Out of Control

I have an essay online about why the candidates should throw a bone to those who care about space policy:

[S]pace policy could be a key long-term component of what’s typically at the top of voters’ domestic worry list—jobs. It’s always tricky to predict what sort of job creation figures a given innovation will yield, but if it turns out to be at all analogous to the aviation industry, the space industry gushes with job growth potential.

And while there’s much reason to be optimistic about the technology behind the private space industry, there’s reason to be pessimistic about the process that controls it. In many ways, the top-down approach that governs space exploration is the opposite of the bottom-up private experimentation which invigorated aviation.

Doesn’t it also apply to revenue-hungry cities?

From Jacob Sullum:

In 1997, when Susette Kelo bought her little house overlooking the Thames River in New London, Connecticut, she had to hack her way through weeds and brush to reach the front door. Renovations transformed the neglected Victorian into a salmon-colored "show home," but today it's besieged by a creeping menace it will take more than an ax to defeat.

Kelo's home stands in the way of progress—at least, the city's idea of progress: a riverfront redevelopment project designed to make New London more comfortable for the Pfizer Corporation, which a few years ago built a research facility adjacent to the Fort Trumbull neighborhood where Kelo had made the mistake of settling. The city wants to hand Fort Trumbull over to a private developer who will use the land for a hotel, condominiums, offices, and shops.

For more on this issue, go here and here.

John F. Kerry loves to damn that infamous outsourcing “loophole.” So who put it there in the first place? The original JFK:

[Mark Sellner, a corporate tax attorney with Larson, Allen, Weishair & Co., LLP, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US.] said the current corporate tax structure, set up in the 1960s under President John F Kennedy’s administration, was designed to help manufacturers compete globally.

And closing the loophole apparently won’t stop outsourcing, anyhow:

In a world obviously even more globalised than 40 years ago, said Sellner, American companies coming to India have not done so for tax savings, but for the overall cost savings of doing business in an extremely competitive global market.

And yet the Kerry camp can’t leave it alone. It just released a new report, rehashing the usual points, and slamming outsourcing:

America confronts a new competitive challenge. The very sectors that drove the American boom of the 1990s are now being threatened by offshore outsourcing," the Kerry report states. "Today, America's innovation workers--software programmers and other professionals--are seeing their jobs outsourced to lower-wage countries around the world."

Outsourcing is part of trade and trade is a very powerful force for innovation. And so, Kerry would support innovation by stifling it? Hmmm.

What do you do? You could do what this guy did:

Arvin Brown, a television director whose credits include episodes of "Everwood" and "The Practice," had something of a problem. Leaving a party in the San Fernando Valley, 40 minutes by freeway from his home in Marina del Rey, he did not feel sober enough to drive his Jaguar. Nor did he relish calling a taxi and leaving the luxury car behind. Then he remembered Home James, a chauffeur service with a twist: you're driven home in your own car.

Mr. Brown made a call, and 20 minutes later his driver arrived, dressed in a mod suit accented by a Union Jack armband, riding a collapsible scooter. Greetings were exchanged. The driver folded the scooter into a carrying case, threw it in the trunk of the Jag and whisked Mr. Brown safely home.

Then the driver gets back on his scooter and zips away. It’s an interesting and promising market-based solution to drunk driving, and businesses like this are popping up all over the nation.

Unions often worry that competitive sourcing will mean lots of federal employees losing their jobs. The truth is typically much less dramatic. Few jobs are actually cut, and when work is outsourced federal employees are usually shuffled off to other government jobs or they opt for early retirement.

Now another report finds the same:

The report, by the University of Maryland's Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise, is the widest-ranging study on the impact of competitive sourcing initiatives on federal employees to date. It exmained almost 1,200 competitions between the private sector and federal employees at the Defense Department during the past 10 years.

The study found that only 5 percent of the 65,151 civilian employees whose work was put up for competition lost their jobs as a result.

For more see this Reason study.

From an interesting interview with the father of private space travel:

I put out there that before I die I want to see affordable travel to the Moon, that’s essentially where I’m going. What I mean by affordable is not what Houston talks about affordable; I’m talking about where a third of the people in this room can afford to go to the Moon when I finally kick off. That’s my vision.

