We interrupt your weekend to announce that today is Wisconsin’s Tax Freedom Day.
The annual project of the Tax Foundation celebrates, if you want to call it that, the day in which we are done paying federal, state and local taxes for the year. It’s based on the assumption that since Jan. 1 all of your salary has been going to taxes; Tax Freedom Day is a state’s total tax payments converted into a calendar.
(Another way to look at it is at your work day: If you start work at 8 a.m., you are working to pay taxes until 10:26 a.m. Ponder that on Monday.)
It will not surprise Wisconsinites (particularly those who had to write a check to the Department of Revenue Tuesday) that Tax Freedom Day is five days later than in 2011. (Which in turn was four days later than in 2010. That is the accomplishment, if you want to call it that, of the 2009–10 Legislature and Gov. James Doyle.) And it really won’t surprise Wisconsinites that Wisconsin has one of the latest Tax Freedom Days in the country, earlier than only Massachusetts and Minnesota (both Sunday), Illinois and Maryland (both Monday), Washington (Tuesday), New Jersey and New York (both May 1), and Connecticut (May 5).
Most of that is the result of the cumulative result of our excessive state and local taxes. (You may note that states like New York and Connecticut, with later Tax Freedom Days, have higher per capita income than Wisconsin, which shows the pernicious cumulative effect of our state’s traditionally bad business climate.) On Tax Day I noted that had taxpayer-protection measures such as spending limits tied to inflation and population growth been in place, state and local taxes would have been $219.7 billion less over the past 30 years, and we wouldn’t be having state budget deficits of $3 billionright now.
What do we get for giving nearly $1 out of every $3 in income to government? (God only asks for 10 percent; why does government get 30.4 percent in Wisconsin?) We get:
A statewide teacher union that pays its management six-digit salaries and pays its employees on average $95,000 per year, almost twice as much as the median family income in this state.
A political culture that is out of touch with the rest of the planet, let alone the rest of the state.
Insufficient political will to change any of these realities.
If you think it’s bad this year, wait until seven major taxes increase next year. Or wait on the wrong results from the June 5 gubernatorial recall and this November’s election.
Today is April 20, or, put numerically, 4/20. Those three digits have become a code for marijuana, as in …
At the risk of violating the maxim that you should write about what you know (because I have never inhaled — on the other hand, I’ve never owned a Corvette but I write about Corvettes), today seems an appropriate day for discussing the wacky weed, because it’s yet another example of the stupidity of our government, for a variety of reasons.
I wandered into the marijuana legalization debate at Marketplace Magazine in 2010 (not on April 20) after reading a debate of sorts between Jay Selthofner, who ran for the 41st Assembly District as an independent that year, and Ripon Commonwealth Press publisher Tim Lyke.
It started with an observation from Washington Post columnist George F. Will:
Daniel Okrent’s darkly hilarious Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition recounts how Americans abolished a widely exercised private right — and condemned the nation’s fifth-largest industry — in order to make the nation more heavenly. Then all hell broke loose. Now that ambitious government is again hell-bent on improving Americans — from how they use salt to what light bulbs they use — Okrent’s book is a timely tutorial on the law of unintended consequences. …
Women campaigning for sobriety did not intend to give rise to the income tax, plea bargaining, a nationwide crime syndicate, Las Vegas, NASCAR (country boys outrunning government agents), a redefined role for the federal government and a privacy right — the “right to be let alone” — that eventually was extended to abortion rights. But they did. …
Before the 18th Amendment could make drink illegal, the 16th Amendment had to make the income tax legal. It was needed because by 1910 alcohol taxes were 30 percent of federal revenue. …
After 13 years, Prohibition, by then reduced to an alliance between evangelical Christians and criminals, was washed away by “social nullification” — a tide of alcohol — and by the exertions of wealthy people, such as Pierre S. du Pont, who hoped that the return of liquor taxes would be accompanied by lower income taxes. (They were.) …
The many lessons of Okrent’s story include: In the fight between law and appetite, bet on appetite. And: Americans then were, and let us hope still are, magnificently ungovernable by elected nuisances.
Selthofner, an advocate for legalizing marijuana, ran in 2010 on a platform of legalizing hemp cannabis, better known as marijuana, for various uses, not all of them recreational.
He argues that pot growers could help the state economically while reducing reliance on fossil fuels, comforting patients with medical marijuana and “provid[ing] a safer choice than alcohol.”
