At Common Council tonight, there’ll be, among other items, ongoing consideration of the proposed 2015 budget, and a presentation from Chancellor Telfer on the Tech Park. Both items offer curiosities. As in past years, City Manager Clapper will stand back from the discussion of the bus, but happily accept any money Council offers for it.…
Government Spending
City, Economy, Government Spending
The Proposed 2015 City of Whitewater Budget
by JOHN ADAMS •
The challenge of government is not fundamentally its cost, but its complexity, intractability, and most concerning of all its use of authority not as representative of residents but as self-interested action contrary to representation. A small rural town of fifteen-thousand, and it’s 289 pages just to list the town’s annual budget. There’s an anecdote about…
Corporate Welfare, Government Spending, Press
Does the Gazette‘s Editorialist Think that Janesville’s Residents Can’t Count?
by JOHN ADAMS •
All around, daily print newspapers are in decline. For most of them, there will be no more than several years of life left. By 2020, almost all of them will be gone. (See, along these lines, Clay Shirky’s Last Call: The end of the printed newspaper.) If a newspaper is at ideological odds with ordinary…
Business, Corporate Welfare, Government Spending, Uncategorized, WEDC
WEDC Claims Success by Writing Off Bad Loans
by JOHN ADAMS •
Wisconsin has had years of embarrassments from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, of economic manipulation, of picking supposed winners as though party hacks would know better than markets. It was a method bound to disappoint. These smarmy men at the WEDC have been trying to show progress on the millions of bad loans they’ve made.…
Corporate Welfare, Development, Government Spending, Marketing, Press
In a City of Sixty-Thousand, Fifteen People Aren’t a Sign of Community Enthusiasm
by JOHN ADAMS •
Nearby Janesville is considering a downtown revitalization, and at the most-recent meeting for the large & expensive proposal, only fifteen-people attended. The Gazette wrote about the plan with this headline: Last meeting for Janesville’s downtown plan doesn’t reflect ‘widespread championship’ (subscription req’d). Well, no, it doesn’t. (The online version of the Gazette had a more…
Beautiful Whitewater, City, Development, Government Spending, Hip & Prosperous, Local Government
Whitewater’s Independent Merchants: Supporting Small Bricks Over Bytes
by JOHN ADAMS •
A quick summary of my views on business would be to say that (1) private markets are typically superior to government regulation, subsidies, or game-rigging, (2) government should be impartial to different kinds of businesses, (3) government ‘business’ or ‘development’ efforts are often self-promoting efforts of officials, bureaucrats, and hangers-on who are parasitic of public…
Business, Corporate Welfare, Government Spending, WEDC
At WEDC-Sponsored Tech Festival, Local Company Announces a Move to Ohio
by JOHN ADAMS •
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation – it should more accurately be called the Wisconsin Economic Disaster Corporation – had yet another embarrassment this week. At the WEDC-sponsored ‘Forward Technology Festival‘ in Madison, a local company announced that it was moving…to Ohio. The Journal Sentinel reports that Aver Informatics Inc., a health information technology start-up, moved…
Development, Government Spending, Local Government
Projects Have a Price, Immediately and Consequently
by JOHN ADAMS •
Government will sometimes offer a look at a program or proposal, with a list of supposed benefits. There may be a set of colorful photographs, and a list of nebulous but optimistic (even grand) declarations of all it will offer (growth, development, jobs, opportunity, etc.). Toads in the press – and like cane toads, they’re…
Business, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park
Innovation Center Offers a Seminar on How to Go Out of Business
by JOHN ADAMS •
Nutty, but true: the Innovation Center – the Disappointment that Keeps on Disappointing™ – is apparently offering a program entitled, “What you Will Need to Know When You are Ready (or Not) to Sell Your Business.” It’s part of – wait for it – the Center’s ‘Elements of Success‘ series. Honest to goodness, for all…
Government Spending, Taxes/Taxation
On the Blackhawk Technical College Referendum
by JOHN ADAMS •
Over at Rock Netroots, Lou Kaye’s published a post with observations about Rock County’s politics, entitled, Community Quotes #3. (It’s in the syle of a similar Gazette feature, but thankfully without that newspaper’s ceaseless fronting of white-collar welfare.) On the Blackhawk Technical College referendum (four-million more annually, forever…), Kaye has three comments that sum it…
Government Spending, Local Government, Press, Taxes/Taxation
What Steve Jobs Understood About People That Local ‘Movers and Shakers’ Don’t
by JOHN ADAMS •
It’s an easy – and false – pose to assume that people can’t understand a supposedly complicated project. There was some of this thinking in an editorial about which I commented yesterday, in the Gazette‘s contention that that “SWAG’s [Southern Wisconsin Agricultural Group’s] complex, though intriguing, always seemed grand and hard for average residents to…
Government Spending, Local Government, Press
In Policymaking, Passion’s a Weak Justification
by JOHN ADAMS •
Alternative title: Passion’s Just Another Word for Nothing Substantive to Say. Only recently, small-town Evansville rejected a $5.5 million tax-incremental funding demand from the Southern Wisconsin Agricultural Group to locate in that community. See, Demanding Millions from Small-town Evansville. To accede to SWAG’s demands, Evansville would have had to abandon street repair, water-system upgrades, etc.,…
Government Spending, Local Government
Demanding Millions from Small-town Evansville
by JOHN ADAMS •
One reads (subscription req’d) that the SWAG project won’t happen in Evansville. SWAG is the Southern Wisconsin Agricultural Group, and they wanted $5.5 million from tiny Evansville, Wisconsin before building an agricultural complex in that town. So Evansville, recognizing that the cost would inhibit other municipal projects, said no after SWAG demanded millions: More than…
City, Corporate Welfare, Government Spending, Local Government, Politics, WEDC
WEDC Update
by JOHN ADAMS •
Anyone betting locally on the supposed prestige and success of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation has placed a bad bet. That corrupt and incompetent agency is in the news yet again for its failures and lies: WEDC award recipients outsourced Wisconsin jobs to foreign countries — WKOW 27: Madison, WI Breaking News, Weather and Sports…