In latest Liberty, Bill Bradford does some very interesting number-crunching on the politics of government spending.

Turns out our view of Dems as spenders and Reps as restrainers holds from the 40s till about 1970. Then things changed.

For example, since 1970 spending has grown 64 percent faster when a Rep sits in the White House than when a Dem does, and the slowest spending growth occurred when a Dem had the White House and the Reps controlled both houses of Congress—which, assuming the GOP maintains control of Congress, is what a Kerry victory would bring.

Joel Schwartz has the scoop on a misleading survey that says homebuyers prefer smart-growth-style accomodations.

Other surveys have shown the opposite, that most people still prefer suburban-style living. And of course reality trumps any survey anyhow because what people actually do is more important than what they say they’ll do.

So where are people moving? To metro areas like Atlanta, which smart growth types scorn. (And, for the first time since its inception in the 60s, Atlanta’s transit agency has no plans to expand its heavy rail system. Does anyone think that will stop any Atlanta-bound U-Hauls in their tracks?)

Even when there is growth in high density metro areas, most tends to be in the suburbs. In the last three years 80 percent of the growth in LA (which is, contrary to popular belief, the highest density metro area) and New York occurred in the ‘burbs.

Schwartz also makes a good point about the density and travel times:

[I]n Manhattan, a paragon of density and mixed-use urbanity, the average commute takes about 30 minutes -- 30th out of 233 urban counties ranked by the Census. Thirteen out of the worst 30 counties are in the New York metropolitan area …

And the nation’s longest journey to work (52 minutes) is endured by, yep, New York transit commuters.

For many the real shock isn’t that Ashlee Simpson Milli Vanillied on Saturday Night Live, it’s that The Today Show covered the lip-synch story. (Go here for the video clip.) What about corporate censorship? After all, both are NBC shows.

Even with all the fears about media consolidation, stories still get covered. If a network doesn’t cover its own flubs, others will. Don’t go to Fox for the latest on the Bill O’Reilly sex-extortion scandal, but other outlets will cover it—often, quite gleefully.

Over at the always insightful Café Hayek, Don Boudreaux points out some negative unintended consequences of D.C.’s recent ban on driving while holding a cell phone:

[My student Carol Shin] reports that, since DC’s prohibition went into effect this past summer, she and her friends -- when driving in DC -- in fact spend less time chatting with each other by cell phone, but spend more time text-messaging each other. Because text-messaging draws each messager’s eyes from the road (and on to the touch pad of the cell-phone) more than does talking on the phone, it is surely more dangerous to text-message while driving than to talk on the phone.

Reminds me of an AEI-Brookings study which noted other unintended consequences: If drivers cannot call ahead and say they will be late, they may speed. If drivers cannot call for directions, they may choose to read a map while driving. If they cannot save time by calling and driving, they may save time by eating and driving.

Kind of makes you wonder what other unintended consequences might be lurking behind all these recently enacted bans.

Sure it’ll cost a lot, but it’s worth it! … Are you sure?

Supporters of the proposed $1.4 billion Jets stadium project on the West Side issued a study yesterday asserting that the stadium - which would also serve as an exhibition hall and a locus of a possible 2012 Olympics - would encourage new housing, shops and office buildings in the area.

The study, paid for by the city's contractors, builders and construction unions, notes that stadiums in many cities have been economic failures but predicts that the Jets football stadium would be as successful as Petco Park in San Diego, Jacobs Field in Cleveland and Heinz Field in Pittsburgh.

Same thing is going on in D.C.

For why this is a bad idea, see this and this, as well as this University of Dayton (pdf) study which concludes: “continuance of large public subsidies cannot be justified on economic grounds.”

“HEART ATTACK RISK TRIPLES IN TRAFFIC”warns the headline.

The article cites a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine which says that the risk of heart attack appears to triple within an hour of being in traffic. Not only that, but the most likely culprit is air pollution.

Now I’m all for decreasing traffic congestion, but there are plenty of justifications for doing that, that don't involve misleading people. It would be nice for the sake of context to mention that air pollution has been decreasing dramatically, and will continue to do so.

