Critics today often point to the 1950s as the last years before American society became so divided between haves and have-nots. At the end of that decade, America’s “Gini coefficient”—the most common measure of income inequality, running from 0 (least unequal) to 1 (most unequal)—was 0.37. Today it is 0.45.
But in 1959, more than 20% of families fell below the poverty line. In 2010 that figure was just over 13%. Real per capita GDP today is 270% higher than it was in 1959. A family in the bottom fifth of the income distribution today makes the same amount in real terms as a family earning the median income in 1950. So inequality might have increased, but so too—dramatically—has quality of life.
Even over the last two decades, while real income has essentially stagnated for the bottom fifth of earners, basic conveniences have become far more affordable. In 1992, only 20% of American families below the poverty line had a dishwasher—50% had air conditioning and 60% owned a microwave. When the Census Bureau last surveyed these figures in 2005, those figures were 37%, 79% and 91%, respectively. Critics who minimize the importance of these conveniences likely have never had to do without them. …
Certainly there are reasons for concern if lower-income Americans aren’t able to save or acquire sufficient capital to pursue innovative ideas, or to see their children attend decent schools. They will suffer, and the country will lose out on significant intellectual capital and growth opportunities. But this should not be confused with inequality.
Equality is not a good in itself and shouldn’t be analyzed in a vacuum. If we remember that, perhaps a century from now low-income Americans will pity the living standards of today’s 1%.
Today in 1963, Paul McCartney was fined 17 pounds for speeding. I’d suggest that that may have been the inspiration for his Wings song “Hell on Wheels,” except that the correct title is actually “Helen Wheels,” supposedly a song about his Land Rover:
Today in 1984, John Lennon released “I’m Stepping Out.” The fact that Lennon stepped out of planet Earth at the hands of assassin Mark David Chapman 3½ years before this song was released was immaterial.
Birthdays today start with David Pack of Ambrosia:
Today’s blog for Collector Car Appreciation Day is about cars that are not likely to become collectors, combining two themes from my past — the 1980s, and the cars therein:
I graduated from high school and college in the ’80s. I’m a fan of ’80s music. I think ’80s fashion is generally unremarkable, except for leg warmers and really big hair. I am not a fan of ’80s cars, nor should you be.
I’ve written here before that today’s cars are unquestionably more capable than collector cars, though they lack the soul, for lack of a better term, of collector cars. Cars of the ’80s generally lacked both qualities.
Collectible Automobile found two newspaper ads of the day for those wondering what was available:
The reason I have pleasant memories of my own ’80s transportation will be revealed at the end.
Imagine being a Playboy Magazine writer and having to write this for the October 1983 issue:
OK, the thrill is back. The decade of dullness has come and gone. Cars are exciting and driving is fun again. …
There’s a new breed of machine in the land: the pocket rocket – your basic economy sedan or coupe with a massive horsepower and handling transfusion.
What cars was the writer referring to? The 90-horsepower Volkswagen Rabbit GTI, the 110-horsepower Dodge Shelby Charger, the 100-horsepower turbocharged (!) Nissan Pulsar NX, the 116-horsepower turbocharged Ford EXP Turbo, and the 150-horsepower turbocharged Pontiac Sunbird S/E.
Most of the worst examples of ’80s cars were the result of their design during or immediately after the second energy crisis in the late ’70s. Consumers wanted smaller cars, but Detroit didn’t have much ability to design small cars beyond just making them smaller than the cars they were replacing and putting weaker engines in them. Front-wheel drive was starting to appear in showrooms, but those cars mostly demonstrated that you don’t want to purchase the first iteration of a car.
Experience number one was a 1981 Chevrolet Malibu purchased as an upgrade from the car my father had been driving. The Malibu was part of the second wave of GM’s downsizing, which started in 1977 with the full-size Chevy Impala/Caprice, Pontiac Catalina/Bonneville, Oldsmobile Delta 88/98, Buick LeSabre/Electra and Cadillac de Villes. With rebodying in 1991, those cars lasted until GM (stupidly) killed its full-size rear-drive cars in 1996.
The downsizing of GM’s mid-sized cars — the Malibu, Pontiac LeMans, Olds Cutlass and Buick Century, and their personal luxury companion Monte Carlo, Grand Prix, Cutlass Supreme and Regal — didn’t go as well. The genius of the 1977 B- and C-body redesign was that, even though the cars were smaller and lighter, buyers didn’t feel as though they were buying less car.
