforce”
The shell game here is that we should be turning out better manufactured school kids because they are good employees. Bullfighters! That’s not what is needed.
We need new industries, but these facile, shallow college grads are not risk takers, innovators or the sort that will hunker down for decades building wealth, but rather are docile followers who want a small paycheck and bigger bennies.
We are to believe that young technologically adept, caring and sharing millennials will create jobs; clearly this is pie in the sky. They will likely move to places that are ideologically compatible, funky places with walkable communities, bike paths and bars that look like a Super-Bowl beer commercials (like in the report on Portland Or. which was featured in the NYT some months ago) where they will be hired for a minimum wages, live on trust funds and fail to found families. These folks, indoctrinated in public schools and in elite universities, militantly will not start new businesses.
Give me the ambitious 40 or 50 year old with a gritty past, who has dreamed, saved, worried and prepared himself in marketing, finances, management and the technical aspects of an enterprise. He can do addition in his head and ignores calculus, reads road signs, not Mlive, and drives a pickup. He puts up with the corporate nonsense for years, gets screwed over, quits and then takes the plunge.
We don’t need more employees, the unemployment rate is sky high already. We need ambition, greed, even avarice, the qualities of soul that come with age and a hard life, but character traits that have unfortunately been hectored out of millennial youngsters during their fashionable and politically correct toilet training.
Accounting statements of public bodies are notoriously slippery. The web site for the rapid is labelled as operating expenses in very small print; it ignores capital expenditures altogether, “because the federal and state governments pay for them.” So let me assign the 40 million construction costs to the 685k riders (ignore the cannibalization from Rt. 1), and the cost per ride is north of 60 dollars per trip. And that does not include the 30 million for the repair garage and the defined benefit pension plan that they will never be able to pay.
The other issue has to do with “resurrection” of So. Division. The model is a rail line in Cleveland; their Silver Line was luckily sited near several thriving businesses. Possibly, there were 5.8 billion of new construction there, but none was due to the new streetcar. The one business that I know well is the Cleveland Clinic. It has had the good luck of being the destination for tens of thousands of desperate, monied Canadians seeking medical care after their government stopped funding hospital infrastructure up there about 20 years ago. The Clinic built a 350 million dollar radiation unit. Folks who stick around for the 6 week treatment stay in the new hotels and eat at the restaurants that were developed around that facility.
The Cleveland Clinic isn’t even known for its oncology unit. It does cardiology very well and I don’t know by how much those operations expanded. Meanwhile, the Cleveland population lost over 13 percent of its population from 2000-13, the folks leaving for Texas where they won’t have to waste money on streetcars. Where is the gain for the taxpayers and residents?
In Kentwood’s 2 mile half of So Division, there has been no interest in real estate, prices and sales are stagnant even after we in Kentwood have spent 2 million of poor people’s taxes annualy for four years now. But markets should move in anticipation of future values, and the fact that they haven’t changed indicates the glum prospects for that stretch of highway, especially after the Urban planners have managed to foul things up.
Our Kentwood city commission has entertained 3 proposals for businesses in the last 2 years. One was for a marijuana clinic which was discouraged by Planning (bad choice on their part.) Another, last month, for a drug rehab unit was angrily kicked over the side by the neighbors and local public schools. I see a proposal for a food pantry/day care center/church in the pipeline. At this pace, we will have Asian groceries, Salvation Army and sweaty gymnasiums in a few decades. These are all valuable ventures, but hardly the stuff of “vibrant communities” pictured so airily by the used car salesmen who promoted the Silver Line. Vargas addressed our city commission last fall and pulled his punches; So. Division would be prosper only after 10 years. The present value of something political to “help business” in 10 years is nil.
Our mayor has labored mightily to bring new businesses to Kentwood, and succeeded twice. Dave and Buster, and Trader Joes both sited on a busy stretch of 28th street. The mayor didn’t advance South Division for these new and exciting ventures. Why would he? The plans for this stretch are for strangling automotive traffic, bike lanes and outdoor cafes for a Michigan January, and replicating the rotting tourist traps that empty out after labor day. No one with money and business smarts would invest in such a scam, and none do.
