These men don’t believe in free markets (of capital, labor, and goods) in constant, voluntary private transactions to achieve advantageous results for individuals and collectively for society.
Instead, they believe in – crave, truly – the manipulation of public policy for their own ends, imagining themselves especially clever and convinced they’re especially worthy.
On a national scale, Trump’s tax bill represents the misdirection of tax policy to benefit a few just as local policy claims ‘community development’ that has done little for the community’s individual or household incomes (as the city still has high levels of poverty).
It didn’t take long for the White House to claim that the tax bill had worked. This time last year, Trump pointed out that private-business investment was rising at an annual rate of more than nine per cent. “So that’s a very tremendous increase,” he said. “There hasn’t been an increase like that in many, many years—decades. And I think the most important thing, and Larry Kudlow”—the director of the National Economic Council—“just confirmed to me, along with Kevin Hassett, that these numbers are very, very sustainable. This isn’t a one-time shot.”
As usual, Trump was exaggerating. The upturn in business investment during the first half of last year was by no means unprecedented, but it did represent an increase on the previous few years. However, it was fleeting. In the second half of last year, the growth in business investment fell sharply, and the slowdown has continued into 2019. During the second quarter of this year, according to last week’s G.D.P. report from the Commerce Department, it turned negative. If you exclude investment in residential real estate, which also fell, business-fixed investment declined at an annual rate of 0.6 per cent in three months, from April to June.
Update, 9.10.19: The policy of the last state administration was a series of interventions to redistribute resources to favored businesses. Over that time, local special interests merely chanted the state administration’s tune. Community Development Authorities across the state became miniature WEDCs. That approach has been, to put it mildly, a bad one. SeeThree Fundamental Failures: Employment, Income, and Poverty.
These men went too far, and did too much, leaving a mess that sugary falsehoods cannot conceal…
Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers giving way to partly sunny skies, with a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:13 PM, for 12h 43m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1813, America is victorious at the Battle of Lake Erie: “Nine vessels of the United States Navy defeated and captured six vessels of the British Royal Navy. This ensured American control of the lake for the rest of the war, which in turn allowed the Americans to recover Detroit and win the Battle of the Thames to break the Indian confederation of Tecumseh. It was one of the biggest naval battles of the War of 1812.”
Trump’s approval rating among voting-age Americans stands at 38 percent, down from 44 percent in June but similar to 39 percent in April, with 56 percent now saying they disapprove of his performance in office. Among registered voters, 40 percent say they approve of Trump, while 55 percent disapprove.
Concern over the economy — and specifically Trump’s handling of trade negotiations with China — have become a drag on the president’s public standing, particularly with women.
The Post-ABC poll finds Trump’s economic approval rating has also declined from 51 percent in early July to 46 percent in the new survey, with 47 percent disapproving. His relatively positive standing on the economy continues to buoy his reputation amid public criticism on other issues.
In the July survey, the economy was the sole issue where Trump received positive numbers, with more than half of all Americans disapproving of his handling of immigration, health care, gun violence, climate change and other issues.
Trump’s handling of trade negotiations with China is a particularly weak spot, with 35 percent in the new poll approving of him on this issue and 56 percent disapproving.
The Secretary of Commerce threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.
That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew criticism from the scientific community that NOAA, a division of the Commerce Department, had been bent to political purposes.
Update, evening of 9.9.19: Although this discussion of tax incremental financing (TIF) took place at a school board meeting, a program like this is (obviously) very much an initiative of city government and special interests. School districts like Whitewater’s have a role on a joint review board that oversees a tax incremental district’s creation; that role doesn’t compensate for the diversion of revenue that a tax incremental district causes (“An expert on inequities in housing and economic development, [Molly] Metzger was increasingly bothered by the fact that land use policies that had long been touted for their ability to jump-start development and create economic opportunity in underserved neighborhoods were doing neither. The closer she looked, the more she saw that TIF—which front-loads future property tax revenue to speed up selected projects—seemed to benefit neighborhoods that were already gentrifying and siphoned off funds that should have gone to public schools.”)
Another item (8A), from Whitewater’s city manager, came close in importance: a presentation on tax incremental financing, the municipal scheme of offering public incentives to private developers while hoping to use any (incremental) tax receipts from their development to pay for the publicly-funded incentives offered to the developer.
Tax incremental financing is trickle-down economics by another name, to the certain benefit of developers but the uncertain benefit of residents whose services depend on general tax revenues and not segregated incremental ones.