1978 Buick Century sedan. In 1978, fastback sedans were not popular.
That was not the case with GM’s A-bodies. If you bought a sedan or station wagon, the rear-seat passengers were unable to roll down their windows. GM’s designers (and I use the term loosely for this decade) removed the rear window mechanisms in order to improve rear-seat elbow room. (That is, for those whose arms fit into the indentation in the rear doors. No, mine didn’t.)
Ford also downsized, with equally bad results, such as the early ’80s Thunderbird, or, as an owner called it, “Thunderchicken”:
Chrysler was trying to bore everyone to death with the Plymouth Horizon/Dodge Omni …
… and the Plymouth Reliant/Dodge Aries:
AMC did so poorly that it imported Renaults, such as the Alliance …
… and Fuego:
Chrysler’s purchase of AMC in 1987 could almost be called a mercy killing.
Engines were dropping in power in those days largely because of air pollution regulations. One solution was to equip them with computers to control spark and various other engine functions. Unfortunately, GM’s Computer Command Control was sent into the world with insufficient refinement, resulting in the Check Engine light going on and off for no apparent reason. (Some things never change.) The automakers also hadn’t figured out that electronic fuel injection was a more precise way to send fuel into the engine than carburetors.
The automakers were starting to figure out that one way to improve fuel economy was to reduce highway RPMs through transmission and rear-end gearing. That’s why cars of today are equipped with overdrive top gear(s). Unfortunately, no one had figured out how to put overdrive gears into automatic transmissions, with the result that rear ends were equipped with tall (that is, numerically low) gear ratios. This was good for highway cruising, but not so good for acceleration from a stop with the three-speed non-overdrive automatics of the day.
Cars of most of the decade also featured a prominent reminder of the stupidity of the Carter administration — speedometers with the top listed speed of 85 mph, and 55 mph highlighted to remind drivers that they dare not drive faster than that.
(I believe this was about the time I started to hate government, come to think of it.)
Tip number one that our experience with the Malibu would not be positive was two days into our ownership experience, when the bratty kid up the street started throwing rocks at it, chipping the black paint. (On the other hand, maybe he knew more than we did about the car.)
Within days of the car’s arrival, we took it on what I dubbed the Rust Belt Vacation, a route that included Chicago, Gary, Ind., Detroit, Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo. (Not that I didn’t enjoy the vacation, because I did, but one could not better plan a better tour of industrial blight than Interstate 94 east from Madison and Interstate 90 coming back.) Everything that happened with the car nicely accidentally symbolized what was happening to the Rust Belt in those days.
On day 2 in Toronto, our car got rear-ended by a driver who gave a false name and address to the Toronto police. (Perhaps the hit-and-runner knew something about our car too.) The Check Engine light went on and off for no apparent reason. The air conditioner started making odd noises, which you don’t want to hear in the summertime. Enough things went wrong that I was commissioned to make a page-long list for the dealer upon our return to Madison. The last thing on that list was the front seat, which broke on the New York State Thruway, leading to the seat’s sliding back upon acceleration (which did not amuse the back-seat passengers) and sliding forward upon braking (which did not amuse the driver).
Similar experiences followed for nearly six years. (On the next vacation, to Florida and Louisiana, the car ran right every other day.) The end came right after my father woke me up one morning to have me take him to work because the Malibu had died one house down the street. I interrupted my father’s streak of, uh, colorful metaphors about the car by asking why didn’t he just get rid of the damn car. A couple months later, he did, succeeding in getting someone else to buy the piece of crap so he could buy a new Honda Accord sedan.
As bad as the GM A-body cars were, they paled in comparison to GM’s next brilliant idea, its first front-drive cars, the X-body Chevy Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Olds Omega and Buick Skylark. Popular Mechanics explains why “X” stood for “execrable”:
These four awkwardly proportioned “X-Body” front-drivers directly replaced GM’s rear-drive compacts (of which the Chevy Nova was the most prominent) and promised a revolution in how the corporation designed and built cars. Chevy alone sold an incredible 811,540 Citations during that prolonged 1980 model year based on that promise. Unfortunately, the reality was that these four- and six-cylinder cars probably suffered more recalls and endemic problems than any other GM vehicle program.