I nearly spat out my dentures when I saw this article; it takes off on the comment I posted on
1 year later, $40M Silver Line attracts riders as future remains a guessing game
8/30/2015 9:34 AM
and in numerous places on my blogsite;
http://www.kentwoodblog.wordpress.com
Why is this opinion? It should be a headline News article. It popped up on my android as news (else I would not have seen it,) but buried on the regular Mlive web page as “opinion.” Braun has it right! We need to allocate costs and benefits on a per person basis, to show the disasters that our legislators and unelected regulators wreak on taxpayers and the victims of the ever more complex nonsense that these Svangalis fantasize. They voted to support the rapacious Sales tax increase in May without having the faintest idea of costs on the individual, opine that “we save for small expenses but borrow for the big ones” and force applicants who want to build stuff to comply with codes that are often useless and economically harmful.
The sad truth is that our Kentwood residents, among others, pay for the ongoing loses of the Silver Line, will have to pay for the “rebuilding” of So. Division if the current legislators have their way, and will need to find other routes to drive to shop and to their jobs as these planners “tame” the traffic in their neighborhoods. A never ending swindle.
Our Commissioners Receive a Report. There’s a Punchline in Reporting what They Believe.
At the 1 September meeting, our treasurer, Tom Chase, for inscrutable reasons, summarized Kentwood’s financial positions. The auguries are good and we should stay the course with our current commission. We need to embrace our debts and slavery to the defined benefit pension plans with their rigid repayment demands.
The justification for our borrowing in the past (and presumably in the future) featured the following; we would save for small expenditures but issue bonds for projects “..of sufficient size and urgency to require long-term funding. All the projects funded by bonds issued since 2001 meet this criteria.” The justification was that paying off debt would force those who enjoy the benefits of these projects to pay for them.
The shell game begins with trying to discern why saving for some projects and not others is materially. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.’
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/421389/attention-americas-suburbs-you-have-just-been-annexed-stanley-kurtz
a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, sometimes, a standard of deferred payment.[
Money’s a matter of functions four,
A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store.[22]
There is an ugly partisanship in our mayor’s rant. Webb’s opponent’s literature states that he voted to lower the sewage rates by 10%. Deceptive; he actually voted for a tax increase. For one, the sewage rates relate only to Kentwood’s first ward which receives all of its water supply and sewage disposal from our neighboring city. The Wyoming city commissioners determines how much it charges Kentwood and tells us to pay up. We in Kentwood can and did mark up their charges when we send out the bills. On the sewer side, Wyoming decreased sewage rates by 11.7%. We lowered our rates to our residents by 9.9%. This markup of 1.8% for sewage services is a constructive tax increase for which the then newly appointed commissioner and now candidate voted.The net charges for combined sewage and water dropped by about 3%. and we approved the rates. No one in Kentwood lowered the rates; the Wyoming city commission did. In Kentwood, we only agreed to accept their offer and cut a bit of pork off the pig as it waddled past..
This is two politicians making exaggerated statements during a heated campaign . One seems to imply problems with our handling of money, the other frankly misleads voters with a fictional account of his non performance.The mayor’s problem is that he chose to point his dagger at the one candidate who made an ambiguous statement and ignored the fabrications of the other. This one sided public eruption from our mayor does not do Kentwood honor.
Erwin Haas, Kentwood city commissioner, 2nd ward
There is an ugly partisanship in our mayor’s rant. Webb’s opponent’s literature states that he voted to lower the sewage rates by 10%. Deceptive; he actually voted for a tax increase. For one, the sewage rates relate only to Kentwood’s first ward which receives all of its water supply and sewage disposal from our neighboring city. The Wyoming city commissioners determines how much it charges Kentwood and tells us to pay up. We in Kentwood can and did mark up their charges when we send out the bills. On the sewer side, Wyoming decreased sewage rates by 11.7%. We lowered our rates to our residents by 9.9%. This markup of 1.8% for sewage services is a constructive tax increase for which the then newly appointed commissioner and now candidate voted.The net charges for combined sewage and water dropped by about 3%. and we approved the rates. No one in Kentwood lowered the rates; the Wyoming city commission did. In Kentwood, we only agreed to accept their offer and cut a bit of pork off the pig as it waddled past..