Also, saying that something “triples” your risk of heart attack doesn’t tell you how much you should worry about it unless you, again, have context. And here comes the context, way at the bottom of the article:

[Dr. Murray Mittleman, a cardiovascular disease epidemiologist at Harvard University] contends that the increased risk associated with traffic might be hard for most people to discern. Even though traffic might double or triple a person's risk of heart attack as compared with the "absolute" risk that person would face under normal conditions, "the absolute risk is probably quite small."

A 50-year-old man, for instance, might face a one-in-a-million chance of having a heart attack in any random hour, Mittleman said. So if his risk was tripled because of traffic exposure, he still would have only a three-in-a-million risk.

Of course, “Traffic Linked to 3-in-a-million Risk of Heart Attack” is not much of a headline.

Planners, council members and mayors often see cities as an extension of their living rooms. Don’t like something? Move it and bring in something else.

But now the federal courts may make it tougher for them to do that. Two cases take another look at the use of tax incentives and eminent domain:

On Sept. 28, the U. S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Kelo v. City of New London. The court will consider the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment limits on the power of eminent domain, the legal process used by governments to acquire private property for various purposes after paying the property owner. The "public use" clause of the amendment states "…nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."

At issue in the case is whether the eminent domain power can be used as a means of increasing the tax base to improve the local economy.
…
The second case, Cuno v. DaimlerChrysler, was decided in September by the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. That case held that Ohio’s use of certain tax credits designed to lure DaimlerChrysler to the Toledo area was a violation of the Constitution’s "dormant" commerce clause.

The whole story is here.

The Guardian launched an operation to help Brits have a say in the American election by writing to undecided voters. Now some of those folks are writing back, and most of them could do without the help.

Prescott, speaking from Minnesota, where he advises the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, described Kerry's plan to roll back tax cuts for top wage-earners as counterproductive.

Prescott also gave Bush the nod on another controversial campaign issue, dismissing Kerry's claims that outsourcing of jobs is damaging the economy.
. . . Prescott also backed the idea, espoused by Bush, to reform Social Security by allowing some workers to place a portion of their payroll taxes into private savings accounts.

USA Today has an interesting article on a new Brookings study about poverty spreading to the suburbs:

Immigration, the dispersal of people who lived in urban housing projects that have been torn down, and revitalization of blighted neighborhoods by the affluent have helped spread poverty well beyond central cities.

Suburbs have more jobs than central cities, but skyrocketing costs for housing and gasoline and public resistance to mass transit and housing for low-wage employees are pushing many working people to the brink of poverty.

The article rightly harps on the high cost of housing (a natural result of restricted supply), but jumbles things when addressing transit. It notes that one community relaxed zoning ordinances to allow for more housing, but refused to allow a light rail line which would supposedly help poor people.

What’s particularly interesting is that the community cited is a suburb of St. Louis, where the Federal Reserve recently crunched the numbers and found that it would be better to buy hybrid cars for poor people than to build light rail. That kind of plan would really improve mobility-and by extension job and education prospects--for the poor.

Stay tuned for the next Privatization Watch which examines what happens to transit dependent people when light rail comes to town.

In the late 60s there were 37 American vaccine manufacturers. Today the number is getting perilously close to zero. What happened?

This OC Register editorial provides some answers:

Litigation: So many pharmaceutical companies had been sued because of adverse side effects that many simply dropped out of the vaccine business, which is a low-profit sector to begin with.

Regulation: [I]n the 1980s, a company came up with a formula for a Hepatitis B vaccine genetically engineered by recombinant DNA techniques. Although safety was a secondary issue because no live viruses were involved, the FDA still forced the longest possible approval procedure, costing tens of millions of dollars and requiring years to complete … Because flu viruses mutate, a new flu vaccine must be formulated every year. That means a new FDA approval every year, which adds to the cost.

Price Controls: [T]he Vaccines for Children program, set up in 1994, consisted of making the government the purchaser of 60 percent of vaccine for children - at deeply discounted prices. This made vaccine manufacturing even less profitable - or money-losing for some companies - and more companies simply got out of the business.

No matter what the result of the November elections, the US is, almost certainly, not going to keep flying the Shuttle after the ISS is complete, and it is doubtful that NASA or the Congress will want to keep paying for ISS operations after 2016 or 2017. International negotiations will decide the future of this $100-billion asset.

