Out of Control

Last week California's public safety workers were in the legislature pushing for benefits and pension increases.

Never mind that cities and counties already face budget-breaking
retirement costs. Voting along straight party lines - Democrats for
and Republicans against - members of the Assembly Public Sector
Committee approved a series of new measures to fatten already bloated
police and fire pensions. These bills are fiscal time bombs. They
fleece taxpayers, while pushing state and local governments ever
closer to insolvency.

From the "taking your eyes off the ball" file:

Mayors from some of the world's biggest cities are gathering here this week to forge a set of international guidelines for sustainable urban living - billed as a municipal version of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming that the United States never ratified.

The Urban Environmental Accords, to be signed at the United Nations World Environment Day Conference, is the latest example of cities seeking to tackle climate change despite reluctance from their national governments.

. . . .

The accords spell out 21 specific actions mayors can take to make their cities greener, and signers promise to annually adopt at least three new policies, many of which involve economic incentives or legislation. In the energy arena, for instance, cities can adopt policies to increase use of renewable power, boost energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions - actions that can help cities save money and clean up the environment.

"It's a real roll-up-your-sleeves approach," said Susan Ode, outreach coordinator for Local Governments for Sustainability. "They're actions that truly will help and can be implemented by local governments and communities."

Come on, guys...where are your priorities? Don't urban mayors have bigger fish to fry than well-intentioned fluff like this? How about...uhhhh...addressing the completely dysfunctional urban education system!? Or maybe modernizing infrastructure? Or removing regulatory barriers to affordable housing and community economic development?

Geez...not to mention the obvious competitive disadvantages from adopting local pollution control ordinances, for example. If you're the CEO of manufacturing company X and you're evaluating two cities for relocation or expansion opportunities -- one with a mini-Kyoto policy or one without -- which one will appear more appealing from a regulatory perspective?

And you can bet that the Smart Growth crowd is applauding this initiative, as it presents the movement another opportunity to push its agenda on a wide scale. So we can probably expect to hear renewed calls for such things as strong growth management policies and light-rail systems, with the attendant deleterious effects of choking off the housing supply (and raising prices), increasing congestion and density, and diverting scarce public $$$ to wasteful transit boondoggles.

These mayors apparently missed the main theme of Governing 101: good intentions tend to make bad public policy.

Now that summer is upon us, hurricane season is ramping up, as well as the predictable hysteria about global warming's influence. After the quadruple pounding that Florida recieved last year, it didn't take long for the Chicken Little crowd to start crowing that climate change MUST be responsible for the increasing hurricane frequency, despite a mountain of scientific evidence to the contrary.

So the ever-helpful Reuters, apparently interested in getting a jump start on the inevitable hurricane hysteria, runs this piece on the global warming/hurricanes debate:

If hurricanes again pound the United States this summer, their roar is likely to be accompanied by the din of another storm -- an angry debate among U.S. scientists over the impact of global warming.

Last season's $45 billion devastation, when 15 tropical storms spawned nine hurricanes in the Atlantic and Caribbean, prompted climatologists to warn of a link to warming temperatures.

But hurricane experts say the unusual series of hurricanes, four of which slammed into Florida in a six-week period, was the result of a natural 15- to 40-year cycle in Atlantic cyclone activity.

After a lull between 1970 and the mid-1990s, the number of storms picked up dramatically from 1995 and higher-than-normal activity is expected for the next five to 30 years as a phenomenon known as the "Atlantic multidecadal mode" holds sway.

"Really, for the folks that are doing work on hurricanes, there isn't a debate (about global warming)," said Chris Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's hurricane research division in Miami.

Many climatologists disagree [...] "Global climate change is happening. The environment in which these hurricanes form is clearly changing," said Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. He is also a lead author of the next major U.N. report on climate change, due in 2007.

Landsea withdrew from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year after accusing Trenberth of linking current heightened hurricane activity too closely to global warming.

See my post from earlier this year on Chris Landsea's resignation from IPCC. I was frankly surprised to see that he got a prominent voice in this article, given the pro-enviro bent of the mainstream media. In fact, the article gave much more ink to the skeptical argument, which is a refreshing change from standard climate reporting.

But the author couldn't resist the ubiquitous shot at the Prez:

The public clash highlighted the sensitivity of the climate debate in the United States, which under President Bush dismayed environmentalists by rejecting the Kyoto pact on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Hmmmm. Let's see...it is certainly true that enviros are dismayed by practically everything Bush has done, but were they not also dismayed when the U.S. Senate rejected Kyoto by a devastating 95-0 margin in 1997 during the Clinton administration (here's a refresher)? It's funny how history gets constantly rewritten amid the passions and vitriol of the politics du jour.

Back to the hurricane story, I'm going to place my bets now. I'm betting (solely on gut instinct) on a normal hurricane season in which we'll hear barely a whimper on the global warming issue. But if I'm wrong and we have another whopper of a season, then I'm betting that we get the first Chicken Little, enviro-hysteria article within 36 hours of the second landfall.

But of course, there is a third option...it would be just priceless if we had a below-average hurricane season and then started seeing articles about how global warming was the cause of the lack of hurricanes. Given the abrupt switch from fears of global cooling to global warming in the late 1970's, this idea isn't that far fetched.

The Star Wars series is fodder for lots of articles on modern politics and war--here, here, and even relating it to the Civil War. I quite like this one by Scott Horton at Antiwar.com.

I was struck by the slipping away of democracy too, as I watched the Revenge of the Sith. At the time I happened to be reading Steve Pressfield's historical novel Tides of War about the Peloponnesian war. The book does an outstanding job of showing all the flaws of Athenian democracy--the fickleness of the masses, the herd behavior, and the hatred of anyone who displays demonstrable superiority in any way. A gripping reminder that democracy doesn't always lead to the right decisions so limiting the scope of those decisions is wise.

It also reminds that democracy sucks, it just sucks less than every other system of collective decisionmaking out there.

OMB has rolled out its its requirements that federal agencies analyze their purchasing habits and use it to shop smarter--what they call "strategic sourcing". While this may seem a no brainer, but it has been long coming for federal agencies. It's a new leg to the President's Management Agenda (which we have been tracking--see here and here, for example.)

New York’s City Council just passed a new bill:

New buildings and buildings undergoing major renovations will be required to install two toilets for women for every one provided to men.

The current law, enacted in 1984, requires a 1-to-1 ratio. But men can "zoom in and zoom out," while women end up waiting in long lines, noted Councilwoman Madeline Provenzano (D-Bronx), chairwoman of the Housing and Buildings Committee.

"This is a quantum leap into the 21st century," said Councilwoman Yvette Clarke (D-Brooklyn), chief sponsor and architect of the bill.