This is two politicians making exaggerated statements during a heated campaign . One seems to imply problems with our handling of money, the other frankly misleads voters with a fictional account of his non performance.The mayor’s problem is that he chose to point his dagger at the one candidate who made an ambiguous statement and ignored the fabrications of the other. This one sided public eruption from our mayor does not do Kentwood honor.
Erwin Haas, Kentwood city commissioner, 2nd ward
“Somebody’s Got Too Much Money”
Kris and I hike or bike daily and one of our favorite haunts is Pickerel Lake, a Kent County park just north of Cannonsburg. It’s a great walk, moderately hilly and blessed with multiple vistas of several lakes. Interestingly, most of what is on view is an artifact, the life’s work of a Lithuanian bachelor who built dams, paths, and culverts that make the hikes so smooth.
The around the lake requires 3 or 4 bridges to cross several environmentally sensitive parts of the
Thoughts on Improving the Security and Processes in the City.
We will have our annual bout with the city’s auditor with their emphasis on healthy procedures for city governments, next week. They will recommend stuff and we will promise to correct the problems. Maybe we should consider further measures beyond the usual bland stuff.
We in Kentwood have had at least two employees steal while handling money, one to the tune of at least $300,000, so it’s worth our while to consider ways of preventing fraud. I have no reason to doubt the honesty of any of our employees, but it is prudent to minimize their exposure to the occasions when they might sin. There are other general problems that emerge only as poorly articulated feelings, and so I sit here blogging.
I”ve talked it over with Commissioner DeMaagd, our auditor Peter Heffner and with candidate Thomas Webb. The following are a composite of their ideas;
- Apparently individuals can accumulate vacation days without limit and so take a lump sum of money when they retire in lieu of time off. One problem arises when an individual accumulates months of vacation and we have to pay a huge lump sum at termination or retirement. It is capable of wrecking budgets. No one seems to have a handle on how large a liability that we face, but it could be millions. The related problem is that an individual who never or seldom takes vacation might be using his/her monopolizing of a job to commit fraud. If someone else where to do that job in his absence, the fiddle might be unmasked. Somewhere, a long time ago, I was warned to suspect the overly zealous employee, the one who stays late to do the job especially well, when no one is looking. We need a policy of restricting the number of vacation days carried forward, and of forcing employees to take their vacations.
- A system of spot checks, of having someone with forensic skills from the outside, take a close look at employees who handle money, at their books, practices, finances, follow up on where and who get checks and the like, on an unannounced and random basis. Perhaps there are accounting firms out there that we could put on retainer for a few thousand. They could do random audits during their slack times, and we could pay them a daily rate. It would take a lot of daily rates to be more expensive than the $300,000 loss from 3 years ago. If no such firm exists, maybe we should start one.
- Move people around from one job to another. Extensively cross train them and have them do each other’s jobs on a rotating basis. It would as an intended effect break up fraudulent practices, but also prevent burnout and boredom, and would give employees a better understanding of the how the enterprise works. Employees would have more skills on their resumes and improve their job prospects. The DPW already do this. I’m told that each of their employees has skills to fix trucks, cars, broken windows, have CDL3 so that they can drive snowplows and the like. Our police force has a similar provision in which each uniformed officer has to do several years as a detective. Firemen inspect, counsel and install fire detectors.
- I, and others, are vaguely troubled by statements, promises, projections that are made by management and officials, and that are subsequently lost and forgotten. What did happen to the internal cost accounting from 18 months ago, or the problem with Kentwood’s clay soil not absorbing storm water? We, on the commission, need a tickle file maintained by the city clerk or the mayor’s office so that items could be brought back to the commission on a regular basis.