Tax incremental financing meets widespread opposition from mainstream economists of the right, center, and left; supporting it are mostly private developers who’ll get public benefits and the municipal officials they’re able either to beguile or bulldoze.
The Whitewater city manager’s presentation appears from 15:05 to 39:35 on the video above. The city’s existing tax incremental districts may close in a year or two, but already the city government is considering more.
A few remarks:
The best record is a recording. The city manager’s remarks are a trove of valuable information: how municipal officials think. No summary would be so revealing.
One can see in these remarks how, at least in part, advocates of tax incremental financing will make their case.
At one part of his presentation, the city manager aimed to reassure that, by his estimation, tax incremental financing had – implicitly by itself – brought tens of millions to the city. (Yes, really.)
For now, it’s enough to remind briefly that his analysis stood on the erroneous ground of one (or perhaps two) common logical fallacies: post hoc ergo propter hoc; cum hoc ergo propter hoc.
A lengthy and detailed discussion over tax incremental financing is in this city’s future.
There was, however, nothing in the 8.26.19 presentation that would cause a reasonable person to abandon the strong economic consensus against tax incremental financing. On the contrary, the claims offered, however revealing of special interests’ desires, only bolster one’s resolve in opposition.
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 46m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM and the Whitewater Unified School Board at 7 PM.
Thomas Hofeller preached secrecy as he remapped American politics from the shadows. The Republican Party operative, known as the master of the modern gerrymander, trained other G.O.P. operatives and legislators nationwide to secure their computer networks, guard access to their maps, and never send e-mails that they didn’t want to see published by the news media. In training sessions for state legislators and junior line drawers, he used a PowerPoint presentation that urged them to “avoid recklessness” and “always be discreet,” and warned that “emails are the tool of the devil.”
Hofeller did not follow his own advice. Before his death, in August, 2018, he saved at least seventy thousand files and several years of e-mails. A review of those records and e-mails—which were recently obtained first by The New Yorker—raises new questions about whether Hofeller unconstitutionally used race data to draw North Carolina’s congressional districts, in 2016. They also suggest that Hofeller was deeply involved in G.O.P. mapmaking nationwide, and include new trails for more potential lawsuits challenging Hofeller’s work, similar to the one on Wednesday which led to the overturning of his state legislative maps in North Carolina.
Hofeller’s files include dozens of intensely detailed studies of North Carolina college students, broken down by race and cross-referenced against the state driver’s-license files to determine whether these students likely possessed the proper I.D. to vote. The studies are dated 2014 and 2015, the years before Hofeller helped Republicans in the state redraw its congressional districts in ways that voting-rights groups said discriminated on the basis of race. North Carolina Republicans said that the maps discriminated based on partisanship but not race. Hofeller’s hard drive also retained a map of North Carolina’s 2017 state judicial gerrymander, with an overlay of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that these maps—which are currently at the center of a protracted legal battle—might also be a racial gerrymander.
Foxconn executive Louis Woo has “relinquished his project responsibilities to focus on addressing some personal matters,” the company confirmed to The Journal Times.
Woo has been one of the major faces for the Foxconn Technology Group in Wisconsin and its development in Mount Pleasant. Woo also served as a special assistant to Foxconn founder and former Chairman Terry Gou before Gou decided to step down from the day-to-day operations to run what ended up being an unsuccessful campaign to become president of Taiwan.
Sunday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of sixty-six. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 48m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1966, NBC broadcasts The Man Trap, the first broadcast episode of the first season of Star Trek on NBC: “The Enterprise visits planet M-113 for a routine medical inspection of the husband-wife archaeological team stationed there, but the crew finds that the wife has been replaced by a deadly, shape-shifting creature.”
The share of farm loans that are long past-due rose to 2.9% at community banks in Wisconsin as of June 30, the highest rate in comparable records that go back to 2001, according to a Reuters analysis of loan delinquency data published by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
While the number of seriously delinquent farm loans is rising nationwide, the noncurrent rate has more than doubled at Wisconsin’s community banks since Trump took office in January 2017. It now stands higher than in any other of the top 10 U.S. farm states as measured in production – a list that includes California, Iowa and Texas.
In more than 50 surveys since the beginning of 2012, Marquette Law School pollster Charles Franklin has asked Wisconsin voters whether they expect the economy to get better, worse or stay the same “over the next year.”
In every survey during the Obama presidency, more voters said “better” than “worse.” That remained true during the first two years of the Trump presidency.