On that last argument Selthofner appears most vulnerable.
One could reasonably ask him: “What are you smoking?”
The last thing this country needs is another mind-altering drug injested for recreational purposes. …
This is no time to get high or get drunk.
It’s time to get serious.
Selthofner argues that “we need to decriminalize marijuana for personal recreational use by responsible adults, in the interest of fairness, personal freedom and compassion.”
Note the contradiction in the sentence above; Responsible adults don’t smoke marijuana recreationally.
They’re too busy trying to earn a living, raise a family and serve as a role models for children they raise to believe that the world already offers more than enough behavioral diversions. …
The last thing Wisconsin residents need to do in the face of growing concerns is to escape by themselves in a cloud of marijuana smoke.
Is it too unreasonable to suggest that we owe it to ourselves, if not our children, to act in ways that are more, not less, mature, responsible and sober?
… I do not believe that fear gives us the right to take rights away from people who have not personally done anything harmful to our society, to other citizens, or to themselves.
It is possible for a recreational or medical marijuana smoker to be a productive and hard working member of society. Just like all drinkers are not drunk drivers, all cannabis users are not lazy people.
I think it’s quite unfair to paint all marijuana users with the same brush.
The letter went on to make arguments without any proof (more of which can be read in the first comment here) that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and “has caused zero deaths, ever.” That assertion has been made by legalization advocates for years without convincing evidence (realizing that proving a negative isn’t easy). News media throughout Wisconsin reported earlier this year that the Ripon College student who drowned in Oshkosh Jan. 8 had both alcohol and marijuana in his system when he died.
On the other hand, Lyke’s sentence that “Responsible adults don’t smoke marijuana recreationally” could have substituted for “smoke marijuana” the words “drink alcohol,” “use tobacco,” “eat fattening foods,” “watch TV,” “go to movies,” or any other number of non-productive recreational activities. Those and other activities and substances are diversions, momentary escapes from our present, responsible lives. Those escapes, legal or otherwise, illicit or otherwise, have existed as long as human beings have existed.
(Reading Lyke’s column nearly two years later, it occurs to a reader that instead of writing an editorial plea for absolute sobriety, a more interesting question for the publisher of the state’s Newspaper of the Year might be to editorially ponder whether and to what extent Americans have lost their coping skills over the years.)
The better arguments for legalization are based not on alleged benefits, but on individual personal freedom. Those arguments were expressed in a later letter to the editor from a “former drug and homicide prosecutor” in Chicago:
Drug prohibition is the most effective means to put more drugs everywhere — stronger drugs, dangerous, uncontrolled and unregulated drugs. The irony of prohibition is that it makes drugs more valuable, more available, less controlled, stronger and more harmful. …
How’s prohibition helping the sober among us? With prohibition, we seize drugs by the ton and prosecute drugs by the gram. [Foolhardy] and bankrupting.
… Counter-intuitive as it may seem, Wisconsinites must legalize drugs to fight drugs, gangs, cartels, crime, prisons, taxes, deficits, corruption, trade imbalance and the funding of terrorism. …
The ex-prosecutor was right in that his argument did, and does, seem counterintuitive. I’ve read numerous arguments for legalizing and taxing drugs that presently are illegal. You’ll note that organized crime still exists today, 80 years after the end of Prohibition. You may also notice that a similar organized-crime structure has appeared around illegal drugs.
Moreover, it seems cruel (but hardly surprising) for the government to ban medical marijuana. Regardless of how you feel about pot use yourself, only the clueless or the sadistic or the authoritarian would claim that those who are using pot for relief of symptoms of terminal or chronic medical conditions are contributing to the problems of drug abuse.
It may blow your mind to know that, according to the Cato Institute, legalizing marijuana would save $3.3 billion in reduced law enforcement spending while generating up to $5.8 billion in new tax revenue. Cato further estimated that legalizing all drugs would net the government (between law enforcement savings and tax revenues) $46.8 billion per year. In contrast, the Buffett Rule was estimated to raise $5.1 billion.
The counterargument to the tax argument is that, as we are seeing with tobacco taxes, taxes that are too high encourage smuggling and other ways to avoid said high taxes. (See Will’s NASCAR reference.) On the other hand, that’s never stopped the government from creating taxes and setting tax rates before now.