The bill approved yesterday is a compromise version of a proposal that would have required virtually all buildings - new and old - with public rest rooms to have two facilities for women for every one designated for men.

In a deal with Mayor Bloomberg, the original potty-parity bill was flushed because of complaints over its potentially huge cost to owners of bars, restaurants and theaters and to publicly owned facilities, such as stadiums.

The bill approved yesterday, 50-to-0 with one absentee, mandates the 2-for-1 rule only for new buildings and existing ones that undergo renovations whose costs exceed 50% of the value of the building. The law could take effect as soon as the fall.

Sigh.

(Via Sploid.)

It’s illegal to erect billboards in Vermont, but it’s Click It or Ticket time and state officials want to warn drivers that they’ll get a ticket if they don’t buckle up.

What to do?

Put up billboards in other states:

[T]he Governor's Highway Safety Program in that state took its seat-belt safety campaign to New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

A sign on Interstate 293 in central New Hampshire at least 70 miles away from the Vermont state line tells drivers, "Buckle-up in Vermont. It's the law." It's part of the state's "Click it or Ticket" campaign.

"We bought billboards in New Hampshire and Massachusetts as close to the Vermont border as we can get," said Charles Satterfield, public information officer for the Governor's Highway Safety Program in Vermont. "The reason we did it is because Vermont's lowest belt use is (along) the New Hampshire and Massachusetts borders. Those two states have among the lowest seat belt use rates in the country, and they affect the belt use rates in Vermont."

Another reason: In New Hampshire, there's no seat belt law for adults.

And Massachusetts has a secondary enforcement law, which from a safety-pusher’s point of view is better than having no adult seat belt law, but still nowhere near as good as having primary enforcement, where cops need no other reason than an unused seat belt to pull you over.

For example, this Massachusetts paper wants the tougher law.

Here's the justification:

As a result of increased awareness and police enforcement, the overall national seat belt use in 2004 was 80 percent, an all-time high. While seat-belt use in Massachusetts has been on a steady climb, the commonwealth is not setting any speed records. Only 63 percent of Massachusetts residents wear a seat belt when driving or riding in a vehicle.

Yes it’s smart to buckle up, but too much talk about seat belt use rates can obscure the bigger picture. CIOT supporters tell us again and again that this effort isn’t about writing tickets, it’s about saving lives.

But based on that measure, seat belt rebels like Massachusetts and New Hampshire are doing very well. Massachusetts has the second-lowest highway fatality rate in the nation and New Hampshire has the fourth-lowest. Vermont, which does not have primary enforcement either, enjoys the nation’s safest roads.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the hot national housing market is spawning an organic revitalization of urban neighborhoods unaffected by traditional "urban renewal" programs:

Now the national real-estate boom is starting to transform some neighborhoods long resistant to government or philanthropic recovery programs. The five-year-old boom in residential housing initially was concentrated heavily on economically vibrant cities like San Diego, Miami and New York. In the past couple of years, it has spread to some less obvious places, including long-distressed sections of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Oakland, Calif. Parts of these cities have turned into hot real-estate markets largely because their house prices still seem like bargains compared with those in more glamorous cities nearby.

The lowest mortgage interest rates in four decades have spurred spending on housing across the country and sent individual investors searching for real-estate opportunities much as they used to scour the financial news for the latest initial public offering. Cities are promoting blighted areas as investment opportunities, offering a lure many prosperous suburbs lack: vacant property suitable for developers.

Full article here.

Actually, "organic" may be somewhat of a stretch, as cities like Baltimore have gotten heavily involved in acquiring blighted housing (or demolishing aging public housing) and turning it over to private entities for redevelopment. The article correctly points out that interest in up-and-coming urban neighborhoods may fall off sharply as interest rates rise. So cities that want to keep the momentum moving in the positive direction would be wise to follow Joel Kotkin's advice (see my previous post) and focus on the basics, like reducing crime, reforming failing urban school systems, and improving infrastructure.

Joel Kotkin has an interesting piece in The New Republic that takes aim at some of the prevalent myths surrounding America's so-called "urban renaissance":

In some respects, of course, the last ten or so years have been a good time for American cities. Most urban areas, particularly New York, became safer and cleaner than they were in the '80s. And, certainly, we are no longer living in the dark days of the '70s--an era symbolized by the 1981 cult classic Escape from New York. These trends have made urban life more attractive to some and thereby stimulated residential construction as well as slowed--and in some cases reversed--the flight from cities of jobs.

But these developments notwithstanding, the renaissance of American cities has been greatly overstated--and this unwarranted optimism is doing a disservice to cities themselves. Urban politics has become self-satisfied and triumphalist, content to see cities promote the appearance of thriving while failing to serve the very people--families, immigrants, often minorities--who most need cities to be decent, livable places. The myths that have grown up surrounding the urban renaissance are now often treated as fact. As an urban historian who lives in a major city, I believe that recognizing these myths for what they are is a critical first step towards the redemption of urban America.

. . . .

Much of the current progressive agenda--with its anti-growth economic bias--does little to boost the competitive status of urban centers. Cities must return to a progressive focus on fixing their real problems--that is, the problems of the majority of the people who live there--not serving the interests of artists, hipsters, and their wealthy patrons. Right now school reform is often hostage to the power of teachers' unions. City budgets, which could be applied to improving economic infrastructure, are frequently bloated by, among other things, excessive public sector employment and overgenerous pensions. In the contest for the remaining public funds, the knitted interests of downtown property holders, arts foundations, sports promoters, and nightclub owners often overwhelm those of more conventional small businesses and family-oriented neighborhoods that could serve as havens for the middle class.

Ultimately, a new urban progressivism must challenge this power axis. It would force local governments to focus on the most important historical work of cities: the transformation of newcomers to America into successful, middle-class citizens. This has undergirded the emergence of all great modern cities, from fifteenth-century Venice to seventeenth-century Amsterdam to twentieth-century New York. The American metropolis can be more than a way station for the wealthy young and part-time destination for the nomadic rich. It can be a place where average people live, thrive, and build communities across lines of race and class. Now that would be a cool city.

Read the whole thing (free registration required). Among the myths in Kotkin's crosshairs are (1) that cities are gaining population; (2) city populations are becoming more educated; and (3) "cool" cities attract the best jobs. Definitely worth a read.

(hat tip: Planetizen)

Via Foxnews

Seven of 10 classroom teachers in a tiny school district resigned after a colleague was fired for helping an 11-year-old girl who was left alone in a playground to pick up rocks as punishment.

At contract time in March, Superintendent Dan Doerhoff recommended firing Price, a popular teacher who had had good performance evaluations, for insubordination. Seven other teachers then chose not to return their contracts.

