Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 22. Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 5:37 PM for 10h 59m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 54% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Park Board meets at 5:30 PM, and the city’s Community Involvement Commission meets at 6:30 PM.
This day in 1455 is traditionally assigned as the date of publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type.
Kristin Brey asks What’s going on with Ron Johnson and jobs?:
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Johnson once fancied himself something of a libertarian (he understood little of libertarianism then, to be sure), and perhaps he thinks that he’s returning to his imagined, prior position.
Too late: years of crackpottery on issue after issue, and silence in the face of ludicrous Wisconsin fiscal policy (Foxconn) leaves Johnson with less credibility than someone on a park bench going on about the time machine he’s invented.
Johnson analyzes this issue poorly; the proper assessment is whether additional jobs truly produced would be worth any public money spent. I’d be inclined to say not, absent a strong showing otherwise. Johnson, however, undertakes no balancing at all — he simply thinks the mere existence of workers in other jobs (any jobs) means no cost-benefit assessment is necessary. That’s intellectually lazy — one should hear out advocates of public support and then consider the quality of their analysis. (I’m a free market man, but I’d still patiently consider the quality of analysis in a proposal.) That’s where Foxconn fell flat — it reeked of flimsiness and grandiosity from the get-go (and it was flimsy and grandiose, after all).
Brey’s probably right on her third point, tellingly: follow Johnson’s big donor money to see who works him like a ventriloquist’s dummy.