This article says privatization is the most likely option:

Yet, a traditional privatization would probably be as unacceptable as an [European Space Agency] takeover. If there were an auction, an investor might be able to take over the ISS for pennies on the dollar. Even if he or she paid $10 billion for it, that would still be roughly ten percent of what it cost to build. None of the governments involved would want to explain publicly why they spent $100 billion for such a pitiful payoff.

The port authority model, which has been proposed by Rick Tumlinson and the Space Frontier Foundation, makes sense to American ears, but may not be as acceptable to the Europeans or Russians. They would probably prefer a more traditional model of a state-controlled company or a public-private partnership.

Russ Roberts does a nice job of going through a WaPo article which seems to shed very little light on why—even though lots of people want it—we don’t have enough flu vaccines to go around:

Ah, reason number six. We're about 3/4 of the way through the article, but now we find something that might actually explain what has changed about the vaccine business

“Because much of the vaccine is bought in huge orders by government agencies, the price is low.”

Roberts’ bottom line:

the vaccine business is less attractive than it used to be. If we want to make it more attractive, either prices have to rise or regulations have to relax. My guess is we're going to end up with more government involvement not less.

All these million marches don’t do so well with truth-in-advertising:

Organizers had billed the gathering as the "Million Worker March" and had obtained a permit for a gathering of more than 100,000 on the National Mall. The turnout was much smaller.

The article notes that a few thousand marchers showed up.

Both government workers and government contractors fear offshoring, but neither for reasons of sound policy. A view into how populist posturing drives decisions, not the public interest.

Jacob Sullum has an interesting article on all the moralizing that surrounds the decision to vote .. or not:

When it comes to politics, Americans who don't know what they're talking about have a lot of company. In fact, as George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin shows in a Cato Institute paper published last month, they represent a majority of voters.

How extreme? A survey conducted last April, Somin notes, found that 70 percent of Americans did not know about the ballyhooed, budget-busting Medicare drug benefit, "the largest new federal entitlement in decades, and arguably the most important piece of domestic legislation adopted during the administration of George W. Bush."

Why don’t we know more?

"Perhaps the most fundamental cause of ignorance resides in the collective action problem created by the insignificance of any individual vote in determining an electoral outcome," [Somin] writes. "Acquiring significant amounts of political knowledge for the purpose of becoming a more informed voter is, in most situations, simply irrational."

Click it or ticket.

In 2002, however, failing to wear a seat belt became a primary offense, meaning officers could stop cars solely on the basis of a seat-belt violation.
And recently, the state stepped up its efforts to enforce the law as part of a campaign, called "Click it or Ticket," which started in July 2002 with the purpose of improving highway safety.

(Read on here.)

When it comes to lives saved, much of this may be beside the point since Washington’s highway fatality rate has been dropping for a long time.

We might be turning the corner on the hysteria over the tiny bit of offshore outsourcing done by governments. The governors of Maryland and Massachusetts vetoed anti-outsourcing legislation, and Arnold recently did the same in California.

Now for the feds:

The corporate tax bill cleared on Monday for President Bush's signature would allow federal agencies to continue awarding contracts to companies working offshore.

A preliminary Senate version of the legislation contained a measure that would have barred most agencies from outsourcing jobs to companies planning to move the work outside the United States. The language also would have prohibited agencies from buying goods or services produced offshore, with a few exceptions.

According to a new study by the college entrance testing organization ACT, only 22 percent of the 1.2 million students who took its test this year were ready for college-level work in English, math and science:

"We've made virtually no progress in the last 10 years" helping students to become ready for college or jobs, said the report, which is being issued today. "And from everything we've seen, it's not going to get better any time soon."
…
It found that the proportion of students taking what it deemed a minimum core of college preparatory courses - four years of English and three years each of mathematics, science and social studies - had risen only slightly in 10 years: to 56 percent in 2004, from 54 percent in 1994.

Another problem, the study said, is that even those who took the full core curriculum were not necessarily prepared for college, since some of their courses were not rigorous enough.

Some troubling quotations:

"We've made virtually no progress in the last 10 years" helping students to become ready for college or jobs, said the report, which is being issued today. "And from everything we've seen, it's not going to get better any time soon."
…
The ACT researchers said that their study had led them "to rethink whether the core curriculum" adequately prepared students "for success after high school."