The problem wasn’t so much the basic engineering of the X-Body cars as it was that no one apparently spent any time doing the detailed engineering that determines a car’s success. So customers complained of disintegrating transmissions, suspension systems that seemed to wobble on their own mounts, and brakes that would make the whole car shudder every time they were applied. There were so many niggling faults and a seemingly endless series of recalls that sales of the car almost tanked by its third year. Still, through 1985, a few million escaped to the public, souring hundreds of thousands on GM.
The father of a girlfriend and our next-door neighbor had one. My father’s bank did too, and he occasionally drove it, and that one apparently wasn’t much of a problem. My experience, though, came as a passenger when the next-door neighbor’s daughter from his first marriage briefly lived with them, resulting in a carpooling arrangement to our high school. I got in the back seat and put my hand on the B-pillar, just in time to have her slam the front door on my hand. The irony was that she had slammed it on three knuckles, and it didn’t even hurt after a couple minutes.
GM had some engine issues during the 1980s, to say the least. One was the infamous Olds diesel V-8, a modified 350 V-8 that wasn’t sufficiently redesigned for diesel fuel’s requirements. Car industry observers claim that Americans 30 years later won’t buy diesel-powered cars because of the Olds diesel. (You can buy diesel full-size pickups from Chevy, GMC, Ford and Dodge — I mean Ram — but you can buy neither a diesel compact pickup nor a diesel car of any kind from them.)
Not to be outdone, Cadillac tried to improve fuel economy with its V-8–6–4, an attempt to disable two or four cylinders on their V-8s based on how they were being driven. It is nearly impossible to find a working V-8–6–4 because nearly every owner had their favorite mechanic disable the controls. Popular Mechanics calls it “one more half-developed, cynically marketed technology that GM just couldn’t make work.”
Cadillac also foisted on the buying public a luxury small car, or so it thought, the Cimarron, which earned, if you want to call it that, the honor, if you want to call it that, of making Time Magazine‘s 50 Worst Cars list:
Everything that was wrong, venal, lazy and mendacious about GM in the 1980s was crystallized in this flagrant insult to the good name and fine customers of Cadillac. Spooked by the success of premium small cars from Mercedes-Benz, GM elected to rebadge its awful mass-market J-platform sedans, load them up with chintzy fabrics and accessories and call them “Cimarron, by Cadillac.” Wha…? Who? Seeking an even hotter circle of hell, GM priced these pseudo-caddies (with four-speed manual transmissions, no less) thousands more than their Chevy Cavalier siblings. This bit of temporizing nearly killed Cadillac and remains its biggest shame.
By the time Johnny Z. got the factory in Northern Ireland up and running — and what could possibly go wrong there? — the losses were piling up fast. The car was heavy, underpowered (the 2.8-liter Peugeot V6 never had a chance) and overpriced. And De Lorean was having a few dramas of his own, resulting in one of law enforcement’s more memorable hidden-camera tableaux: the former GM executive sitting in a hotel room with suitcases on money, discussing the supply-and-demand of nose candy. The Giugiaro-designed DMC-12 sure was cool looking, though. In August of this year, the Texas company that controls the rights to the name announced it will build a small number of new DMC-12’s. How’s that for time travel?
The ’80s were also a demonstration of the maxim that just because you can doesn’t mean you should. (See “DeLorean.”) If you purchased a 1984–1989 Corvette, this is what stared back at the driver:
The switches to the right of this cluster (I can add four letters to that term to more accurately describe it) allowed the driver to select between oil pressure and oil temperature, and between engine temperature and volts, when most drivers would prefer to be able to see all that information. GM instead felt drivers would be more interested in the Corvette’s fuel economy. And while this Vette had a digital trip odometer, it had a conventional regular odometer. (And a butt-ugly steering wheel.)
You’ll be shocked — shocked! — to know that fixing these instrument clusters drains your wallet quickly, because the circuit board died and the lights would fade. C4 owners can replace the digital gauges with analog gauges, which leaves the owner with the choice of originality or function. (Choose the latter.)
The Corvette was not the only car with an instrument panel of regrettable design. Late ’80s buyers of Chevy S-10s and GMC S-15s had to choose between, as Car & Driver put it, something designed by Playskool …
… or this:
How about some Fun with Fonts:
Detroit wasn’t the only creator of automotive dreck in the ’80s, as MArooned lists:
1. 1988 Suzuki Samurai – I had a friend growing up who traded in a 1983 Pontiac Trans Am, Daytona 500 25th Anniverary edition on a Suz. Worst. Trade. Ever. Not only was the Samarai notoriously underpowered, poorly engineered, and slow; it was also prone to rollover crashes at moderate speeds. Bad, bad, bad.