If only school principals would stop living up to the petty caricature of a school principal. Of course, if they did the writers for the Simpsons and other shows would have less real-life material to draw from.

Think the anti-outsourcing hoopla would die down after the presidential election?

Just in the first three months of 2005, over 112 anti-outsourcing bills are coursing their way through some 40 states in the US. In 2004, there were 107 bills in 33 states, of which only five became law, says the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) in a new study.

It’s a good time to remember an often-overlooked point that Daniel Drezner highlighted in Foreign Affairs a while back:

Boston University Professor Nitin Joglekar has examined the effect of outsourcing on large financial firms and found that less than 20 percent of workers affected by outsourcing lose their jobs; the rest are repositioned within the firm.

According to the Washington Post, Endangered Species Act reform is in the works:

Lawmakers from both parties are pushing to transform the nation's approach to protecting imperiled species, making it tougher to add to the federal list of endangered animals and plants, and providing new incentives for landowners to protect crucial habitats.

A brief hearing yesterday kicked off the drive to retool one of the nation's best known and most controversial environmental laws, which currently protects about 1,800 species believed to be on the verge of extinction. Enacted in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has come under fire from both the left and the right.

Republicans and Democrats say they largely agree on what aspects of the act need work. Although they differ on how to fix them, they have engaged in a dialogue over the most problematic features. With a moderate Republican in charge of drafting the Senate bill, some said prospects for rewriting the law may be better than they have been in more than a decade.

. . . .

For years, property owners have complained that the government has been too ready to declare species in trouble and place valuable land off-limits to development. Environmentalists, on the other hand, say the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has moved too slowly in safeguarding struggling populations.

. . . .

Areas of agreement include the idea of providing federal grants or tax incentives to landowners for maintaining key habitat for imperiled plants and animals. And both sides favor changing the process of designating critical habitat so that land-use restrictions would take effect only after federal scientists devise a formal recovery plan. That would ease the constraints on developing private property.

The full article is here. CEI's Myron Ebell offers some perspective on ESA's failures:

There is one fundamental reason why the ESA does a lot more harm than good. The ESA penalizes people for being good stewards of their land. Landowners whose management practices create and preserve habitat for an endangered plant or animal open their land to being regulated under ESA. And contrary to what many environmental pressure groups claim, ESA regulation does not simply prevent development or changes in land use. Customary land uses and practices, such as farming, livestock grazing, and timber production, have regularly been prohibited, even when such practices help to maintain the species’ habitat.

Naturally, faced with the regulatory taking of their property, people sought compensation under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Unfortunately, although compensation is due whenever government physically seizes even an inch of private property, the Supreme Court has ruled that compensation is not required for a regulatory taking as long as the property retains any possible use and any value. An ESA listing can destroy 90 percent or more of the value of a piece of property and prohibit its traditional use without triggering the Fifth Amendment’s just compensation clause.

The ESA thus encourages landowners to take the steps necessary to ensure that their land does not contain suitable habitat for any endangered or potentially endangered species. Since around 80 percent of listed species depend largely on private land for their habitat, the effects of this perverse incentive clearly continue to be catastrophic for endangered animals and plants. Given the logic underlying the ESA, it is not entirely fanciful to imagine that rural America will eventually be paved over.

Reason's Michael De Alessi has written extensively on ESA's failures and the need for a market-based approach to conservation. Visit Reason's Private Conservation Resource Center for more. And be sure to check out his January 2005 study, Conservation Through Private Initiative, which suggests that:

Human ingenuity and the entrepreneurial spirit underlie most conservation success stories. Under private ownership and stewardship, problem-solvers become remarkably resourceful at protecting and enhancing the value of what they own, for reasons as broad as profit and aesthetics, and ranging from fisheries and forests to backyard gardens. No one questions the impetus for a cleaner, healthier, species-rich environment. How we get there, however, is another question. The most promising efforts to address the perverse incentives typically created by command and control regulation are the use of market mechanisms and performance measures, both of which rely on getting the incentives more inline with the desired results, and on tapping into the same human ingenuity that drives commercial activity. Using performance indicators to measure and acknowledge conservation success, especially in the context of using the land is the next logical step.

Yesterday's New Zealand Herald ran an article by Owen McShane that hits the nail on the head regarding attempts by planners to regulate retail in the interest of protecting "traditional," main street retailers:

Where regulators have tried to protect mainstreet shopping, they have...devastated the retailing sector.

The regulators are well-intentioned - they do not set out to reduce employment in retailing, raise rents and prices, and choke off innovation and change.

So why do they get it so wrong? We expect our planners to look to the future. Why do they attempt to lock us into the retailing patterns of the past?

The problem lies with their belief in a false theory. You will have problems with your navigation if you believe the earth is flat.

The reports and planning documents that regulators use to justify their protection of mainstreet retailing centres and their opposition to "big box retail" and shopping malls claim consistently that protecting "the traditional retail centres" will maintain, or even restore, "vibrant local communities".

This is a seductive claim. Sadly it is wrong. Places do not create communities. Communities create places.

Read the whole thing.

(hat tip: Planetizen)

Do Arab Americans do better than the average American?

Do they do better than Arabs in Europe?

Better than Arabs in Arab nations?

Daniel Drezner has the scoop.

Boise tops the Forbes “Best Places for Business and Careers” list. Southern metros were particularly well represented, accounting for six of the top 10.

As for the worst, LA had the highest business costs, Youngstown, OH had the worst job growth, and in a regional double-shot Modesto, CA had the highest unemployment rate and Stockton, of all places, had the highest crime rate.

Last week I wrote about a bill moving through the Texas House of Representatives that would force local governments to compensate landowners when strict land use regulations reduce property values (see here). House Bill 2833 passed the House on May 10th and is now under consideration in the Senate.

According to the Dallas Morning News:

A hurricane of a property rights bill that officials feared would take away their control over zoning and planning matters has been weakened. But it could still bankrupt some Texas cities and prevent others from controlling their growth, opponents say.

The bill, approved by the House, would require cities to compensate property owners whose land values are eroded by city regulations. For example, if a property owner buys an acre of land in Dallas but is restricted to building only on a portion of the property, the city would have to compensate the owner for the lost value of the land.

And despite amendments that clarify the bill's intention, city officials still worry that the legislation could hinder their ability to develop comprehensive plans and that it could carry potential hidden disasters.

. . . .

The battle now moves to the Senate, where the rhetoric about the bill is escalating, and the bill could be approved by a Senate committee this week.

. . . .

