You might call this a transition day in rock music history. For instance, one year to the day after the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” …
… Brian Jones left the Stones, to be replaced by Mick Taylor.
The Rolling Stones had a big day today in 1963: They made their first TV appearance and released their first single:
The number one song today in 1975 (pictured with the official tractor of Roesch Farms):
Five years later, Gary Numan drove his way to number nine:
We begin with a song that was set on this date (listen to the first line):
The number one song today in 1955 was probably played around the clock by the first top 40 radio stations:
Anniversary greetings to David Bowie and Iman, married today in 1992:
Whether you’re a fan of the proposed Milwaukee Bucks arena deal announced Thursday, you have to give Gov. Scott Walker credit for coming up with a sort-of novel rationale — financial conservation:
Today, Governor Scott Walker joined state and local leaders, including Speaker Robin Vos, Majority Leader Fitzgerald, Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in announcing a plan to protect state taxpayers from a loss of approximately $419 million, if the NBA relocates the Milwaukee Bucks. The total state contribution will be capped at $80 million.
“We’ve considered the financial impacts on the state should the Bucks stay or go, and quite simply, we found it’s cheaper to keep them,” Governor Walker said. “Our plan is the result of a state and local, public and private alliance, and it is developed with the goal of ensuring a good return to our state taxpayers. Under this plan, for every dollar the state invests, state taxpayers will get a $3 return on that investment.”
In April 2014, new owners bought the Milwaukee Bucks from Herb Kohl in a deal approved by the NBA and contingent upon the construction of a new arena by 2017. If a new arena is not constructed by 2017, the NBA will buy the Bucks back from the current owners and move the team to another state.
If the team is relocated, there will be a loss to state taxpayers of at least $419 million over the next 20 years due to the loss of current revenue, future growth, and the ongoing costs to maintain the Bradley Center.
Current and former team ownership committed to fund $250 million toward funding the $500 million arena project. Under this plan, state and local governments will also fund $250 million, or half of the total project costs, toward building the new arena without tax increases or state bonding. Any cost overruns would be paid by other sources, but not the state.
Working together with local leaders, Governor Walker, Speaker Vos, and Majority Leader Fitzgerald developed a plan that will cap the total state investment in the project at $80 million over 20 years. Over a 20-year period, this plan protects $299 million in income tax revenue, including the base and projected growth.
Basically Walker is saying that the $250 million taxpayers — $80 million from the state, and $170 million from Milwaukee County and the City of Milwaukee — will be spending on the new arena will “protect” $299 million in income tax revenue, but having the Bucks leave will be a bigger loss, $417 million.
Wisconsinites, whether they are Bucks fans or not, will be on the hook for less than $1 per year for 20 years. I suppose state government has spent money on worse things over the years, though if you find it strange that a Republican is using the word “investment,” usually a Democratic tactic to justify spending tax dollars, you’re not alone. The $80 million could be thought of as a couple of years’ worth of spending by the previous governor to purchase land with absolutely zero return for taxpayers. (That would be the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund, which Republicans apparently lack the guts to kill.)
The fact that state taxpayers pay less than one-third of the public-sector costs — less than one-sixth of the total cost — makes some logical sense, though whether it makes political sense remains to be seen. At least with Republicans in charge it seems the chance of taxes being raised to support this spending seems less likely.
There is an additional potential cost to the Bucks’ leaving, and I’m surprised no Bucks supporter has brought this up yet. Similar to the NFL with Los Angeles (which is reportedly being pined over by the Rams, Raiders and Chargers, all of which used to play in the same L.A. stadium), two cities are named when the subject of the potential move of NBA franchises comes up — Seattle and Kansas City, both of which used to have NBA teams. Kansas City has the Sprint Center, a new arena without a major pro sports tenant, and Seattle has the Key Arena, the former home of the former Sonics, now the Oklahoma City Thunder. If you were the NBA, wouldn’t you rather have a team in Seattle than in Milwaukee?
The additional potential cost is not just the tax revenue lost by losing the Bucks; it’s the money spent to replace the Bucks with another NBA team when political pressure ramps up to get a replacement pro sports franchise. (The Bucks are not going to be replaced by a National Hockey League team; when your current pro hockey team, the Admirals, draws only a few thousand people every night in an arena four times that size, that doesn’t say “growth market” to anyone.) In addition to Kansas City (which also lost the NHL’s Scouts to Colorado and then New Jersey) and Seattle, Buffalo had the Braves, which became the San Diego and then Los Angeles Clippers, and Cincinnati had the Royals, which became the Kansas City and then Sacramento Kings. Cincinnati is in the same boat as Kansas City, with neither an NBA nor an NHL franchise on which to get people to spend money.