2. 1985 Yugo GV – this one’s masquerading as a GTI, but failing. What can you say about the Yugo other than, well, you get what you pay for? Manufactured by Soviet bloc comrades, this car was as ugly as a CZ-52 but nowhere near as reliable or durable. …
6. Volkswagen pick-up. Whoever thought of this concept should be dragged off and shot. A front-wheel drive pickup truck? WTF? Uh, guys, the idea of a pickup truck is that you put extra weight in the back. When the drive wheels are in the front, extra weight in the back means that it’s a LOT harder to move… Duh! …
10. Nissan Pulsar. All the aerodynamics of a door wedge. All the frightening raw power of a weedwhacker. Pop-up headlights that broke within weeks. The only way this car could possible have gotten worse would have been to give it a restyle with a modular ass end. Oh, wait, that’s what they did…
Two facts about the Yugo: The engines on the first Yugos failed shortly after purchase, requiring a replacement engine that cost a few hundred dollars less than the car. A couple years ago, a caller to WTMJ radio’s Charlie Sykes reported that his parents had purchased a Yugo in the ’80s. When they contacted their bank to get a car loan, the bank told them it would make the loan, but would not accept the Yugo as collateral.
The first car I purchased was a 1988 Chevy Beretta GT.
It was a manufacturer buyback, which should have been my first warning; I assumed that GM had fixed the problem in question. The problem was mysterious indications of overheating; as I discovered, the car’s temperature gauge would peg at H, and the Low Coolant light would light up, even though the car didn’t act as if it was overheating, and it wasn’t low on coolant. Two car dealers and one repair shop could not determine whether or not the car was in fact overheating, and could not repair the problem.
Beyond its generally cheap design, the Beretta (which I think is Italian for “lemon”) developed other problems. The car got into and out of tune to the point where when I pushed in the clutch, the engine would quit, necessitating either starting the car or letting it back out so the momentum of the car reengaged the engine. There were also mysterious electrical gremlins. I didn’t impress my then-girlfriend (now wife) when the turn signals stopped working and I had to purchase a fuse, only to have it immediately pop, in the Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa. I was wondering if I brought enough money for replacement fuses, but the second one didn’t pop. I had to replace the exhaust system, the first and only exhaust system I’ve ever had to replace before or since then. The last straw (because I concluded that making simultaneous car and car repair payments sucked), was when, four years into its life, I had to have the front disc brakes completely replaced because they were rusting from the inside.
It’s amusing to me that any car built in the 1980s can now be licensed in Wisconsin as a collector car … not that you’d want to. Yet I still have fond vehicular memories of the ’80s. That’s because I didn’t own an ’80s car for more than a year of the ’80s. (In fact, I should have kept the car I had, 11 mpg or not.)
As I wrote here a year ago, this comparison “measures the states by their own standard: the selling points they use to attract business. We separate those pitches into the ten categories, which are then weighted in the study based on how frequently the states use them as selling points.”
Most business climate comparisons rate states based not on the seller’s perspective, but the buyer’s — that is, the perspective of businesses that have to deal with the tax and regulatory structures of each state, as well as the other things that go into a state’s share of the U.S. economy. The “buyer” is the one deciding to do business, or not, in a specific place, but it’s interesting to see how a state does what it claims to do, or be good at doing.
Wisconsin ranked below Minnesota (11th), Iowa (12th) and Indiana (14th), but ahead of Ohio (25th), Illinois (26th), Missouri (27th) and Michigan (33rd). Wisconsin also got closer to the three Midwestern states ranked better than Wisconsin while leaping over Missouri, which are positives.
Wisconsin’s 17th ranking is the sum of ranking 15th in cost of doing business, 43rd in workforce, 14th in quality of life, sixth (up from 22nd) in infrastructure and transportation, 34th (down from 22nd) in the economy, 10th in education, 20th in technology and innovation, 27th in business friendliness, 27th in access to capital and 23rd in quality of life.
