In unemployment, emergency benefits to extend 99 weeks (almost two years) of unemployment benefits are running out or for some 4 million to 5 million people from December through April. This is proof positive that we are on the cusp of a deepening poverty at the very moment of political stalemate.
Rosenberg [David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff] says government handouts are responsible for 20% of disposable income in the country, so pray for the stability of the Social Security system. In personal Income, this loss of unemployment benefits means a loss of income equal to about $300 a week, or about $80 billion totted up, unavailable for consumption.
There’s a way out — an end to big projects in small towns, an overall reduction in government spending, a return of most savings as lower taxes, with other reductions reallocated to genuine need rather than showy efforts and bureaucrats’ positions and salaries.
Here’s the FREE WHITEWATER list of the scariest things in Whitewater for 2010. The 2007, 2008, and 2009 editions are available for comparison.
The list runs in reverse order, from mildly frightening to super scary. (Before I begin, I’ll note that I think this last year was the worst in recent memory, a time of hardship and loss, often ignored or rationalized, for so many.)
10. Apartment Buildings (Big Ones). We’re fine at building grand things we don’t need, but opposed to building large practical things of which there’s great need. We have a campus, and so many homeowners next to it who are just shocked, shocked that students might want to live nearby their university. Who knew? Oh dearie me — there’s a university next to this house I’ve bought!
That we must not have — it’s an historic neighborhood after all, with signs that declare as much to all the rest of the city.
So be it. Save your embarrassingly dramatic speeches about how you live here, you live here — they do, too.
If you’ll keep renters out, through every restrictive, intrusive approach, they’ll have to live somewhere. A large and well-designed apartment building would be just the thing. Yet, for some, that’s the last thing we should have. Worse, the restrictions were a first option, and a large and attractive apartment building, well, let me see, we’re working on that…
For all the talk about planning, comprehensive plans, provisional plans, plans for nighttime, plans for daytime, plans for twilight, plans for days when it’s just kinda cloudy, etc., even a simple sequence of events is too hard.
9. Responsibility. Did something go well today, in Whitewater? If so, then that accomplishment is the sole achievement of a longtime local resident, an honest, decent, hardworking descendant of Whitewater’s very founders. He or she sprang from the soil, a son or daughter of the pure and noble settlers who built this town, and achieved what he or she did owing to that lineage, and the genius consequently and necessarily inherited.
Did something go poorly today, in Whitewater? Damn it! Those filthy outsiders, those out-of-town reporters, outspoken residents, and those leftwing fanatics from Madison, they’re coming down on us, hammering us, again and again!
Besides, we wouldn’t have problems if people didn’t point them out, for goodness’ sake. We shouldn’t be held to the standard of other, normal towns; we should be able to establish our local standard.
Stop trying to hold us to the standards of Wisconsin, America, and the rest of the civilized world; we don’t deserve that kind of abuse.
8. Drink specials. In a town with economic problems, and problems in the fair enforcement of rules and regulations, here’s an idea: Ignore all that, and regulate all-you-can drink specials.
Sure, the regulation would use regulatory authority to favor some merchants over others, but why not hide that fact behind a laundry list of supposed harms that you would speciously prevent. Just list all the possible problems from alcohol — absolutely anything — with no need for a solid link between drink specials and any of the harms. Science, schmience — why solve a problem like over-consumption through education when one can offer a parade of horribles? After the regulation, the same problems will still take place, but grandstanding officials will have scored their victory, and fawning reporters will take their leads from those officials: Move along, nothing to see here.
7. Conflicts of Interest. Who cares how many different roles, often contradictory to each other, someone plays? If the man playing them insists he can set aside one role, and decide from another, based on his unquestionably exquisite judgment, who are you to doubt him? It’s true that in the rest of Wisconsin, or the rest of America, those conflicts would be obvious and prohibited.
This isn’t the rest of Wisconsin, or the rest of America — this is Whitewater! Shucks, son, that’s the way we do things around here.
6. Criticism. You know, and I know, that outspoken citizens and pesky bloggers in Whitewater aren’t supposed to call for a better standard. They’re supposed to shut up and sing.
If they offer any criticism, it needs to be appropriate, acceptable, approved, and proper. Tone must be watched very carefully, lest you criticize anyone in town with the same vigor that normal Americans criticize their officials elsewhere.
Well, that idea is an infringement on one’s rights as a citizen, and requires obeisance to mediocre officials. Americans are a robust and vigorous people — we need not live the frail and obsequious lives that a third-tier bureaucrat or his few remaining sycophants might want. Not having been born a rabbit, there’s no reason to live like one.
In any event, there will be no going back for Whitewater — on the contrary, there’s so much more yet to write.
5. Time. There’s a line from the series the Tudors, where Henry tells a nobleman that the most precious commodity is time, as it’s the “most irrecuperable.” That’s true. Every day we spend on silly projects and puffery takes away from the real needs of the city.