Will himself seems sympathetic to drug legalization (and I’m guessing not to legitimize his own recreational activities):
Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs.
About 3 million people — less than 1 percent of America’s population — consume 80 percent of illegal hard drugs. Drug-trafficking organizations can be most efficiently injured by changing the behavior of the 20 percent of heavy users, and we are learning how to do so. Reducing consumption by the 80 percent of casual users will not substantially reduce the northward flow of drugs or the southward flow of money. …
In Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know, policy analysts Mark Kleiman, Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken argue that imprisoning low-ranking street-corner dealers is pointless: A $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence. And imprisoning large numbers of dealers produces an army of people who, emerging from prison with blighted employment prospects, can only deal drugs. Which is why, although a few years ago Washington, D.C., dealers earned an average of $30 an hour, today they earn less than the federal minimum wage ($7.25).
Dealers, a.k.a. “pushers,” have almost nothing to do with initiating drug use by future addicts; almost every user starts when given drugs by a friend, sibling or acquaintance. There is a staggering disparity between the trivial sums earned by dealers who connect the cartels to the cartels’ customers and the huge sums trying to slow the flow of drugs to those street-level dealers. …
Sixteen states and the District have legalized “medical marijuana,” a messy, mendacious semi-legalization that breeds cynicism regarding law. In 1990, 24 percent of Americans supported full legalization. Today, 50 percent do. In 2010, in California, where one-eighth of Americans live, 46 percent of voters supported legalization, and some opponents were marijuana growers who like the profits they make from prohibition of their product.
The best argument for legalizing at least marijuana may be Will’s last point about “cynicism regarding law.” Two of the criteria for what constitutes a bad law are the extent to which the law is unenforceable, and the excessive cost (financial and otherwise) of enforcing the law in question. (There is something seriously wrong with society’s being stuck with a $100,000 bill for three years of prison for a $200 drug deal.) You need not be a buddy of Jeff Spicoli or assert that the police and the Gestapo are indistinguishable from each other to conclude that laws against marijuana possession violate both of those criteria. (Increasing the drinking age has served only to increase underage drinking, and banning texting while driving has not stopped texting while driving.)
I am sure that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney will bring up drug legalization during their presidential campaign. I feel safe in assuming that Romney’s personal experience with marijuana is the same as mine. Obama has admitted to using more than just marijuana. Regardless of Obama’s past experience with controlled substances, the Obama administration has been an across-the-board civil liberties disaster, perhaps to the surprise of many who voted for Obama four years ago.
It is hypocritical to have laws that you don’t plan to enforce or cannot enforce. It’s obvious that the illegality of marijuana hasn’t stopped its fans from buying it and using it. Marijuana should have the same status as other supposedly-bad-for-you substances — until you do something harmful or illegal under the influence, your being under the influence isn’t the government’s business.
I know people who use the devil weed, but I can’t say I’ve ever been interested in partaking. But one need not be a fan of recreational drugs to notice similarities between the drug war of today and Prohibition 90 years ago.
It is a fact that the S&P 500 reported a combined $1.6 trillion in profits in 2011, the highest profits in 50 years, adjusted for inflation. It is also a fact that unemployment remains above 8%. Advocates for higher taxes add these two facts together to refute the notion that lower taxes stimulate job creation.
But there are a couple of other facts to consider when evaluating the implications of those first two — first, there are 2.5 million corporations in the United States, and those 50-year record profits are what was reported by 500 of them for a single year. A record amount of profit posted by .02% of our corporations does not tell us anything meaningful about the profitability of the other 99.98%.
Next, only 21 million Americans work for a Fortune 500 firm, out of the 130 million or so who work. With something like 15 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, the Fortune 500 companies would have to collectively increase their workforce by 71% to put everyone back to work. Not gonna happen.
And finally, perhaps most importantly, 52% of the profits of the Fortune 500 in 2011 were earned overseas. When overseas profits are removed from corporate earnings reports, 2011 was a quite ordinary year in comparison to the previous 49.
Actually, Nerenz’s estimate of 2.5 million corporations (which, by the way, pay the highest corporate income tax rates in the world) is low. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of businesses with employees as of 2007 was 6,049,655. Another 21,708,021 businesses were sole proprietors, businesses without employees besides the owner. So complaining about the profits of the S&P 500 means you’re complaining about 0.0018 percent of American businesses, which employ the 34.9 percent of people who, despite government’s best efforts, as Nerenz put it, “create the wealth that sustains us all.”