CNBC explains the economy ranking thusly: “A solid economy is good for business. So is a diverse economy, with access to the biggest players in a variety of industries. We looked at basic indicators of economic health and growth.”
That suggests (besides being merely top third now overall) that a lot of work still needs to be done by the Walker administration and the Legislature. The corporate income tax rate of 7.9 percent gives Wisconsin (when added to the federal corporate income tax rate) one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world. The 7.75-percent personal income tax bracket affects every owner of a subchapter-S corporation. As for “access to the biggest players in a variety of industries,” just nine of the S&P 500 has operations in this state.
The economy ranking also shows that state government did not do enough in 2011 to improve the state’s economy. Replacing the Department of Commerce with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. was only a start. Appointing more business-friendly administrators across state government was only a start. Creating job-creation tax credits doesn’t cost state government money if no jobs are created, but businesses don’t make job creation decisions based on job tax credits.
As for the workforce ranking, “We rated states based on the education level of their workforce, as well as the numbers of available workers. We also considered union membership. While organized labor contends that a union workforce is a quality workforce, that argument, more often than not, doesn’t resonate with business. We also looked at the relative success of each state’s worker training programs in placing their participants in jobs.”
That sentence about unions and business makes one wonder if a brave legislator can be found to introduce a bill banning closed shops in Wisconsin. The educational level measure is also interesting given that there are a lot of college-educated people among the unemployed today.
I’m not going to mention further the improvements in rankings, because this blog doesn’t exist to be a cheerleader for this state or for Gov. Scott Walker or Republicans. Wisconsin was ranked in the top five in no area. An eight-position overall jump didn’t warrant inclusion on CNBC’s list of most-improved states. Even Walker’s congratulatory news release admits:
“This improvement in our ranking shows we are on the right track,” Governor Walker said. “We’ve made great strides in improving the business climate in the state over the past year and a half, but there is more work to be done.”
There certainly is. For one thing, legislators need to create a mechanism to essentially prevent taxes from increasing in the way that Walker’s predecessor and the 2009–10 Legislature increased taxes. Everyone whose fingerprints are on those tax increases is directly responsible for Wisconsin’s poor business climate rankings up until the past year, because while business climate comparisons differ in what they measure and to what extent, every single one of them prominently includes taxes.
Does that require a Taxpayer Bill of Rights? A supermajority requirement or voter referendum to increase taxes? Do them all, as far as I’m concerned.
To finish in the top third among the states is better than finishing in the middle. (And it’s certainly better from the state’s 37th ranking in 2008.) But 17th isn’t nearly good enough. State government’s goal should be for the state to finish number one in the Midwest and, at a minimum, in the top five nationally, regardless of the business climate comparison.
Today is the anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first public performance, at the Marquee Club in London in 1962. They were known then as the “Rollin’ Stones,” and they had not recorded a song yet.
If you’re going to record just one song that gets on the charts, ending at number one would be preferable, whether in 1969, or in the year 2525:
Today in 1979 was one of the most bizarre moments in baseball history and/or radio station history:
President Obama on Monday called for an extension of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class, setting up an election-year showdown with congressional Republicans and sharpening the contrast with Republican rival Mitt Romney on the crucial issues of taxes.
At an event staged in the East Room with working families, Obama announced that he would support a one-year extension for households earning less than $250,000, citing the tough economic times “when so many people are trying to get by.” But the president added that he supports allowing the tax cuts to expire at the end of the year for higher-income earners, putting him at odds with the GOP, which favors extending them for all income levels. …
The tax cuts dating to the Bush administration are set to expire for all income levels at the end of this year. And the debate over tax fairness has grown more pronounced with the looming deadline, this winter, of the “fiscal cliff” — a combination of mandatory spending cuts and tax increases agreed upon last year to tame the deficit that many economists believe could throw the country back into recession. …
House GOP leaders have scheduled a July 23 vote on a one-year extension of the tax cuts for all income earners, and they charged that the president’s plan would raise taxes on small-business owners.
“President Obama is still asleep at the switch when it comes to our economy and jobs,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) said Monday. “In the wake of another weak jobs report, the president is doubling down on his quixotic call for the same small-business tax hikes that have been routinely rejected by the House and Senate.”
Interesting admission from the White House that “so many people are trying to get by.” Recall from Monday that since World War II no president has ever been reelected with the unemployment rate higher than 7.4 percent. It is now 8.2 percent.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