4. Chocolate Pouring. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Dickens, but I distinctly recall a scene from A Tale of Two Cities, book 2, chapter VII:
Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning’s chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.
Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.
Here, in our time and place, an American man or woman should be more than some asinine, third-tier official who expects the world of others in deference and supplication. No one should seek, and no one should be sought, to pour another’s chocolate.
3. Tax Incremental Districts. Oh, what a mess tax incremental financing has been for Whitewater. Predictably, one hears that failures here were the result of a bad economy.
That’s nonsense, and just excuse-making. All Wisconsin felt a bad economy these last few years, but only a small minority of Wisconsin communities have had problems with TID districts as we’ve had. It’s well-past time to except that the fault is a local one, of official bungling and blame-shifting.
2. Big Projects in Small Places. Our so-called Innovation Center is just corporate welfare for the upper-middle class, helping no one — no one — truly in need. All those millions in grants and bonds are misspent on this effort. Other communities would have used this money to a better end.
The lies and emptiness of this project are exceeded only by the vanity of the undertaking.
1. Poverty. We’re a small town with extraordinary poverty among families and children. That’s the real “Banner Inland City of the Midwest,” and all the cheerleading and self-congratulatory rhetoric on earth won’t change that grim truth — that a few officials put their pride ahead of others’ needs.
There’s a way out, and it will come to Whitewater, in time — a smaller government, with good leaders, fewer burdens & regulations to encourage private investment, and an end to cheerleading bureaucrats.
What we have now will be set aside, in favor of a better politics, and our present leaders will be recalled mainly as cautionary examples, of what one should not do.
Here’s a press release for Whitewater Halloween events on Saturday, October 30th. (House-to-house trick or treating in Whitewater is on Sunday, from 4 to 7 p.m.)
Who are the biggest egomaniacs in the United States Senate? Darren Garnick and Ilya Mirman write that
In a quest to find out, we developed the Senate Vanity Index, a formula that measures the level of egotism displayed in each senator’s lobby, the part of his or her office open to the public….
Visiting all 100 offices, we counted every award and picture on the walls—giving special weight to each senator’s poses with celebrities, presidents, and foreign dignitaries. We make no claims that our vanity formula is flawless. But we do feel comfortable declaring that we have found a truly bipartisan issue: Of the top 10 egos in our rankings, five are Republicans, four are Democrats, and one is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
For 130 years, the kilogram has weighed precisely one kilogram. Hasn’t it?
The U.S. government isnt so sure.The precise weight of the kilogram is based on a platinum-iridium cylinder manufactured 130 years ago; it’s kept in a vault in France at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. Forty of the units were manufactured at the time, to standardize the measure of weight.
But due to material degradation and the effects of quantum physics, the weight of those blocks has changed over time. That’s right, the kilogram no longer weighs 1 kilogram, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST. And it’s time to move to a different standard anyway.
Real GDP is still 0.8% below the prior cyclical peak, which was 11 quarters ago. Such a result is considerably worse than prior cyclical experience. Other “recent” recessions (since the 1970s) show that real GDP is usually more than 6% above the previous peak by now. Softer than usual consumption, housing, commercial real estate, and state and local government spending are the main reasons for the poor performance relative to history. –Jay Feldman, Credit Suisse
Support for campaign finance restrictions notwithstanding, Feingold’s been a good senator for Wisconsin. His opponent would never do so well.
Describing the Republican nominee as a “one-note” candidate, the paper said Johnson made a big deal about the need for fiscal responsibility but “seemed unable to further articulate his plan for job creation — especially for the middle class — during a recent meeting with the Green Bay Press-Gazette editorial board.”
….In contrast, the Press-Gazette noted: “Feingold has a solid jobs plan and detailed, specific proposals for controlling spending and reducing the federal deficit. He is a leading proponent of the pay-as-you-go principle that says government should not cut taxes or add entitlement spending without paying for it elsewhere, and he has joined with Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, in an effort to reduce pork-barrel spending in Washington.”
Reason considers our economic situation today and compares it with one from the ’30s. I don’t think the New Deal brought private jobs back, but I will say this much for FDR (as I have before): his New Dealers cared more about results than any local official hawking an empty idea like a so-called ‘Innovation Center’ for Whitewater. (It should be called a “Decline Center” to highlight the steep backwards direction in political and administrative quality from FDR’s New Dealers to Whitewater’s current municipal administration.)
Here’s an excerpt of the description accompanying the video:
The Great Recession officially ended way back in June of 2009, so why are so many Americans still out of work?
It’s not because politicians were twiddling their thumbs. Indeed, from from bailouts to “Cash for Clunkers” to the massive stimulus plan, government has busied itself with trying to fix the economy. And, according to President Obama, this “bold, persistent, experimentation” has brought our country back from the brink….The Great Recession officially ended way back in June of 2009, so why are so many Americans still out of work?