About those profits …
It is those new entrants, not the Fortune 500, that are the key to solving our problem of high chronic unemployment. In a market economy, high profits are a good thing; they attract new competitors willing to accept lower profits for better goods. That is why prices drop and quality rises in free markets where choice and competition are left to work their magic.
It was the high profits of IBM in the 1970’s that invited insurgent start-ups like Apple and Microsoft. Henry Ford did not walk to Detroit dreaming of high taxes and low profits; it was the other way around, just as it is for every other entrepreneur whose dreams of today will provide the jobs of tomorrow. Nobody gets in it for the taxes.
The economics of taxation is not difficult to understand, it is only difficult to accept; in the end, there is no corporate tax – it is all paid for by consumers, every penny of it. …
Higher taxes on “record” profits might sound appealing, but emotion and economics are two very different standards by which to judge ideas. Raising corporate tax rates means higher prices for consumers and job cuts to offset the government’s larger rake – ask the people of Illinois if it has solved any of their problems.
Next year, a $500 billion tax increase awaits Americans if Congress does not act this year to extend current tax rates, including the infamous “Bush tax cuts” from the last decade. 70% of this will fall on middle and low-income families with an average increased tax burden of $3,800 per family, according to Heritage Foundation.
That is not just a 50-year record, it is the largest tax increase in the history of the world.
The highest tax increase in the history of the world — now there’s an accomplishment for a second presidential term. Actually, “sentence” would be more appropriate than “term” for this country.
One of the reasons to support smaller government is because social engineering is not a proper role for government. Social engineering through the tax code, social engineering through regulation, or social engineering through manipulation of markets is wrong.
An example of the latter would be this idiotic idea from the Canadian Auto Workers, reported by Bloomberg via Automotive News:
Canada should adopt a national auto policy and investigate the possibility of establishing a domestic car company to safeguard employment in the industry, the Canadian Auto Workers union said.
“Canada is one of the only auto-producing jurisdictions in the world that doesn’t have a formal national auto policy,” CAW President Ken Lewenza said at a news conference in Toronto. “This is a huge weakness.” …
A 59 percent increase in the Canadian dollar against its U.S. counterpart in the past 10 years has made Canadian factories less competitive globally. The currency is “an enormous artificial cost penalty” amounting to C$3.7 billion a year on auto parts made in Canada, said Jim Stanford, the union’s economist.
Labor costs in Canada are about C$6 to C$7 an hour lower than in the U.S., when considering prices for houses that can be 138 percent higher and the same cars can cost 20 percent more in Canada, Stanford said. Also, Canadian compensation is weighted more toward wages and pensions, while in the U.S. a larger portion is for bonuses and health care, he said.
“We actually have a labor cost advantage in Canada but it’s an overvalued currency that has converted that to an apparent cost penalty,” Stanford said.
To counter that, Canada should slow the development of the Alberta oil sands and limit foreign investment in the energy industry, he said.
“It’s clear that the over-valuation of the dollar is tied to the oil industry,” he said. “Canada is not just an oil producer. But our currency is behaving as though we were.”
The government should keep its minority stake in GM and “utilize that share in a more proactive effort to ensure that Canada’s economic interests are respected in GM’s future business decisions,” the CAW said in the policy paper.
Through state-owned agencies such as Export Development Canada, the government should gradually acquire equity stakes in other carmakers that commit to maintaining factories in the country, the union said.
This is the kind of stupid idea that actually might have some legs in the Great White North. The Canadian laws mandating Canadian content on radio and TV prove that Canada officially opposes freedom of expression and free markets. Apparently the CAW believes that the purpose of both government and business is employing people, instead of, respectively, providing government services and providing goods and services to customers, with employment the result of providing goods and services. I’m just surprised the CAW didn’t suggest the Canadian government hire all the unemployed, half to dig holes and the other half to fill them.
The comments about Canada’s supposedly too strong dollar are interesting. The beneficiaries of a strong currency are consumers, including buyers of those cars that are 20 percent more expensive than cars purchased here. As we know from our own experience with the weak-dollar Obama administration, weakening currency makes everything more expensive, while simultaneously weakening the value of savings and investments. So apparently the CAW is just fine with Canadians not being able to afford buying what CAW members build.
