12.25.07
G1G1
Right now, you still have a chance to participate in the One Laptop Per Child organization’s Give One Get One program. A number of blogs have written about it, so I won’t try to improve on it.
12.16.07
Now We Know Why
The San Francisco Chronicle scores again with its revelation of the cause of the whole mortgage mess: misconduct within financial companies.
Over and over, the commentators keep telling us that it is the fault of the buyers, and that the lenders were totally innocent, tricked by those deceitful borrowers. The problem with that is that we know it isn’t true. For nearly a decade, we have been treated to story after story about financial companies’ complicity in misconduct that harms consumers. From the homeowners who got left holding the bag when their insurance companies refused to cover their damages from Hurricane Katrina, to the individual stockholders who lost out when mutual fund managers got preferred access to trading, to the consumer finance agencies that got caught trying to squeeze people after bankruptcy discharged their debts, to the people whose identities have been stolen but their banks do little to protect them, the financial industry as a whole has made a practice of preying upon individuals and families.
In my opinion, a test of how much the next administration’s Attorney General is doing his job is how many CEOs of the top 1,000 publicly-traded companies (plus the top 100 financial companies, public or private) are led past television cameras in shackles and orange jumpsuits the first two years. If it is less than 10%, we have to wonder just how well the person is doing his/her job.
Unlimited Taxation
Some choice words from “Unlimited Taxation“, which comments on California legislators’ idea to fix the deficit by making it harder for California citizens to make ends meet.
Only government has the luxury of increasing its income at will, whenever its spending exceeds its income. Too bad the taxpayers can’t do the same. As George Will once said, “…in the lexicon of the political class, the word ’sacrifice’ means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.”
Being generous with other people’s money, for your own political benefit, isn’t altruism. It’s theft.
How often do we think of it that way?
California Reliving Its Past?
Looming Budget Crisis
One thing that has been pretty constant over the past several years is that the state has a little financial boomlet, spends 100% of the incremental tax revenues, and then has a bust. The two parties point fingers at one another, as one side fights to raise taxes and keep “essential” services running at the same level they were before and the other side fights to cut services and avoid raising taxes at all.
I fall more on the cut side than on the tax side, but it isn’t realistic to expect the state to suddenly wean itself off of its love of spending other people’s money. Instead, we need to rely upon cuts for 70% to 85% of the needed funds, and then use taxation to come up with the rest.
Our state must learn to live frugally, putting some money away for a rainy day. One thing that anyone can guarantee is that the time will come when those reserves will come in handy.
Schools And The State Budget
After Proposition 13, when property tax growth was capped, the state government became the primary source of funds for school districts. This allowed other local agencies to consume a larger proportion of property taxes. The problem with that has been that there is effectively no local funding for schools. There are no brakes on spending growth, as there would be if spending increases had to be justified to local taxpayers. As long as Sacramento sends the money, the local districts will continue spend it with abandon.
Another proposition, I think it is 42 or 44, requires the state to give schools at least the same percentage of state funding as they had the prior year. In a year when it may be necessary to cut spending 10% or more, schools will scream unless they are left alone.
We already know that a partial solution to this is to once again place most of the funding and most of the control of schools in the local community. For one things, it makes local residents responsible for raising the funding and containing the costs, so that their local schools continue to serve their children’s and grandchildren’s needs. In addition, we need to break up the mega-districts. A mega-district like the one for Los Angeles is so big that it takes a huge and expensive bureaucracy to run it.
As an example, in almost thirty years of voting, (and with elections nearly every Spring and Autumn,) I can count on one hand the number of times there has not been statewide or local bond issue to borrow more money for the schools—and there are often a number of other bond issues being voted on as well—not that they all pass, but there are frequent attempts to borrow money. The payments on those bonds are now contributing to the crisis, since delaying or reducing those payments could force the state into bankruptcy court.
Current Situation
State lawmakers are talking about raising taxes to pay for the projected budget deficit. Because California did not cap its spending during and after the last budget crisis, there was no money laid aside for the inevitable economic decline.
The slumping housing market, fueled by the subprime mortgage meltdown, remains the main cause of the state’s deepening fiscal woes, having an impact on a wide range of revenue including that from property and sales taxes.
In other words, the decline in taxes is caused by something that everyone knew would come sooner or later. This means that California’s spending plan was based upon resources that we knew might not exist from year to year. It looks like the state is about to get smacked down, exactly the way that a spendthrift household does. Eventually, there is no one left who will lend you any resources, and you have to suffer the consequences of your profligacy.
12.06.07
Maglev and High Speed Rail: An Investment For Our Future
At first, high speed rail (HSR) was just an idea promoted by dreamers and idealists. Then the Japanese actually built high speed passenger rail lines. Magnetic levitation (maglev) passenger rail was a techno-fantasy, until the Europeans and Chinese developed reliable, high speed maglev systems. The question is, why haven’t we done anything like this in this country?
Popular Mechanics has a vision piece that can help us see where we should be heading. Their maglev article is light on the technical and economic details, and completely ignores the social and political transformation that will be required in order to establish maglev and high speed rail as important components of our national transportation infrastructure. Even so, I recommend that we read the article and that we seriously consider its points.
Living where I live, I fairly often see traffic backups on the main Los Angeles to Las Vegas route, I-15. On some Fridays, traffic heading Northeast backs up all the way to the junction of the 210 and 605 freeways. On some Sundays, traffic heading back toward the Los Angeles area will be backed up all the way into Victorville. Why? Because the leaders of California and Nevada have not yet decided that it is worthwhile to invest taxpayer funding in eliminating that traffic congestion.
Driving around Southern California, I get to see traffic tie-ups along the 15, the 215, the 210, the 605, the 10, the 5, and the 805 (all of which are Interstates, so should be I-15 and so on), along with the 91, the 57, and the 60 (all of which are state highways, so should be CA-91 and so on), the 395 (which is or was a US highway, so should be US-395), and (to a lesser degree) a host of surface streets and highways. For the local traffic, neither HSR nor maglev offer the convenience and flexibility that commuters require. But for longer-range commuting, such as traveling from Southern California to Las Vegas for a weekend, or traveling from Rancho Cucamonga to Anaheim as a daily trek, a well-run rail system is the future.
All we are waiting for now is for our political leaders to have the nerve to declare that this is a priority, including a funding priority. We’ll grumble for five years or so of taxes, but once we get to cut our daily commuting time by half, and the occasional fun trip’s commute time by two-thirds or more, suddenly those very politicians will be heroes.
Infrastructure investments that Southern California Must Make Now.
This is part of a series of articles meant to highlight the fact that our present course is unsustainable. The primary issue in this article is commuting time, which is unbearably long. In a recent workplace, I was staying just twenty miles away, but it took over an hour to get to work. Fifteen to twenty miles, by the way, is about how fast a reasonably fit person can travel on a bicycle in one hour. My present workplace is about six miles away from where I’m staying, and it took me about fifteen minutes from driveway to driveway this morning.
For those who maintain that maglev and HSR are not practical, we can see that they certainly are practical just by looking at the examples of Europe and Japan. Yahoo recently linked both of these articles and this search from their front page, part of a special focus on maglev trains and HSR.
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Tags: infrastructure, transportation, mass transit, political