It would be interesting to know how much Baltimore spent to get the Cleveland Browns to move there after the Colts left for Indianapolis, and how much Cleveland spent to get the second edition of the Browns as an NFL expansion team, not to mention how much Nashville spent to get the Houston Oilers, and how much Houston spent to get the expansion Texans. In each case, the minimum answer is: A new stadium, cost nine digits.
This is not the good old days (if that’s what you want to call them) where, for instance, when the Milwaukee Hawks left for St. Louis and the Braves left for Atlanta, the Milwaukee Arena and Milwaukee County Stadium were there waiting for new tenants. If the Bucks leave, the number one demand of a potential new team owner will be a new state-of-the-then-art stadium. As it is, without the Bucks whether the Bradley Center needs to be there is an open question. The Admirals’ apparent fan base certainly fits into the Arena, and I doubt that Marquette basketball would be a money-maker for the Bradley Center by itself, given that college teams have fewer than half the home dates of an NBA team.
The same applies to baseball. Washington lost the Senators to Minnesota in 1961, got another Senators team and lost that to Texas in 1972, and then got the Nationals from Montreal, which won’t be getting a replacement team to occupy the hideous money-sucking Olympic Stadium. Beyond the late Braves, Royals, (Kansas City) Kings and (San Diego) Clippers, the NBA’s New Orleans Jazz moved to Utah, eventually replaced by the Charlotte Hornets; Charlotte had to build a new arena for the expansion Bobcats. (More confusing, the former Hornets are now the Pelicans, and the Bobcats are now the Hornets again.)
There was a TV commercial years ago in which a mechanic touted the value of preventive maintenance by saying, “Pay me now or pay me later.” A similar metaphor probably applies to pro sports franchises as well, in that keeping a used car, including maintenance costs, is cheaper than buying a new car, including payments. Whether Walker’s numbers are correct, logic says that if the Bucks leave, replacing them will be considerably more expensive.
The bigger issue is whether or not people care about the Bucks and their leaving without a new arena. There probably were Wisconsinites in the mid-1960s who said they didn’t care about the Braves’ leaving for Atlanta. One year after the last Milwaukee Braves game, Gov. John Reynolds and the state Supreme Court chief justice, who ruled in favor of the Braves’ being able to leave (though he delayed their departure for one year), were bounced from office.
Not that my parents were paying attention, but the number one song two days into my life was:
Twenty-eight years later, the number one song was by a group that sang about aging nearly two decades earlier:
Remember when Hillary Clinton was the inevitable Democratic Party nominee for president?
She probably still is inevitable, but it’s not as if Democrats have decided to clear a path for her. Perhaps emboldened by Comrade Bernie Sanders, the communist senator from the People’s Republic of Vermont, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee (a former Republican U.S. senator and independent) have now entered the Democratic race.
I’ve written before that governors make better presidents because they actually have to make decisions and govern instead of — well, actually, in addition to — speeches. O’Malley’s main problem is that he was mayor of Baltimore, and the current state of Baltimore is not exactly a bragging point on one’s résumé. Chafee has apparently jettisoned all his non-liberal points of view, which doesn’t bode well for his post-primary future in the unlikely event he gets the Democratic nomination.
(Clinton, whose campaign hasn’t exactly been setting the political world on fire of late, suffered a substantial blow this morning when Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett endorsed her for president. Milwaukee is becoming Baltimore without the Atlantic Ocean and crabcakes.)
As for the Republican side, there are probably too many to count, but the most recent addition is former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Perry is a good addition to the race if for no other reason than the stark economic contrast between Perry’s Texas and the rest of the nation. When one state has more job growth than the entire nation does, and the nation’s economic policies are mostly a leftist mess, at least voters can’t say they don’t have a choice.
Perry stands out from the Democratic field in an additional way. He is a veteran who apparently served as a mentor for Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor Navy SEAL whose story was told in the film “Lone Survivor.” (Which I watched on a bus on the way to a college basketball game. It’s powerful, though difficult to watch even if you don’t know the ending.) There are no veterans running for the Democratic nomination, unless U.S. Sen. James Webb (D–Virginia) gets into the race.
Perry’s relationship with Luttrell says a lot about Perry’s character, and in that sense perhaps he stands out the most from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in actually possessing laudable character in contrast to Obama and the amoral Clinton(s). Perry has also suffered from the same claim made of Ronald Reagan, Tommy Thompson, George W. Bush (Perry’s predecessor as governor) and Scott Walker of not being very smart. (That’s despite the fact that Perry and that quartet comprises four terms as president and all or part of 14 terms as governor. As high school graduate Harry S. Truman put it, the world is run by C students.) Clinton and Obama are supposedly smart, and where has that gotten us?