Thankfully, the stupidity of this idea is apparent to Automotive News readers:
As if we needed any more evidence that the CAW has lost touch with reality. They want everyone else to change so they don’t have to. They just want somebody to start a car company in Canada? Great suggestion. Let someone else spend Billions of dollars to start a car company so they can have jobs. What is YOUR contribution to all of this CAW? Nothing! You want everybody else to do everything for you – you want the government to create auto policies for you, you want somebody to create a Canadian car company for you, you want Canadians consumers to buy the cars you build. You want the government to manipulate the value of our currency so you can have a cost advantage vs. the US. GIVE ME A BREAK! The CAW is totally out to lunch once again.
… Perhaps the CAW should establish their own car company. That way they get to experience the “enjoyment” of management and global competition first hand. I’d actually pay to watch that show.
… The only “reasonable” option[s] for which the union has control, keeping wages/expenses in check and improving productivity, are not listed. I would just once like to see a Union state “our members will improve productivity by X%, reduce absenteeism by Y% and work with management within the economic environment/reality we live in to the benefit of the company and our members”. THEN, I would have some respect. Accept reality, work within it. When times get much better, negotiate for more. When times are tough, give up a little more. And ask the same of Management. Public support would go a long way and right now, they are losing it bit by bit daily.
… It takes a truly unique belief system to actually proffer a policy paper SO self-serving as to recommend creating an entire industrial enterprise PURELY for its own benefit and absolutely no one beyond its own members. CAW wants Ottawa to commission its own Trabant and devalue every OTHER Canadian’s savings ONLY so its members can avoid the same need to be competitively productive that everybody from ditch diggers to neurosurgeons must abide. What’s MOST remarkable is it being PRECISELY what anybody should’ve expected CAW to recommend. After all, their southerly neighbors have already given CAW two precedents to work from.
Proving, however, that autoworker unions have no monopoly on bad ideas, enter former Government Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz, as reported by CNS News:
“If I were emperor of the United States, I would raise the fuel tax in the United States by 25 cents a gallon per year,” said Lutz during a panel discussion on energy independence co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute.
“So that people making a purchase decision, ‘Wow it’s 4 dollars this year, $4.25 next year, $4.50 the year after that, you know what? We better buy a compact this time.’”
Lutz claimed an annual tax hike on fuel would create predictability in the auto market and consumers would be more inclined to buy electric cars.
He also called the 18 cents per gallon federal tax on fuel, “ridiculous,” because 18 cents a gallon is in his view too low, and lamented the political risk in the U.S. of advocating for higher taxes on fuel.
“In the states, the political process is such that we can’t use the market mechanism of fuel price to drive demand for these alternative fuel vehicles. So we leave taxation where it is, and then we have to find a somewhat artificial means to incent customers to look at these [electric] vehicles,” he said.
CNS didn’t report why Lutz believes government should “incent customers to look at these [electric] vehicles.” Lutz’s explanation of why, despite a $7,500 federal tax credit, $250,000 per car in federal subsidies and $4-per-gallon gas, Chevy Volt sales were a fraction of GM’s projections wasn’t reported either. Nor is reported Lutz’s explanation of how the electric grid is supposed to be able to recharge millions of electric vehicles every night, when brownouts occur in the grid every summer.
Lutz’s comments are utterly predictable from a toady for Government Motors. GM didn’t raise a finger when the Obama administration raised the automakers’ fuel economy requirement to 54.5 mpg, which will result in cars that will serve no one yet be too expensive to buy. It’s yet another application of the Golden Rule of politics — he who has the gold makes the rules — and GM is once again parroting its government masters instead of the interests of its customers.
Lutz also appears to not realize how expensive cars have become — $30,748 on average, according to the Chicago Tribune. (A Volt costs $10,00 more than that.) Lutz’s answer suggests that people trade off cars every three years, as in the 1960s or 1970s. The National Automobile Dealers Association estimates that because of the extra cost of the 54.5-mpg standard added to the sticker price, 7 million Americans won’t be able to buy such a car because they won’t be able to finance it. And I suspect that number is low, because given current economic trends, the increased costs will be more than currently estimated, and American incomes won’t keep up with the added cost of the 2025 Chevy Communard putt-putt.
How our tax dollars are spent is a pertinent issue every day, not just around Tax Day.