It’s not because politicians were twiddling their thumbs. Indeed, from from bailouts to “Cash for Clunkers” to the massive stimulus plan, government has busied itself with trying to fix the economy. And, according to President Obama, this “bold, persistent, experimentation” has brought our country back from the brink.
Obama borrows that phrase from President Franklin Rooselvelt, and today’s president has a lot in common with the original bold, persistent, experimenter. Like Obama, FDR was a charismatic Democrat who replaced an unpopular Republican during a time of crisis. And like Obama, FDR championed a slew of policies designed to get America back to work.
Today many Americans credit FDR with rescuing our nation from the Great Depression, but there’s plenty wrong with that view, says Lee Ohanian, a UCLA economics professor who specializes in economic crisis. “What’s wrong with that view is that private-sector job growth did not come back under Roosevelt,” says Ohanian, who notes that Americans often forget how long the Great Depression lasted. Unemployment stood at 17 percent in 1939, a decade after the infamous stock market crash, and, although times were much worse back then, Ohanian sees troubling parallels between the Great Depression and the Great Recession. In both instances our nation emerged from a severe downturn with strong productivity growth and the banking system largely restored. “So the key puzzle for both today and the 1930s is why aren’t private-sector jobs being created at a much more rapid rate?”
….According to research conducted by Ohanian and fellow UCLA economist Harold L. Cole, FDR’s anti-market policies actually prolonged the Great Depression by seven years. And what about Obama’s policies? When the unemployment rate finally does improve will he receive credit for rescuing America from the Great Recession or blame for prolonging the crisis?
Approximately 6.40 minutes
“Where are the Jobs? The Parallels between Today and the Great Depression” is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Field Producers: Paul Detrick and Zach Weissmueller; Production Associate: Sam Corcos.
Nina Easton writes about so-called reform that’s both anti-speech, and deeply hypocritical:
One narrative of election year 2010 was shaped long before any votes were tabulated. President Barack Obama penned the first chapter with his January condemnation of a Supreme Court ruling that lifted government prohibitions on spending by corporations in elections. The 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission “strikes at our democracy itself,” he said. Democrats and the media followed with tales of horror and fright, warning of corporate super-PACs and foreign donors. You could practically hear the theme from Jaws rumbling in the background….
As constitutional scholar Floyd Abrams recently wrote in the Yale Law Journal, campaign finance reform is considered so sacred that any ruling like this [Citizens United] was bound to be unpopular. The Citizens United decision “was treated as a desecration,” Abrams notes, even though Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, likened the overturned restrictions to suppression of political speech in newspapers, books, and television….
Nor is the ruling likely to enshrine a permanent tilt in favor of Republicans. (Where was all the media hand-wringing when money from unions and wealthy individuals was gushing on behalf of Democrats in 2006 and 2008?) Campaign money follows the intensity gap — which is on the Republican side this year but was on the Democratic side in the past two elections.
Forecasts from Goldman Sachs of growth way too low for a meaningful recovery —
We expect US growth to remain sluggish next year, as the temporary boosts from inventory restocking and fiscal stimulus wanes while final demand remains weak. If our view is correct, 2011 consensus expectations will move significantly over the months to come. The US consensus estimate of 2.4% in October is still 0.6 ppts above our forecast and will need to continue its recent downward fall see “Forecasters Need to Cut GDP Estimates a Lot Further”, US Daily Comment, August 23, 2010.
Whitewater’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of fifty degrees.
The Comment Forum will be off today, but will return next Friday. Other features are on the way, today and through the holiday weekend.
Tomorrow I’ll post FREE WHITEWATER’s annual Scariest of Whitewater, with this year’s top ten list of the scariest things in town. For a quick look at past posts, follow these links to the 2007, 2008, and 2009 editions.
The brain uses two different checks to guard against sloppy copy, a new study finds. By using a doctored word processor to sneak errors into typed words and surreptitiously fix typists’ real errors, researchers teased apart the various ways people catch their own mistakes. The study, published in the Oct. 29 Science, highlights the complexity of performance monitoring….
The results may reveal a hierarchical method of error correction — with a “lower” system doing the actual work and a “higher” system assigning credit and blame, Logan suggests. These multiple layers of control may be evident in tasks such as playing music, speaking and walking to a destination, Logan says. As a man heads toward a new restaurant, his brain is noticing landmarks and keeping on the right course. Meanwhile, his feet steadily plod along, navigating the terrain automatically.
Here’s the citation: G. Logan and M. Crump. Cognitive illusions of authorship reveal distinct hierarchical error detection in skilled typists. Science. Vol. 330, October 29, 2010, p. 683.
Another unfunded mandate at the worst possible time —
Milwaukee city officials are asking the federal government to give them more time to comply with rules that require replacing signs and traffic signals, at a cost of $5.3 million to local taxpayers.