The bill's House author, Rep. Robby Cook, D-Eagle Pass, said the proposal was aimed at curbing the effect on property owners of Austin's Save Our Springs water quality ordinance – an initiative approved by voters in 1992 to limit development and curb pollution in the Barton Springs Watershed – and similar regulations.

"It's a backdoor way to take your property," Mr. Cook said of such legislation. "It's really designed to stop development."

He said the bill would simply protect landowners from cities that essentially "take" their property through regulations and don't compensate them for the loss. The proposal calls for such compensation when – through a regulation – a city limits the ability of a property owner to use less than 45 percent of the land.

The whole article is here.

And be sure to check out the bill's status on the Texas Legislature's website to read the amended text and track it as it navigates through the Legislature.

Observers of the environmental movement have surely noticed a great deal of soul searching of late as it struggles with growing pains; the early, euphoric successes of the movement in the 1970's are solidly in the rear view mirror as the movement struggles to stay afloat amid waning public interest, a more skeptical political environment, and the challenge of remaining relevant in a context in which the low-hanging fruit of environmental policy has already been plucked.

An interesting perspective on this soul searching comes via the Pacific News Service, in which California community activist Orson Aguilar opines on the divide between the environmental movement and those interested in urban socio-economic issues, such as affordable housing and local/community-scale economic development. In "Why I Am Not an Environmentalist," he writes:

For communities like mine, environmentalism has seemed to be about preserving places most of us will never see. Even when environmentalism has focused on problems that affect urban communities, such as air pollution or lead poisoning, it has pointedly avoided addressing my community's desperate need for economic development. Environmentalists do not talk about the importance of a living wage or affordable housing because, we are told, those are not environmental problems. Foundations feed this problem by failing to recognize minorities and urban city residents as prominent stakeholders in the environmental arena.

While many leaders of the environmental movement have a deep and abiding interest in social and economic equity, that concern is largely absent from their work because it is "not their job." The same mistake is made by every other progressive movement, including the civil rights movement. We have become trapped in narrow categorical definitions of ourselves instead of developing a comprehensive understanding of what values we stand for.

For those of us that follow the issue of smart growth with a critical eye, tensions like this have been obvious for some time. To a certain extent, the movement has been trying to maintain the veneer of being a big tent in which advocates of many progressive issues can come together to advance a win-win solution. But underneath this veneer lurks a bundle of fundamental contradictions.

For instance, on the surface, urban growth boundaries are a favorite policy tool adored by smart growthers, as they aim to focus development within existing communities and urbanized areas while preserving nearby green space. But if you step back and assess the idea critically, the contradictions jump out immediately: limiting land available for new housing results in higher housing prices within the UGB, pricing more and more at the lower income scale out of the area. This then pushes growth further out to more distant areas, which effectively perpetuates the "sprawl" and traffic congestion that smart growth is intended to cure (see here for a discussion about how this is playing out in the D.C. metro area). In effect, the "cure" is worsening the "disease."

So while smart growth is supposed to be all about balancing man, economy, and nature, there really is no balance once you look past the rhetorical flourishes to the actual, real-world policy implications. And that's why Aguilar's piece is particularly relevant...because it refocuses the discussion back to finding a true balance between economy and environment. And this opens the door to innovative market-oriented urban and environmental policy solutions better suited to successfully achieving that delicate balancing act.

Burt Rutan is letting NASA have it again, this time at the International Space Development Conference:

He said the agency is wasting taxpayers' money on a deeply flawed space shuttle and paper spaceships that never get beyond the planning stage.

According to Rutan, NASA should get out of the human spaceflight business and leave the flying to the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.

Here’s a plan that would be a significant change to NASA’s contracting practices:

[A] space startup called Transformational Space stole the show with a full-size mockup of its proposed shuttle replacement.

Although Transformational Space, or t/Space, has chosen not to bid for the contract to replace the shuttle, the company nevertheless hopes to beat big aerospace companies to orbit with a four-person crew transfer vehicle, or CXV, that NASA can use to send astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond.

Instead of bidding for the full amount ($500 million) it needs to develop the ship, as the primes will do, t/Space is asking NASA for small increments of development money in exchange for achieving significant milestones.

NASA is sitting up and taking notice; the space agency has already awarded t/Space $6 million for developing the CXV concept and building flight-test hardware that Scaled Composites will fly this week.

T/Space's ship differs from those proposed by the primes in one other important respect: it will fly paying passengers. After supplying NASA with the ships it needs, t/Space plans to offer flights to anyone who can afford them.

But there will certainly be risks with private space flight. How will America react?

Space tourism is the prize most of the space entrepreneurs have their eyes on, and one of the biggest points of contention is how to safely fly well-heeled tourists and handle litigious relatives who don't take kindly to fatal accidents.

For Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company started by Richard Branson last year, the best technology is obvious: a spaceship powered by a non-explosive mix of nitrous oxide and synthetic rubber launched from a high altitude airplane. This is the approach Scaled Composites used to create the world's first commercial astronaut last year, and the one that t/Space also champions.

But other companies, including Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, plan to fly passengers on good old-fashioned, two-stage rockets fueled by explosive kerosene and liquid oxygen.

That prospect keeps Whitehorn awake at night. If some garage rocket scientist blows himself up trying to get into space, the U.S. government may well put the brakes on the whole industry.

Whole story is here.

And here's Rutan taking on the FAA.

In Sunday's Orange County Register, Steven Greenhut comments on Joel Kotkin's new book, The City: A Global History:

Perhaps [Kotkin's] most fascinating insight: Cities need a sense of moral purpose to survive and flourish. It's not enough, he argues, for them to serve merely as a center of commerce. It's that idea that helps me the most as I continue my critique of the modern planning movements.

In a recent interview, Kotkin complained to me that New Urbanists and others who want to recreate urban living as a rebuke to suburbanization tend to miss this almost-spiritual side to city planning. The hip, vital cities modern planners are most enamored of, such as Portland, Ore., are geared almost exclusively toward "young people and the nomadic rich and trustafarians," those childless trust-fund elites who are seeking high culture but eschew child-bearing and religion.

In Europe, he said, all the major cities are mostly devoid of children. Yet planners refuse to acknowledge that "the evolution of suburbia is part of the continuum of urban history." He calls the people who run cities the worst enemies of them, as their hamfisted regulations, the destruction of schools and the bloated bureaucracies are unfriendly toward average middle-income families.

He derides the emphasis on hipness rather than on traditional city planning that focuses on good infrastructure, good schools, safe neighborhoods. Unfortunately, people come out of the planning schools with the same ideas, he said. So those who don't fit this narrow demographic move to the suburbs, where they are criticized by the urban elites who accuse them of selfishly promoting sprawl. In the book, Kotkin makes the case by comparing the new planning ideas to the lessons of the past. "Broader demographic trends also pose severe long-term questions for these cities," he wrote. "The decline in the urban middle-class family - a pattern seen in both the late Roman Empire and eighteenth-century Venice - deprives urban areas of a critical source for economic and social vitality."