Other than shared revenue to other units of government, the biggest chunk of government spending is on employee salaries and benefits. The former are said to be inferior to the private sector, but the latter, we’ve learned in the past year, are considerably superior to the public sector.
We taxpayers are supposed to be OK with that, an assertion Reason.com’s Tim Cavanaugh doesn’t buy:
During the last two years, with public-sector compensation becoming a bitter political issue, a host of new studies have appeared, arguing that government workers deserve the big bucks, thanks to their extra-special skills and book learnin’.
“Are Wisconsin public employees over-compensated?” asked Jeffrey H. Keefe in a February 2011 briefing paper for the union-backed Economic Policy Institute. They are not, Keefe decided, as long as you use “comparisons controlling for education, experience, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability.” …
Why did the field of government-employee-skill-set studies explode in 2011? It all started in a little Los Angeles County town called Bell. In 2010 the Los Angeles Times revealed that Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo was pulling down $800,000 in straight salary for managing a poor town into bankruptcy. Counting pension and other benefits, Rizzo was making well over $1 million a year.
The Bell scandal gave a face (Rizzo’s bloated Dickensian mug) to a growing national uproar over the booty taxpayers are shelling out to government employees. In December 2009, with unemployment at 10 percent, the consumer price index down for the quarter, and private compensation at a standstill, federal workers were treated to a 2 percent cost-of-living pay hike. And in nearly every state the looming $3 trillion wave of unfunded pension liabilities was prompting many Americans to ask why we give DMV drones so much damned money.
The most basic of the misdirections is that they treat education —rather than the actual work you do—as determinative. Public school teachers are more likely to hold state-approved credentials than private school teachers (and they make 37 percent more, according to the U.S. Department of Education). Would anybody claim they do a better job of teaching children?
Most of these studies, though not all, also ignore the value of job security: The layoff rate of public workers is about one-third that of private-sector workers. And virtually none of the studies accounts for the easier and lighter schedules of government stiffs: Public workers work 1,825 hours a year vs. 2,050 hours for private workers, according to the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards.
Even the central claim about higher rates of education may be bogus. In January the Congressional Budget Office, comparing the compensation of federal and private-sector employees, found it is actually the least educated public workers who get the biggest pay bump. Public workers with a high school degree or lower make 21 percent more in wages than equivalent private workers; those with less than a bachelor’s degree earn 15 percent more; and those with a bachelor’s degree receive 2 percent more. Only at the level of master’s degrees and higher do private wages outpace public. (Benefits are much higher for public workers at all education levels.)
Of course, the claim that government employees are public servants or engaged in public service doesn’t hold water. Someone who is engaged in actual service does so expecting no reward. Government employees are paid to do what they’re do, and they’re paid very well for what they do. Consider this comment:
Lower the offered wages for government work until you stop getting qualified applicants. There’s your market based wage for government workers. Not perfect, but it is not a completely non-market situation, necessarily.
Last weekend’s severe weather reminded one of the killer tornadoes that hit Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Joplin, Mo., within a month of each other one year ago. The two cities have taken contrasting approaches to cleanup, and two professors from the University of Alabama and Troy University report in the Wall Street Journal which approach has led to more actual cleanup:
In Joplin, eight of 10 affected businesses have reopened, according to the city’s Chamber of Commerce, while less than half in Tuscaloosa have even applied for building permits, according to city data we reviewed. Walgreens revived its Joplin store in what it calls a “record-setting” three months. In Tuscaloosa, a destroyed CVS still festers, undemolished. Large swaths of Tuscaloosa’s main commercial thoroughfares remain vacant lots, and several destroyed businesses have decided to reopen elsewhere, in neighboring Northport.
The reason for Joplin’s successes and Tuscaloosa’s shortcomings? In Tuscaloosa, officials sought to remake the urban landscape top-down, imposing a redevelopment plan on business. Joplin took a bottom-up approach, allowing businesses to take the lead in recovery. …
The Alabama city’s recovery plan, “Tuscaloosa Forward,” is indeed state-of-the-art urban planning — and that’s the crux of the problem. It sets out to “courageously create a showpiece” of “unique neighborhoods that are healthy, safe, accessible, connected, and sustainable,” all anchored by “village centers” for shopping (in a local economy that struggles to sustain current shopping centers). …
In Joplin, the official plan not only makes property rights a priority but clocks in at only 21 pages, compared with Tuscaloosa’s 128. Joplin’s plan also relied heavily on input from businesses (including through a Citizen’s Advisory Recovery Team) instead of Tuscaloosa’s reliance on outside consulting firms. “We need to say to our businesses, community, and our citizens, ‘If you guys want to rebuild your houses, we’ll do everything we can to make it happen,” said Joplin City Council member William Scearce in an interview.