Much has been made over the way anti-terrorism funding has been doled out. Small states often find themselves buried in funding, and who’s going to turn it down?

Lloyd B. Omdahl, a former lieutenant governor in North Dakota, said it made no sense that his state was among the domestic security winners - the state received $91 for each resident over the last two years - when the only plausible terrorist targets, he said, are two air bases that are already protected by the military.

"No amount of logic will change opinions under those circumstances," Mr. Omdahl said.

And so we get this:

[The] Northwest Arctic Borough, a desolate area of 7,300 people that straddles the Arctic Circle, recently stocked up on $233,000 worth of emergency radio equipment, decontamination tents, headlamps, night vision goggles, bullhorns - even rubber boots.

Even in post 9/11 America, pork still trumps rational risk assessment. Then again, breaking from our usual routine would mean that we let the terrorists win.

Arnold has made a habit over going to other states (either in person or in billboard form) and trying to convince businesses to come (or perhaps return) to California. For example:

In August, he clambered aboard an 18-wheeler bearing the words "Arnold's Moving Company" and rolled into the belly of the beast, onto the Las Vegas Strip. To runaway companies, he was saying: Come back, all is forgiven — and cheaper.

Now other governors are fighting back:

At one soft target, the corner of Hollywood and Vine, an eight-story banner, the sly handiwork of Nevada, is being unfurled: "Will your business be terminated?" California, it says, is getting beaten black and blue by taxes, fees, workers' comp rates. Come do business in our state, it hints, where your employees won't give you any problems.

And even Massachusetts is going after California businesses with the same pro-business talk:

Last week, Massachusetts went on the offensive, putting up billboards in San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles with the image of its own governor, Mitt Romney — Mitt, as in oven mitt — mocking Schwarzenegger: "Smaller muscles, but lower taxes! Massachusetts means business!"

It’s good that businesses can (sort of) escape high taxes and regs by simply moving to another state--also good to see that governors will rethink state policy in order to woo business. And it’s more evidence that it’s usually Americans who “take” jobs from other Americans.

Recent Nobel Prize winning economist Edward Prescott wants more tax cuts:

"What Bush has done has been not very big, it's pretty small," Prescott told CNBC financial news television.

"Tax rates were not cut enough," he said.

Maybe more tax cuts would boost the economy, but it won’t win novelist vote.

From the Federal Times:

Federal employees will be able to protest before the Government Accountability Office or federal appeals court competitive sourcing decisions if the conference report on the fiscal 2005 Defense authorization bill the House and Senate agreed to on Oct. 7 is signed into law, as expected.

Soloway said the provision will discourage companies from competing for federal work. “Employees already win more than 80 percent of the competitions. Why should companies spend the money and effort to compete when there are so many obstacles?” Soloway said.

So why do federal worker win so often? Are they just top-notch performers? Not exactly.

Reason’s Geoffrey Segal explains in this (pdf) Privatization Watch article.

If today hybrid cars reveal social consciousness, imagine what kind of statement hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will make. Now sure we hear from all sorts of hydrogen skeptics, but aren’t they just people who don’t particularly care about the environment or, worse yet, oil men?

Not really. Here’s a review of a book written by a hyro-skeptic who was involved in overseeing fuel cell research for Clinton’s energy department. He also calls global warming this century’s “most intractable and potentially catastrophic environmental problem.” He worries that, by pinning our hopes on the hydrogen highway, we’re being set up for disappointment.

Not on the gridiron, on tax policy:

The face-off at Stanford between the university's Michael Boskin, an architect of the Bush tax cuts, and Berkeley's Alan Auerbach, an adviser to Democratic challenger John Kerry, previewed some of the themes likely to be heard in Friday's presidential debate. It also personified a cross-bay campus competition that extends from the gridiron to the policy arena.

Points to Auerbach for hitting Bush on ballooning budgets:

"The president has a proven record of being the opposite of a deficit hawk,'' Auerbach said. "I'm not sure what that is. Maybe it's a deficit chicken.''

