A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported. The nationwide study was not a rigorous experiment. But with 368 patients, it’s the…
Bad Ideas
Bad Ideas, Business, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Development, Foxconn, Government Spending, Mendacity, WEDC, Wisconsin
Foxconn’s ‘Innovation’ Centers: Still Empty a Year Later
by JOHN ADAMS •
Over at the national tech website The Verge, Nilay Patel reminds that a year later, Foxconn has still done nothing with the ‘innovation’ centers that foreign corporation promised it would open around the state. They’re still empty: See FOXCONN’S BUILDINGS IN WISCONSIN ARE STILL EMPTY, ONE YEAR LATER. In Whitewater, the ‘Greater Whitewater’ Committee…
Bad Ideas, Coronavirus, Politics, Public Health, Religion, Scott Fitzgerald, Speaker Vos
If Vos & Fitzgerald Read More, and Spoke Less
by JOHN ADAMS •
So Speaker Vos and Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald want Gov. Evers to allow an exception to the Safer at Home order for Easter Sunday services. (They’ve also included Passover in their request, but they’re either too ignorant or too dishonest to concede that Passover is commemorated traditionally in a home setting. It’s obviously a certain…
Babbittry, Bad Ideas, Boosterism, Conflicts of Interest, Kakistocracy, Kushner, Nepotism, Public Relations, WEDC, Wisconsin
An Empty-Headed Man’s Next Gig
by JOHN ADAMS •
Updated with a longer – and so more revealing – video of Kushner’s vapidity. When Jared Kushner is finished impairing America’s response to a pandemic, he’ll need something else to do. Wisconsin still has the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, and in small Wisconsin towns like Whitewater one finds development hucksters, business leagues of landlords &…
Bad Ideas, Boosterism, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Development, Economy, Planning, Poverty, WEDC
Declines, Recessions, and Rhetoric
by JOHN ADAMS •
While yesterday was a bad day for the financial markets, it’s the underlying – and troubling – fundamental condition of the economy that matters far more. Places like Whitewater, that adopted business special interests’ “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” approach despite increasing poverty and stagnation in household and individual incomes, are especially vulnerable to a downturn. Market Declines. Steven…
Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Conflicts of Interest, Development, Economics, Economy, Free Markets, Local Government, Special Interests, WEDC
Miscellany on Development Policy in Whitewater
by JOHN ADAMS •
There’s a significant difference between local, political calls for urgency and genuine need. Recent discussions about development policy in Whitewater only bolster this view. A few remarks (as I’ve been asked more than once what I think of the last two months’ events) — Independence. The best decision one could make when writing about policy…
Bad Ideas, Holiday, YMBFKM
If you want to become (or stay) single, then here’s your best bet…
by JOHN ADAMS •
Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Development, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Local Government, Public Relations, WEDC
Do Yorkshire Terriers Dream of Being Wolves?
by JOHN ADAMS •
Perhaps Yorkshire terriers dream each night of being ferocious wolves. If that should be so, and if even tiny dogs imagine themselves as mighty predators, then there may be a natural explanation – in animals and people – for the yearning of smarmy local development men for gigantic corporate welfare schemes. Of those men and…
Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Development, Economics, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Local Government, Press Release, WEDC
A Reminder About Opportunity Zones: Bad Policy Flacked Locally
by JOHN ADAMS •
Those following what passes for economic policy in Whitewater know that this website has been rightly critical of the economic opportunity zones that were part of Trump’s tax bill. See About that Trump Tax Bill, More About that Trump Tax Bill, and The Trump Tax Bill: That’s Not Reform. Jenny Schuetz, commenting on part of Trump’s…
Bad Ideas, Trump, Wall
Portion of Trump’s newly-built wall on Mexican border collapses
by JOHN ADAMS •
America, Bad Ideas, Government Spending, Trump
$1,000,000,000,000.00
by JOHN ADAMS •
One reads that U.S. deficit to eclipse $1 trillion in 2020, CBO says, as fiscal imbalance continues to widen: The U.S. government’s budget deficit is projected to reach $1.02 trillion in 2020, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as the federal government continues to spend much more than it collects…
Babbittry, Bad Ideas, Boosterism, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Culture, Development, Economics, Economy, Local Government, Trump, WEDC
‘But Not in Conditions of Their Own Choosing’
by JOHN ADAMS •
It’s a truism to say that all people make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing: Admittedly and sadly, the local boosterism of the pre-Trump years is now in retrospect worse than one might have initially believed: across America boosters who peddled false descriptions & junk solutions during the economic hardship of the…
Bad Ideas, Boosterism, CDA, Economics, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Local Government, Politics, WEDC
Market-Hating Republicans Have Been a Local Problem for Years
by JOHN ADAMS •
George Will, writing in the Washington Post, observes that Josh Hawley sounds like he has far too much faith in government: The sails of [Republican] Sen. Josh Hawley’s political skiff are filled with winds gusting from the right. They come from conservatives who think that an array of — perhaps most of — America’s social injuries,…
America, Bad Ideas, CDA, Economics, Economy, Gov. Walker, Government Spending, Local Government, State Government, WEDC, Wisconsin
But, but, but…we were promised growth, growth, growth!
by JOHN ADAMS •
Locally, statewide, and nationally, Trump & those who flacked his tax bill, and those who also pushed corporate welfare schemes (Foxconn, WEDC, Whitewater CDA), promised growth, growth, growth! How odd that these men — politicians, movers-and-shakers, developers, landlords, and public relations types — seem to have missed the mark: The World Bank sees U.S. growth stumbling from…