- I have been told that we hire a snow plow service that does a sloppy job, yet this firm continues to win bids and gets taxpayer dollars. There should be a mechanism for reporting and correcting this low level fraud. Certainly complaints lodged by commissioners should be heeded and if not, heads should roll….As it is, commissioners, those who will actually speak are routinely ignored or placated. Perhaps a new commission will correct this paternalistic practice.
medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, sometimes, a standard of deferred payment.
Money’s a matter of functions four,
A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store.[2
a shrinking amount of money, so deflation. people do not have wealth, in its role as a store of value, rather have devoted their resources to junk, to non productive assets, worthless baubles and give up the products of their labor, they are land rich and cash poor and have diminished options, fewer choices.
Conventional inflation increases the money, greenback or currency in circulation; too much cash, of a medium of exchange, chasing too few goods. Now the fed increases credit, and neglects money as a standard of deferred payment, which is not the same thing
“Peace Officer” A Movie with a Message for our Commission and Police.
Kris and I hike or bike daily missing only when it’s pouring rain or too slippery. This happens occasionally in West Michigan, so there came an afternoon recently when we went to Commissioner Arz’s multiplex at Woodland where they have a series of “indie” films for 5 dollars, about our price range. Kris had been keen to see a documentary called “Peace Officer” and I was sold when I saw a picture of Radley Balko, a writer for Reason and one of my Facebook buddies, on the promo,
It’s a long movie about the police development and use of SWAT teams. The main character and narrator is a retired Utah sherrif named Dub Lawrence who is currently self employed repairing septic tank pumps, something he deems superior to politics. He had developed a SWAT team for his county in the 1970s and was proud of his teams until he personally witnessed his team murder his temporarily overwrought son in law. He did an extensive years long investigation that showed dysfunctional practices of these units as well as an apparently flawed, self serving investigation by the police force. Law suits have not prodiced any relief for the dead man’s family.
Dub went ont ot investigate at least 2 other botched SWAT team incursions, both done to serve otherwise routine warrants. One, done on Christmas had armed men invade the home of a reported Army deserter which terrified the family and in which one of the officers told the man that if he had picked up a gun instead of a baseball bat, that he would have been shot. It was served on the wrong individual.
The other SWAT team incursion was to search for marijuana. The man growing some plants in his basement, was awakened from sleep and didn’t hear the police announce themselves. He had a pistol nearby which he started to use to defend himself. He expended 35 rounds of which 17 hit invading police officers. The police used a ridiculous number of rounds, my recollection was between 500 and 1000, of which 3 hit the man defending his home and 4 killed on of the other police officers. Numerous rounds passed through the home and went through the neighboring home and even into the second house. In the ultimate indictment of the valor of our SWAT team, the miscreant marijuana grower drove a five man SWAT team from his home, and escaped into his garage where he was apprehended by our valiant team. The investigation incorrectly concluded that the miscreant had murdered the police officer.
The film generously allows the involved police, prosecutors and politicians to present their concerns, and many seem to be genuine. One is struck by the clash of what the police investigations had concluded to have happened and easily demonstrated contrary findings. The flawed investigations in connection with police sovereign immunity leads one to near despair; the police can do whatever they want with impunity.
In Kentwood, we apparently use our SWAT team about 4 times per year. I know of at leasst one (and possibly two officers) who were fired for misconduct in the last few years. Our chief seems to be fairly clear eyed about such transgressions. On the other hand, our officers have been invloved in at least two killings in the last year or so, and both adjudged to be justified.
There were only 4 customers at our viewing of “Peace Officer” so its message is not likely to incite domestic unrest, but it should put our commission on notices to monitor our police and their use of military equipment closely. I’m somewhat comforted by my recollections of being in the army; The use of equipment was desultory at best and we certainly didn’t win my war nor many other wars in the last 70 years using these toys. We who are in a fiduciary position must remember that use of these weapons emboldens police and accidents do happen endangering both police themselves and the citizens that they are sworn to protect.
There are many evils against which one cannot secularly justify the coercive intervention of the state.
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