The whole article is here. Haven't read the book yet, but the idea of tracing the history of urbanization to gain insights on modern times would seem to me to be a valuable contribution to the planning literature. It would be good for planning students to be exposed to reading like this, as it places their work in a larger context that may not be obvious to them from their vantage point.

Dan Klein’s work is getting lots of much-deserved attention from the NYT’s John Tierney. Here’s the latest example:

[Adam] Smith knew that some people professed love for all humanity, but he realized that a man's love for "the members of his own family" is "more precise and determinate, than it can be with the greater part of other people." Hence his famous warning not to rely on the kindness of strangers outside your family: if you want bread, it's better to count on the baker's self-interest rather than his generosity.

This has never been a popular bit of advice because selfishness is not admired in human societies ... We know it exists, but it feels wrong. We are born with an instinct for altruism because we evolved in clans of hunter-gatherers who would not have survived if they hadn't helped one another through hard times.

The result is an enduring political paradox: we no longer live in clans small enough for altruism to be practical, but we still respond to politicians who promise to make us all part of one big selfless community. We want everyone to be bound together with a shared set of values, a yearning that Daniel Klein, an economist, dubs the People's Romance in the summer issue of The Independent Review.

The People's Romance is his explanation for why so many Americans have come to love bigger government over the past century. Their specific objectives in Washington differed - liberals stressed charity and social programs for all, while conservatives promoted patriotism and spending on national security - but they both expanded the government in their quest for a national sense of shared purpose.

The result, though, has not been one happy community because America is not a clan with shared values. It is a huge group of strangers with leaders who are hardly altruists - they have their own families and needs.

Here’s the whole article.

Here’s Klein’s working paper.

Here’s a shorter article by Klein on the same topic.

It’s Don Boudreaux vs. David Barron.

Check it out here.

Click It or Ticket, the annual exercise in highway nanny-statism, is back.

``It's not about writing tickets. It's about saving lives,'' said a law enforcement rep from Florida.

That’s one of the talking points, but does CIOT save lives?

Go here and here for some of my takes on this.

It makes sense, actually, if you accept the dubious proposition that government job programs work. Read here.

Steve Austin, 60, finds it ironic that the state is outsourcing an information technology job that he would have been qualified to do.

. . .

Sen. Deanna Hanna, D-Lakewood, believes the case illustrates why state jobs paid for with taxpayer money should not be outsourced. "My citizens are going without jobs," she said. "Our taxes should be paying the salaries of people who live in our country."

Such is the stuff and nonsense of so much of the debate on offshoring. Do we really think the government should be in the business of creating jobs? Regardless of the cost?

Phooey. Doesn't work anyway. Driving up taxes by not taking the most efficient course to deliver government services will destroy more jobs in the long run than offshoring.

Related to this post is more evidence that a little bad press doesn’t mean much if you get to keep your job:

Citizens Against Government Waste has ranked Mr. Stevens No. 1 every year since it began calculating lawmakers' proficiency at bringing home pork in 2000. In 2005, Mr. Stevens brought home more than $645 million, or $984.85 for each Alaskan, the group says.

And yet there’s always another story like this:

Tom Wilson is faced with a problem that many city administrators would envy: How to spend $1.5 million on a bus stop.

Mr. Wilson, Anchorage's director of public transportation, has all that money for a new and improved bus stop outside the Anchorage Museum of History and Art thanks to Republican Sen. Ted Stevens -- whom Alaskans call "Uncle Ted" for his prodigious ability to secure federal dollars for his home state.

Mr. Wilson is prepared to think big.

The bus stop there now is a simple steel-and-glass, three-sided enclosure. Mr. Wilson wants better lighting and seating. He also likes the idea of heated sidewalks that would remain free of snow and ice, and he thinks electronic signs would be nice.

"It is going to be a showpiece stop," Mr. Wilson said.

He acknowledges that the money has put him in an awkward position.

"We have a senator that gave us that money, and I certainly won't want to appear ungrateful," he said.

At the same time, he does not want the public to think the city is wasting the money. So "if it only takes us $500,000 to do it, that's what we will spend."

That is still five to 50 times the typical cost of bus stop improvements in Anchorage.

The money was contained in a $388 billion spending bill passed by Congress in November, when Mr. Stevens was head of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Here's the whole story.

(Thanks to Dan for the tip.)

Both NASA’s space shuttle and Virgin Galactic’s passenger service to suborbital space have been delayed.

Virgin Galactic initially announced plans to launch its commercial space liner by 2007, but [Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic] now pegs its debut for 2008 or 2009.

NASA’s problems are technical in nature, Virgin’s fall under a different category:

It is not the technical issues, or even the financing, that is causing concern. It is uncertainty about US licensing requirements.

"At this point we are not able to even view Scaled Composites' designs for the commercial space vehicle," Mr Whitehorn testified before the House committee.

"After US government technology-transfer issues are clarified, and addressed if deemed necessary, we hope to place a firm order for the spacecraft," he said.

Whole story is here.

(Thanks to Don for the tip.)

See this related post.

The people in 3 Arizona cities voted down laws that would restirct Wal-Marts coming to town.

Voters also seemed to go with Economics 101 rather than heed warnings from activist groups that challenged the projects because they were too expensive, too invasive or too destructive to small business.

Antonio Villaraigosa will be L.A.?s next mayor, but what?s with all this landslide talk?

Peter Gordon explains:

The LA Times reports that of the City's 3.8 million, only 1.4 million are registered to vote. Of these, the winner received 18.6% while the incumbent came in with 13.1%. More than 68% of those registered stayed away. All of this in a City where approximately 1.9 million are eligible to vote (over 18 and citizens). The proportions, then, were more like 13.7 % for the winner, 9.7% for the loser and 75% for "whatever".

And Joel Kotkin worries about the rise of ?cool? mayors:

Villaraigosa represents the latest trend in big-city mayors: the cool chief executive. The world is now filled with such characters, usually handsome and telegenic, who often seem more like celebrity endorsers for their cities than tough-minded chief executives ?

Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick, for instance, was elected in part because he sold himself as "the hip-hop mayor" who would turn the Motor City into the next "cool city." Kilpatrick's recent missteps ? such as having family members use a luxury SUV leased at public expense ? have somewhat tarnished his appeal. The city's continuing descent into the later stages of municipal collapse has not helped. But other "cool" mayors are still getting good reviews, from the media and, in many places, from voters as well. Indeed, several of these ? Denver's John Hickenlooper, Baltimore's Martin O'Malley and San Francisco's Gavin Newsom ? were recently among Time magazine's top U.S. mayors ?