I have a Facebook Friend who has gone over the top in his support of Perry. (My Friend is not a fan of Walker.) I am not endorsing Perry or anyone else, but based on what I’ve seen so far, Perry would be a substantial improvement over the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
It is starting to appear that despite the opposition of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), reforming, if not eliminating, the state prevailing wage law may happen through the back door that is the 2015-17 state budget.
A growing number of Republican legislators, most recently state Sen. Duey Strobel (R-Cedarburg), are saying they won’t vote for the state budget unless it includes prevailing-wage repeal. Strobel specifically said he wouldn’t support the budget unless it repeals the prevailing-wage law for local budgets.
Which would positively impact other pressing fiscal issues, reports Collin Roth:
The Joint Committee on Finance will not meet this week because the Republican-controlled State Senate reportedly cannot find consensus on the Transportation budget and the proposed Milwaukee arena deal.
The situation, in a nutshell, is the amount of borrowing in the Transportation budget and the taxpayer liability for a Milwaukee arena that is largely unpopular with out-state constituencies.
Some Republican legislators are still enamored by new revenue (read: gas tax increases) to help pay for roads and decrease bonding. If passed, this would almost certainly get vetoed by Walker ahead of his presidential run.
And the now-“fluid” arena proposal is very close to unacceptable in its current form for most fiscal conservatives.
So, how can Republican lawmakers cut this Gordian Knot?
It may sound like a broken record coming from me, but Republicans must look at prevailing wage repeal.
In comments to Charlie Sykes in January, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald explained just how prevailing wage could be the key to the Transportation budget.
This prevailing wage is huge. Representative Hutton dropped his bill last week… That’s a game-changer as well because this is something we have tinkered with but no one even had the guts to talk about full repeal. And I don’t even know if we end up there, but it’s a game changer because here we are on the verge of considering a massive Transportation budget… it’s not going to include a gas tax increase, but it is going to include bonding. It is probably going to include some fee increases. And at the same time, you’ve got these unions who do all of this road work as well as horizontal construction… all these taxpayer funded projects, I don’t care if they have one dollar or millions of dollars, nobody is protecting the taxpayers. Which is so reminiscent of Act 10.
Want to offset some spending, bonding, or fee increases? Repeal the prevailing wage.
And what about the Milwaukee arena? Lawmakers and taxpayers are worried about the cost and the taxpayer liability. So Republicans could separate out the arena proposal and hope for Democratic support. Or they could consider the repeal of the prevailing wage as an outlet for cost savings.
As Sen. Duey Stroebel revealed in a request to the Legislative Council, the Milwaukee arena would be subject to the prevailing wage. With full repeal, the cost of the building could be cut by around 10%, or $50 million.
Lawmkers need to start asking themselves some tough questions. Would you rather run on massive bonding for roads and public money for a Milwaukee arena? Or would you like to make the case that you were looking out for the taxpayers and ensured that spending on transportation, infrastructure, and an arena were all done with the greatest efficiency and cost effectiveness?
The common slogan when it comes to budgets is that they are about priorities. By repealing prevailing wage, Republicans could prioritize taxpayers while getting more bang for their buck in big ticket items like Transportation and a Milwaukee arena. A potential win-win-win.
Not just big-ticket items like big road projects, but city streets, and locally big-ticket items like school projects are also inflated in cost due to the prevailing wage law. Nothing is more important than spending taxpayer money in the most efficient manner possible, so if such taxpayer-funded projects can be cut 10 percent in cost by eliminating the prevailing wage law, the prevailing wage law needs to be eliminated.
I was one day old when the Rolling Stones released “Satisfaction”:
Four years later, the Beatles released “The Ballad of John and Yoko”:
The short list of birthdays today includes Roger Brown, who played saxophone for the Average White Band …
Today in 1965 (along with other events taking place on June 3), U.S. astronaut Ed White made the first U.S. spacewalk out of Gemini 4.
If you want unfiltered Steve, read this.
As long as we’re on a self-indulgence thing (which seems obvious for the Selfie Era), for those who care, here is a Half Century of Steve:
What, you ask, was the number one song on this day in 1972? Your Lincoln dealer is glad you asked:
Birthdays today include Monty Python’s favorite saxophonist, Boots Randolph:
Curtis Mayfield:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 