But in two of the three Wisconsin polls that Marquette has done in 2019, more voters have said “worse” than “better.”
In short, public expectations about the economy are darker this year than they have been at any time since at least 2011. And that’s not based on just one survey; it is based on the yearly averages of 52 surveys Marquette has done from 2012 to 2019.
This finding is also consistent with national trends. In August, a widely followed index of consumer sentiment by the University of Michigan registered its biggest monthly drop since 2012.
Moreover, Trump’s tax cuts were spun on the basis that they would permanently hike business investment, raise workers’ wages by $4,000 and bring on a new era of more than 3 percent growth. That hasn’t happened. Rattner wrote: “In fact, during the second quarter, new investment fell for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2015. As the 2020 election season continues to unfold, Americans may be surprised to learn that the rate of investment under Mr. Trump — 3.9% — is actually lower than under President Obama (5.7%) after the nation’s economy began to recover in 2010.”
In 1971 Durham, NC, civil rights activist Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) faces off against C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), the Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, over school desegregation.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:18 PM, for 12h 51m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Dane County citizens voted Judge Archie Simonson out of office. Simonson called rape a normal male reaction to provocative female attire and modern society’s permissive attitude toward sex. He made this statment while explaining why he sentenced a 15-year-old to only one year of probation for raping a 16-year-old girl. After the recall election, Simonson was replaced by Moria Krueger, the first woman judge elected in Dane County history.
Former Gov. Scott Walker is jumping back into Wisconsin politics — this time to promote his 25-year-old son’s potential candidacy for Congress.
Matt Walker, Walker’s oldest son, is one of 10 potential candidates considering running to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner in the 5th Congressional District, a conservative stronghold.
“I think in particular what intrigues him is he feels frustrated that (U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) somehow nationally is reflective of his generation,” Scott Walker said in an appearance on WISN’s “UpFront.” “He’s 25 and he feels there needs to be a counter-voice to that.”
Ocasio-Cortez is a 29-year-old freshman congresswoman from New York — and the youngest female to serve in Congress — who the former Republican governor frequently criticizes over her Democratic Socialist views.
(Oh, brother. The gerrymandered Fifth Congressional District stretches all the way down to Whitewater. Walker says his son wants to be a counter-voice to AOC, but the son isn’t using his voice – his father’s the one talking. If Matt Walker wants to take on Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, then he’s going to have to speak & stand on his own without papa’s help. This libertarian does not – and never will – support AOC’s fundamentally misguided confidence in government action. And yet, and yet – it is clear that AOC can speak and write on her own. She’s standing on her own feet. It’s always worth reminding of Scott Walker’s Three Fundamental Failures: Employment, Income, and Poverty.)
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, and Irina Novoselsky, chief executive officer at CareerBuilder, examine the U.S. August jobs report. They speak on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas.”
In Whitewater, there’s a top-notch think tank right-wing landlord’s business group that flacked Foxconn both privately and through that group’s sway over the Whitewater Community Development Authority. The group invited a state operative to spin Foxconn as a tech city of gold, and at the Whitewater CDA one could hear fantastic tales of high-tech wonders that Foxconn was sure to produce. These gentlemen could feel the magic, really they could…
Predictably, Foxconn’s simply a fiscal con, but perhaps the gentlemen of the Greater Whitewater Committee and the Whitewater CDA can grab themselves a robot-prepared cup of coffee at the airport:
Foxconn will help the company manufacture its units in its Wisconsin LCD factory, which doesn’t exist yet — and thus produces no LCDs, or any other product for that matter — and which Foxconn has previously claimed it plans to use for a variety of manufacturing purposes.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:20 PM, for 12h 54m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 53.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
To a first approximation, the best advice is to toss it into the average. Definitely do not assume that it’s the new normal. You don’t need to read dramatically headlined newspaper articles and watch breathless cable news segments about it. In a race with many polls, any one poll should rarely make all that much news. But you shouldn’t “throw out” the poll either. Instead, it should incrementally affect your priors. In the case of the Monmouth poll last week, for instance, you shouldn’t have assumed that the race had suddenly become a three-way tie, but you should have inched up your estimate of how well Sanders and Warren were doing compared with Biden.
For extra credit, pay attention to sample size. The Monmouth poll surveyed only 298 Democratic voters, which is small even by the standards of primary polls (which often survey fewer voters than general election polls do).
….