The comments from the piece have been interesting. All the Joplin comments praised the city’s speed:
As a resident of Joplin since 2008, I knew exactly how Joplin would handle this disaster. The citizens would dig in their heels, move quickly and repair the town; whether you wanted them to or not! I have found it to be an amazing thing to witness…and participate in the recovery. As I think anyone can admit, the positive “can-do” attitude was infectious, and sometimes “over the top”. … The citizens are proud of this city, and as I saw someone else post – the citizens are “self-reliant”. Joplin doesn’t need permission to fix its town…and didn’t wait for handouts.
Tuscaloosa comments, meanwhile, seem to take the tack that property doesn’t really belong to its owner:
There have been many, many planning meetings in which WE THE PEOPLE have participated. I have seen personally how the plans have changed based on feedback from the community. Democracy is not easy; it takes time. … [The professors] want business owners to control our redevelopment. I don’t own a business. I guess I shouldn’t have a say?
Sure, you should have a say. If it’s your property. If not, not so much. Or, as another commenter put it:
Kudos to the people in Joplin for electing people who aren’t control freaks posing as public servants. Central planning doesn’t work at the local level, the state level, or the national level. The higher the level goes, the bigger the fallout, ie, unintended consequences.
Today in 1964, the Beatles appeared on the BBC’s “Morecambe and Wise”:
The Beatles had the number one single on both sides of the Atlantic that day:
The number one British single today in 1972 wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder, but it wasn’t a traditional hit either:
Today in 1975, four fans of the Bay City Rollers were hospitalized and 35 others were treated at the scene when they tried to swim across a lake to see the Rollers, who were making a BBC Radio 1 fun day at an amusement park.
The number one British single today in 1981 was that year’s Eurovision song contest winner:
The number one single today in 2009:
Birthdays begin with Glen Hardin, one of Buddy Holly’s Crickets:
When legitimate complaints are made this time of year about how we pay too much in taxes, someone inevitably trots out Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ oration that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
Curiously, those who use that Holmes quote don’t use another Holmes quote, “Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes,” which is the subject of today’s blog.
As far as Holmes’ first quote, given not only crime rates but the juvenile lawless behavior of the Occupy ________ set, to call our society “civilized” is accurate only in the most relative terms. And government wastes our tax dollars as often as we breathe.
I prefer the views of Winston Churchill, found on Facebook Monday afternoon, preferable on this subject …
… or the Beatles:
The Wisconsin Constitution includes these words in article I, section 22 …
The blessings of a free government can only be maintained by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
… that the writers failed to enforce by including any controls on spending or taxation. Every Legislature in the history of the state has failed to control spending and failed to enact constitutional limits on spending or taxes.
Proof of the latter comes from the Tax Foundation and its Taxpayer Bill of Rights Calculator. Going back to 1977, which is approximately the last time state per-capita personal income growth exceeded the national average, the blue line shows where state and local government spending would have been had growth been limited to inflation plus population growth. The yellowish line shows actual state and government spending.
The gap between the blue and yellowish lines by the end of the graph totals $219.7 billion, between 1978 and 2009, that state and local governments have instead of you. That demonstrates too many government employees getting paid too much, too many units of government, too many laws and regulations, and not nearly enough controls on government. And, as we read yesterday, overtaxation gives us an underperforming economy in good and bad times. I think anyone in this state could have found a better use for their share of that $219.7 billion than any governor or state legislator, including the governors and legislators I voted for, over the past 35 years.
Had TABOR controls been in effect in the late 1970s, instead of state and local governments spending $49.3 billion in 2008, state and local spending would have totaled $29.4 billion. Gov. James Doyle wouldn’t have had the opportunity to create a $2.9 billion GAAP deficit, and Gov. Tommy Thompson wouldn’t have had the chance to invent the term “structural deficit.”
The next state budget should have a provision that establishes spending controls on every level of government tied to inflation and population growth, to be effective until the passage of a constitutional amendment that establishes spending controls on every level of government tied to inflation and population growth. Enough is enough.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 