[N]either O'Malley nor Newsom has been able so far to rescue his city from continuing economic decline. O'Malley's strategy in crime infested Baltimore ? based on attracting gays and bohemians ? strikes some as slightly superficial. What's the point of being hip and cool if you're being mugged?

Where have all the crusty pothole-filling mayors gone?

Guess who said "There is no sense for us to try to protect or preserve high-tech jobs in America or block efforts by American companies to outsource. Our economic future is wedded to technological change, and most of the jobs of the future are still ours to invent."? Not some corporate hack, but Robert Reich, democrat and former Labor Secretary for President Clinton.

The offshore outsourcing issue is full of things that defy conventional wisdom and common perceptions. My colleague Ted Balaker and I explore them and plenty more about offshoring in our new study "Offshoring and Public Fear: Assessing the Real Threat to Jobs." It is a handbook for understanding the many facets of the offshore outsourcing issue.

You can get the study here or a summary version here.

Even on the brink of a partisan meltdown, Democratic and Republican senators found something Tuesday that they could agree on: a $295-billion highway bill that provides funds for popular traffic-easing projects.

The measure, approved 89 to 11, has drawn a veto threat from the White House, which considers it too costly in the face of federal budget deficits since it exceeds, by about $11 billion, a spending cap set by the Bush administration.
The legislation funds highway, mass transit and traffic safety projects through 2009. The last highway bill expired in September 2003; because of conflicts between Congress and the White House over spending, temporary extensions have been used to fund highway projects since then.

The Senate bill must be reconciled with a $284-billion House measure that falls within the president's spending limit but has drawn the wrath of deficit hawks because it includes thousands of projects sought by lawmakers for their districts.

Read on.

Members of Congress know they’re going to catch all kinds of flak for adding pork projects, and yet they do it anyway. In fact, they’re doing more and more of it.

It’s just a simple, political calculation. The pork helps them more than it hurts them.

Pretty depressing.

The Houston Chronicle ran a piece on Sunday by local blogger Tory Gattis calling for a combination of (1) creating a network of managed lanes throughout the Houston metro area, and (2) opening up competitive express transit services to private competition:

Our current HOV network is empty and underutilized much of the day, overly focused on downtown (which has only 7 percent of area jobs), has limited entrances and exits, and only runs one direction at a time while the dispersed nature of Houston's many job centers means several freeways are congested both directions morning and evening. We need to fill in gaps and augment the existing HOV lanes with a comprehensive network of Managed eXpress, or MaX, lanes that can link all our neighborhoods to all our job centers. This can be rapidly accomplished by converting the left lanes of freeways like the 610 Loop to EZ-tag toll lanes with congestion-based pricing. By adjusting pricing by time-of-day (free outside of rush hours), the lanes can move the maximum number of vehicles at maximum speed (which would actually reduce the number of cars in the remaining free lanes), while still being free to buses, van- and carpools.

To get the best use out of this express lane network, Metro should open up express commuter transit services to private companies by providing a simple subsidy per passenger-mile (partially funded by the new MaX lane tolls). These private transit companies will offer more nonstop services from more neighborhoods to more job centers with more convenient schedules, increasing commuter transit usage and reducing solo drivers on the freeways...Some may even offer novel services like wireless Internet access, which could attract even more riders. They could also expand beyond the existing Park & Ride lots by, for instance, cutting deals with grocery stores to use their underutilized parking lots as mini Park & Ride/drop-off centers during workdays. (What grocery store wouldn't want busloads of potential customers dropped off at their doorstep every evening?)

Read the whole thing here. A link to Gattis' blog post on the article is here.

For more on toll lanes and congestion pricing, look no further than Bob Poole's excellent work in Reason's Surface Transportation Resource Center.

And in case you missed it, be sure to check out Bob's recent radio appearance on NPR's Talk of the Nation, in which he discusses HOT lanes and congestion pricing.

Offshore outsourcing, that is.

Seems there’s a law called 122-12 which forbids layoffs in the case of outsourcing deals:

If you think they can't be serious, they are. Just ask Alcatel, which signed a deal a few years ago and laid off hundreds of workers, only to be forced by a French labor court to take a large number of them back.

Whole story is here.

(Nope, not the Newsweek stink.)

News reports often leave readers with the impression that everyone is outsourcing offshore and that anyone’s job could be the next to go overseas.

Don’t hold your breath for improved coverage, at least not from Reuters:

Union employees at Reuters are stepping up their campaign against the wire service's outsourcing of U.S. jobs, most recently transferring the editing and caption writing of photos to its Singapore office and some Internet work to Toronto.

“U.S. jobs”? Reuters is based in the U.K. Are Americans stealing jobs from Brits?

Members of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America have distributed leaflets outside Reuters' office in Times Square. Critical ads also have been placed in Investor's Business Daily and the Columbia Journalism Review, and more are planned for the Web.

But you guys will still be even-handed when covering outsourcing, right? You know, report on how it also creates jobs in the U.S.--stuff like that.

Another thing to bring up is that offshore outsourcing is rarely the cause of job loss. The pattern holds in this case too:

No guild member has received a pink slip because of outsourcing, but six to eight are "at risk" - primarily in the Washington office - because of last month's opening of the global photo-editing desk in Singapore, according to Bill O'Meara, secretary-treasurer of the union's New York local.

Then again there might be some hope for better coverage, particularly since some of Reuter’s work is going to Canada. All those stories featuring sari-clad Indian woman can be misleading for Canada is a much more common outsourcing destination.

The headline proves the case. This article sums up what is wrong with public education, why teachers will continue to be the lowest-scoring students on SAT tests, and why science and math majors and other high-quality teaching prospects will continue to avoid/flee the teaching profession.

At Lucia Mar, 575 Teachers of the Year

Teachers' union decides not to pick a single winner this year to protest Schwarzenegger's merit pay proposal

The Teacher of the Year for the Lucia Mar Unified School District cannot be named within the space of this story.

All 575 instructors in San Luis Obispo County's largest school district are winners, he said. "We all help children in our own special way."

California State Senator Tom McClintock has one of the funniest and really saddest takes on the California education budget in the LA Daily News:

To understand education budget, start with math
By Tom McClintock

Perhaps. But there's an old saying that you can't fill a broken bucket by pouring more water into it. Maybe it's time to fix the bucket.