And to Boskin for defending outsourcing:

The two also differed over outsourcing. Auerbach said Kerry would remove corporate incentives to ship jobs abroad. Boskin said that while job losses hurt some in the short term, in the long run, the more open the U.S. economy, the faster it would create new jobs.

Kerry and Edwards seem anxious to bring outsourcing into the debates. Remember Kerry even forced the o-word into his description of the Bush policy of using foreign fighters to go after bin-Laden.

In tonight’s town hall debate, the issue’s more likely to come up more often. And here’s the latest in a long line of “don’t believe the hype” studies:

In a working paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, two International Monetary Fund (IMF) staffers discover no evidence that job growth in Britain is slower in those sectors with a quicker pace of service outsourcing.

They also find no link between job losses and outsourcing in the United States because outsourcing, by boosting firms' efficiency, creates enough new jobs to offset the initial losses.

From the study’s abstract:

The results show that although service outsourcing has been steadily increasing it is still very low, and that in the United States and many other industrial countries "insourcing" is greater than outsourcing.

A task force studying ways to improve fire protection after last year's disastrous Cedar and Paradise wildfires recommended Thursday that the county's patchwork system of fire agencies be overhauled to improve coordination and communication.

Good idea. Another good idea would be to make more use of contractors:

If California were to shift toward contracting out for wildfire protection, firms from the Northwest would expand south and provide a ready source of manpower. Meanwhile, related private fire services firms closer to Southern California would see a new market and begin training crews to fight wildfires. Eventually, these closer-to-home firms would supplement those from the north. California would have to provide regulatory oversight, but that would be cheaper than hiring new employees.

The nature of the threat posed by wildfires also lends itself to contracting out. Public safety threats like cardiac arrests and car accidents require a constant presence of emergency medical personnel poised for prompt response, but wildfires are seasonal. And since wildfire seasons peak at different times in different states, contractors could follow the fires as they ignite.

In order to benefit from tax cuts you have to pay taxes. And since rich people pay the most taxes, it’s natural to expect them to benefit most from tax cuts. This is where the Kerry/Edwards types come in and complain.

Even so, it turns out that Bush tax cuts have been kind to average Americans, saving the typical household somewhere around $2,000.

Now if we could only get spending under control.

Get the scoop here.

Clifford B. Janey, the District's new school superintendent, said yesterday that he is considering closing underutilized schools, giving students more time to graduate and hiring a private company to temporarily run such operations as facilities, purchasing and food service.

Read the whole story here.

The X Prize Foundation isn't done:

[X Prize Foundation chief Peter Diamandis] wants to keep up the momentum, especially among the 25 other teams that competed for the Ansari X Prize. He has raised $10 million from the state of New Mexico, which will serve as the host state for the X Prize Cup.

Diamandis says at least six additional competitions will be held over the next couple of years, including battles for the highest altitude and most passengers carried. "One student suggested we do one for the coolest-looking plane," Diamandis said, "and we may."

And now:

A Las Vegas hotel magnate who is hoping to build the world's first commercial space stations has offered $50 million (28 million pounds) to the creators of the first privately funded spaceship to reach orbit.

Robert Bigelow, who owns Budget Suites of America, launched his challenge a day after the first privately funded spaceship rocketed out of the atmosphere and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize designed to spur commercial space flight.

Those hotel magnates sure love aviation. Hotel magnate Raymond Orteig dangled $25,000, which was collected by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 after he flew across the Atlantic alone, without stopping.

Reason’s George Passantino was a director of Gov. Schwarzenegger's California Performance Review. He has a piece in today’s LA Times about what Arnold has (and has not) done so far:

He has traveled to other states, recruiting businesses to come to — or return to — California. He also vetoed a number of bills that would have further undermined the state's still-recovering economy, including a minimum-wage increase. Perhaps most important, he resisted tax increases.

However, efforts to restore the state's fiscal stability have not been as successful.

Read the whole thing here.

Lots of people want to know what kind of a governor Arnold is, and this list of bills vetoed, and bills signed helps define him.