If a poll shows a significant change in the race, you should tend to presume it’s an outlier unless it’s precipitated by a major news or campaign event.
Corollary: You should be much more open to the possibility that a poll reflects a real change if it’s among the first polls following a major news or campaign event.
What do I mean by a “major” news or campaign event? Some fairly specific types of things. When I made you pinky swear earlier, I was asking you to stick precisely to this list:
Debates.
Candidates entering or exiting the race, or clinching their nominations.
Primary and caucus results (e.g., the Iowa caucuses occur and that has knockoff effects on the next set of states).
The conventions.
The announcement of vice presidential candidates.
The final week of the campaign.
Spectacular, blockbuster news events that dominate the news cycle for a week or more. (There generally are only one or two of these per campaign cycle, if that many.)
Squirrels eavesdrop on the casual chitchat of birds to figure out when it’s safe enough to be out in the open and foraging for food.
Researchers have found that a squirrel becomes incredibly vigilant when it hears the shriek of a red-tailed hawk, but it will relax and resume its food-seeking behavior more quickly if the predator’s call is immediately followed by the easygoing tweets of unconcerned birds.
One reads – thanks to a pointer from Joe in a comment – that Wisconsinites whose houses were ruined for Foxconn now see the loss of some homes was for nothing:
The Jensens had owned a home on nearly 3 acres along Southeast Frontage Road for more than 20 years, close to the planned Foxconn development. Cathy Jensen said she went to a couple of village board meetings to get more information, but it was “useless.”
Then, like dozens of fellow homeowners, the Jensens received a relocation order from Mount Pleasant.
“They said that they needed .13 acres of our frontage for a road project … but they would be generous and offer us basically twice the amount and buy our whole property — our whole 3 acres,” Jensen said.
Wisconsin law gives municipalities the power to acquire private property using eminent domain as long as there is fair compensation and the property will be used for a public purpose. This is typically for road improvements, or sometimes to take control of dilapidated property.
….
The records show the village threatened eminent domain against some homeowners, saying their property was needed for road improvements. But in some cases those plans changed or were dropped even before the homes — some of them newly built — were bulldozed, state records show.
One reads that F. James Sensenbrenner, the pro-Trump septuagenarian multimillionaire congressman from a gerrymandered district that stretches all the way down to Whitewater, is retiring when his current term ends. Consigned to the minority forever must look unappealing.
How time flies! It was not long ago that then-chairman of the Whitewater Community Development Authority was scampering off to thank Sensenbrenner in person for a portion of the Trump tax bill. SeeThe Trump Tax Bill: The Illusory Pay Bump and ‘Our Guy’ Isn’t Our Guy.
The former’s now out of office and the latter soon will be. These changes will leave Sensenbrenner plentiful opportunities for reminiscing over the manipulation of free markets, with moments left for complaining that he was never adequately appreciated by ordinary men and women who should damn well have known better.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:22 PM, for 12h 57m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 43.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
“President Trump promised Mexico would pay for his border wall and that’s clearly not true because he is taking money from our military to pay for it,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin said in a statement.
In another sign the president’s crusade against China is hurting the U.S. economy, factory activity shrank in August for the first time in three years, according to a new survey.
The measures the Institute for Supply Management uses for domestic manufacturing’s health fell nearly across the board. New orders for manufactured goods dropped for the second month in a row to a level not seen since late 2009; production and employment contracted for the first time in three years. Another reporton manufacturing activity — from IHS Markit, also released Tuesday — confirmed the findings, showing the weakest manufacturing activity in nearly a decade.
….
The slowdown in American manufacturing comes as the sector has hit a skid worldwide, a development dating to last year that has grown worse as trade tensions have intensified. But the ISM survey left little doubt that the president’s tariff fight is weighing on manufacturers. Four of 10 respondents that the survey quoted invoked the trade war as a top concern (“While business is strong, there is an undercurrent of fear and alarm regarding the trade wars and a potential recession,” one respondent working in chemical products said.)
President Trump’s political allies are trying to raise at least $2 million to investigate reporters and editors of the New York Times, Washington Post and other outlets, according to a 3-page fundraising pitch reviewed by Axios.
The group claims it will slip damaging information about reporters and editors to “friendly media outlets,” such as Breitbart, and traditional media, if possible.
People involved in raising the funds include GOP consultant Arthur Schwartz and the “loose network” that the NY Times reported last week is targeting journalists. The operations are to be run by undisclosed others.
The prospectus for the new project says it’s “targeting the people producing the news.”