Following up on Adrian and Ted's posts yesterday regarding the Supreme Court decision on direct consumer purchases from out-of-state wineries (see here and here), UCLA law professor Steven Bainbridge is less than sanguine about the outcome. As he writes on Tech Central Station today:

If the states chose to change their laws so as to ban direct-to-consumer sales by both out-of-state and in-state wineries, those laws almost certainly would be upheld as within the states' powers under the 21st Amendment. Given the considerable power wielded in most of those 24 by the wholesalers and retailers who benefit from bans on direct-to-consumer shipments, as well as lingering Prohibitionist sentiment in some of the more Southern and rural of them, I expect many of the 24 will enact nondiscriminatory bans on direct-to-consumer shipments. At least now, however, their in-state wineries will be on the side of those who favor "freeing the grapes." In states like New York, where there is an important in-state wine industry to counter-balance the power of Ken Starr's "booze boys," direct-to-consumer sales may yet prevail.

Read the whole article here. If this analysis is correct, then wine afficionados may want to go ahead and place their orders now before their state legislatures crash the party.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, home prices are soaring in many of Florida's major metropolitan areas:

Home prices in most major Florida metro areas are rising faster than in other U.S cities, driven by population growth, record-low interest rates and investor speculation that have triggered bidding wars.

The state captured eight of the top 10 spots in a report released Thursday by the National Association of Realtors that ranked price changes in 136 metro areas. It was Florida's best showing ever.

Bradenton led the nation in price growth with a 45.6 percent increase in median home price, to $275,100, between the first quarters of 2004 and 2005.

Orlando ranked eighth with a 28.7 percent gain, to $194,400. The median price actually is higher in the core Orange-Seminole county area, where it hit $204,500 in March.

And for the first time, the median home price in Orlando exceeds the national figure of $188,800.

Across Central Florida, the increases have shown no sign of slowing, with the inventory of available homes dipping to record lows. Realtors talk of houses selling in days, rather than weeks or months.

While population trends, interest rates, and speculative forces may indeed be important drivers of rising home prices in Florida, the article (not surprisingly) makes no mention of another possible culprit: land use regulation under Florida's statewide Growth Management Act. A 2001 Reason study found that:

Evidence on housing-price trends and comprehensive planning in Florida confirms [that] growth-management regulations increased median single-family home sale prices on a statewide level in the period immediately following their implementation. This relationship is evident using summary data as well as more sophisticated statistical analysis that controls for factors such as changing household incomes, single-family home quality, and public policy. Moreover, the effects are sufficiently large to reverse trends in housing affordability in Florida.

While not definitive, housing price trends in 20 Florida metropolitan areas suggested that Florida’s growth management laws may have added as much as 20 percent to the rising cost of housing. On a statewide level,
these effects could have reversed trends that lowered housing affordability during the 1990s.

This study is but one piece of a large and growing body of research that points to a significant regulatory influence on home prices and housing affordability. As my colleague Adrian Moore pointed out last week, even the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has recognized that state and local policies can drive up the cost of housing. See their Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse for more info on this topic.

So while the Sentinel article focuses on housing price drivers seemingly out of the control of public policy, they missed a golden opportunity to shed light on one key area in which public policy -- specifically, growth management regulations -- does influence housing price appreciation.

If you listen to people like Lou Dobbs, you might get the impression that our nation—the flag, apple pie, baseball, everything—will get swallowed by China. After all, China has lots of people and they’re willing to work cheap.

But other foreign threats have come and gone—weren’t we supposed to be property of Japan by now?—and there are many things wrong with the China-is-taking-over-the-world view.

For example:

China's booming economy and low manufacturing costs have made it one of the world's most popular foreign investment destinations. Yet the country's payroll levies--when applied--make it the world's second-worst spot in terms of tax misery. Moreover, troubles in China's pension system make it unlikely that relief from this burden will be felt any time soon. High taxes and rising wages will ultimately threaten the country's competitiveness.

…

Social-security-driven payroll taxes on employers of as much as 45%, levels well above those of most of Europe's welfare states, catch executives at the wave of companies investing in China for the first time off guard, says Nora Wu, a partner specializing in pensions in PricewaterhouseCoopers' Shanghai office. "Such contributions are hidden costs sometimes overlooked by companies during their feasibility studies," she says.

A typical, visible (foreign-owned) manufacturer in coastal China might think it can hire college graduates for $5,000 a year. But to cover his own taxes, the worker will want to get at least $6,000. And the employer will pay north of 40% in payroll tax against that salary, so the effective salary cost for the employer is close to $9,000. For higher-end staff, where China's 45% top personal income tax rate kicks in even if payroll taxes are capped, there's a similar accelerator effect.

…

Whereas China has the dubious distinction of having Asia's greatest tax misery, rival India has negligible payroll taxation and one of the lightest overall burdens.

It’s worth taking a look at the huge improvements India has made.

This was India in the 1970s:

[C]ustoms duties were often above 200 per cent on many products. Excise duties ranged between 2 and 100 per cent spread across 24 different rates, not counting much higher duties on tobacco and petroleum and many specific (that is, per unit) duties.

Inputs were routinely taxed and credit on taxation of inputs was rare. So "cascading" of taxes was the norm. Direct taxes were even more bizarre. In 1973-74, the personal income tax boasted eleven different slabs with rates ranging from 10 to 85 per cent. With a surcharge of 15 per cent the top marginal rate was effectively 97.75.

Thus, for every additional 100 rupees earned you got to keep just over 2 rupees! Actually since all wealth was also taxed at significant rates, the cumulative incidence of income and wealth taxes frequently exceeded 100 per cent. The predictable result was widespread evasion and avoidance.
…

Company taxes were typically around 60 per cent and varied across equity holding patterns. Tax administration was equally complex and arbitrary.

Read the whole article to find out how things turned around.

And this doesn’t mean that India is taking over the world either. Using the rhetoric of war doesn’t work well for trade, for trade allows for many victors.

As Ted notes below, today the Supreme Court smote arbitrary restricitons by state governments on internet sales of wine. Thanks to the the merry band of litigators at Institute for Justice!

"This landmark ruling is a victory for consumers and small businesses and a defeat for economic protectionism. It demonstrates that in the era of the Internet, the Court will vindicate the principles of free trade that made this country great.”

. . .

“This victory is about much more than wine—it is about the freedom of small businesses to operate without arbitrary and anti-competitive government regulation getting in their way. Now that we have set this important precedent, we’ll work to expand on it to help other entrepreneurs who face similar government-imposed good-old-boy networks."

To the Supremes!

Wine lovers may buy directly from out-of-state vineyards, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, striking down laws banning a practice that has flourished because of the Internet and growing popularity of winery tours.

The 5-4 decision overturns laws in New York and Michigan, which supporters said were aimed at protecting local wineries and limiting underage drinkers from purchasing wine without showing proof of age. In all, 24 states have laws barring interstate shipments.