Some notables:

Vetoes:

FOREIGN JOBS: Five labor-backed bills by Democrats that sought to track and curb the movement of jobs overseas. One bill would have banned state agencies from contracting with companies that "outsource" jobs. Another would have required California companies to annually report how many people they employ outside the United States. (AB 1829, AB 2715, AB 3021, SB 888, SB 1492)

MINIMUM WAGE: A bill that would have raised the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $7.75 an hour in July 2006. (AB 2832 by Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View)

Approvals:

CARPOOL LANES: A bill allowing solo drivers of hybrid vehicles to use carpool lanes. It applies to cars that get at least 45 miles per gallon, including the Honda Civic Hybrid, Honda Insight and Toyota Prius. (AB 2628 by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills)

MEXICAN TRUCKS: A bill requiring trucks crossing into California to meet national emissions standards. The bill was written in response to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could open the border to more than 30,000 trucks from Mexico. (AB 1009 by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills)

NEEDLES: A bill allowing pharmacists to sell up to 10 hypodermic needles without a prescription. The governor said the law would help stop the spread of HIV, hepatitis and other blood-borne diseases among drug users. (SB 1159 by Sen. John Vasconcellos, D-Santa Clara)

OLD CARS: A bill ending the exemption on smog checks that cars at least 30 years old now get and requiring emissions tests for all vehicles made since 1976. (AB 2683 by Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View)

And the “Prison Riot Inducing Bill of 2004” was also signed into law:

SMOKING: A bill banning smoking by inmates and guards in California prisons starting in July 2005. (AB 384 by Assemblyman Tim Leslie, R-Tahoe City)

After the debate, the polls have apparently tightened. So what?

You’d think that after the 2000 election, news outlets would no longer emphasize nationwide polls. After all, it’s the Electoral College that matters. We should see more of these.

If the election were held today, Bush would win (348 electoral votes to 190).

Go ask Al Gore how important the popular vote is.

All that’s left is the confirmation process:

If Monday’s initial altitude measurement of about 114 km (368,000 ft) is confirmed, SpaceShipOne's creators at Scaled Composites in Mojave will win the $10 million prize established in 1996 by Peter Diamandis to spur private space tourism.

What now?

With the X Prize now seemingly won, Diamandis and colleagues will set up annual X Prize Cup awards to begin in 2006 for various other commercial spaceflight achievements.

"I think we've met our goals," Diamandis said on the eve of the flight. "We've gotten the world to recognise that private spaceflight is possible. I think we'll start to see a flood of investment capital and the birth of a real new industry where all of us will be the benefactors."

Los Angeles' department of water and power recently raised rates 11%, and by sheer coincidence (they say) raised the amount of money they transfer to the city's general fund by the same amount.

Yes, it smells like a sewer main. CA state senator Richard Aaron has launched a lawsuit on the legality of the move. For some time now Alarcon has questioned DWP/city financial arrangements and potential illegal or corrupt practices. But LA mayor Hahn assures us there is no need for outside audits, as the city it auditing things themselves. As we all know, foxes guarding henhouses is an established municipal management best practice.

The irony is knee deep after a year in which revelations of financial shenanigans at DWP have popped up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

Don’t be like rigid Europe, says Michael Mandel. America has a duty to be the world leader in freewheeling innovation. It’s the difference between cautious growth and exuberant growth:

Cautious growth depends on investment in physical capital — and that is not one of America’s strong points.

Exuberant growth instead builds on the real competitive advantage that the United States has, not in capital, not in education — but in risk-taking.

Private space travel emerged from risk-taking. For those interested, I have an article on that in today’s Investor’ Business Daily (unfortunately, it’s not among the free content).

Which states benefit from federal taxing and spending policies?

According to a Tax Foundation study:

Currently taxpayers in North Dakota benefit most from the give-and-take with Uncle Sam, receiving $2.03 for every dollar in taxes. New Jersey benefits least, receiving just 62¢ per federal tax dollar.

Though not comparable as a state, the District of Columbia is by far the biggest beneficiary of federal spending, receiving $6.17 for every federal tax dollar—more than nine times the national average.

Tax Prof sees a pattern: Blue states feed red …

The report shows that of the 32 states (and the District of Columbia) that are "winners" -- receiving more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 76% are Red States that voted for George Bush in 2000. Indeed, 17 of the 20 (85%) states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Red States.
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In contrast, of the 16 states that are "losers" -- receiving less in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 69% are Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000. Indeed, 11 of the 14 (79%) of the states receiving the least federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Blue States.