The court said the state bans are discriminatory and anticompetitive.

Read on, here.

For lots of background info on this, see Todd Zywicki.

My colleague Adam Summers pointed out this interesting column.

How does the BLS know that there were 274,000 new jobs? Not by counting them. It has a statistical formula which includes the likely creation of new businesses and the likely demise of old businesses. This is called the birth-death ratio.

Let me assure you, the journalists who report the employment figures do not report the following. That’s because hardly anyone knows about it, and of those who do, hardly anyone understands it, and of those who do understand it, hardly anyone knows what the BLS formula is or how the samples are made. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does publish a page about the birth-death ratio.

. . .

So, the corporations used their statistically overfunded pension funds as a convenient ATM machine. The pension funds became a source of operating expenses, especially medical costs. In other words, the corporations did exactly what the trustees of the Social Security Trust Fund have done ever since 1938.

and more. Again, the whole thing is here.

Such an assertion probably only startles you if you are a transportation planner. To most people it is common sense, but when is the last time you saw your city adding roads to reduce congestion?

You've probably seen all the recent news reports on the 2005 Urban Mobility Study telling us how bad congestion is and how much time we spend stuck in traffic.

Less attention is paid to the part of the report that discusses the cities that saw the least congestion. Most interesting is that cities that build roads to keep up with travel demand did not experience the congestion growth other cities did! A three page summary of that result is here. Especially check out the graph on p.3.

The crime is that only 4 cities built enough roads to be in that category--Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Tulsa and Anchorage.

It's time metro area leaders get serious about adding capacity to relieve congestion. New roads or expanding existing roads, we can build our way out of congestion. It ain't easy, but it can be done.

Especially at the IRS. . .

Have you seen how planners set out to create congestion in order to improve our quality of life. No kidding, a great example from Sacramento, CA.

City of Sacramento residents may have to accept sitting in traffic longer to make their hometown a better place to live, say those working on the city's general plan update…

In yet another example of the backlash against heavy-handed land use planning that's occuring nationwide, the Wisconsin legislature is considering abolishing the state's 1999 law requiring all counties and local governments to develop 'smart growth' plans. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The [Wisconsin] Legislature's budget committee voted Wednesday to abolish the Smart Growth program, which requires counties and local governments to adopt comprehensive long-range land use and development plans by 2010.

In a decision that surprised local government and environmental leaders, the Joint Finance Committee voted 10-6 to repeal the Smart Growth requirement passed in 1999.

The committee also voted to end the annual $2 million state government now gives Wisconsin's 1,940 local governments to help them meet the 2010 deadline for county-by-county development plans.

The vote added repeal of that law to the 2005-'07 state budget that the committee is building. For it to become law, the move would have to be approved by Gov. Jim Doyle and the full Legislature.

Read the whole thing.

Coming on the heels of Oregon's controversial Measure 37 initiative passed late last year (see here, here, and here for more), the Texas House is considering House Bill 2833, which would force local governments to compensate landowners when strict environmental regulations reduce property values by more than 25 percent. Bill 2833 appears to be much more limited in scope than Measure 37, which allows for compensation (or waived regulations) for zoning, environmental, and a variety of other sorts of regulations that reduce private property values.

According to the Austin American-Statesman:

Start with the name: the Texas Landowners Conservancy.

It evokes environmental groups, such as the Nature Conservancy and the Hill Country Conservancy, conjuring backgrounds as green and landscapes as lush as those on the LandownersConservancy's Web site.

Yet the group has created more ire and trepidation among Central Texas environmentalists, and some government officials, than any developer in a decade. In just three months of existence, the Landowners Conservancy has shown that is has deep pockets, powerful political connections and strong ties to developers, some of whom stand to reap bigger profits if the group can convince lawmakers that cities should compensate landowners for strict environmental regulations.

. . . .

The issue in question is House Bill 2833, a measure written by Landowners Conservancy lawyers. The bill would force local governments to pay landowners when strict environmental rules cut into land values by more than 25 percent.

The Landowners Conservancy, along with a score of development representatives and property rights advocates, say the bill gives them needed protections against government takings of property.

. . . .

The Landowners Conservancy has spent much of the past two weeks trying to reassure lawmakers that the bill would not force cities to compensate landowners for zoning restrictions, smoking bans, sexually oriented business prohibitions and other regulations that might devalue property.

Though the group's battle cry is fairly broad — "Just compensation for land takings," according to its Web site — its leaders insist that the bill's focus is quite narrow: Regulations such as the SOS ordinance requiring that developable land have less than 45 percent impervious cover such as buildings and pavement.

Read the whole thing. Keep an eye on this one, folks...

Who'd have thought that HUD would be the source of something this interesting? A website devoted to chronicling “laws, regulations, and policies affecting the development, maintenance, availability, and cost of affordable housing.” More specifically, it’s a database of state and local policies that drive up the cost of housing and are thus a part of the affordable housing problem.

Look for Reason’s Bob Poole and Lisa Snell on ABC’s World News Tonight.

The show airs tonight at 6:30 pm Eastern and Pacific, and the segment is about the growing popularity of toll roads.

This New York Times title says a lot, "No New Refineries in 29 Years? There Might Well Be a Reason." It follows the story of a group trying to build a new refinery in AZ, and digs into why we have had such a long dry spell.

Some tidbits:

Over the last quarter-century, the number of refineries in the United States dropped to 149, less than half the number in 1981. Because companies have upgraded and expanded their aging operations, refining capacity during that time period shrank only 10 percent from its peak of 18.6 million barrels a day. At the same time, gasoline consumption has risen by 45 percent.

and

But even as the United States grows more reliant on foreign gasoline, it will face mounting competition from other buyers where demand is similarly growing, like China and India. "More competition means imports might become more expensive," said Joanne Shore, an analyst with the government's Energy Information Administration.

Over at Reason magazine site, Cato's Marie Gryphon looks at the implications of Utah's challenge to the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

On Monday, Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. fired the first shot in what may become a national rebellion against the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Resisting intense veto pressure from President Bush and federal regulators, Huntsman signed into law a bill that will prioritize Utah's own educational goals over the mandates of the federal act. To preserve its freedom to chart the future of its schools, the Beehive State, Huntsman signaled, is willing to say no to Washington's money.

That's not small change: U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings sternly warns that Utah risks losing up to $76 million in federal funds, or eight percent of the state's education budget, if the law leads educators to disregard NCLB. But how much should Utah, and a growing number of other states, be willing to give up for the freedom to educate children without interference from federal bureaucrats? . . .

That states like Utah are resisting such carrots and sticks is inspiring, and may signal a sea change in the relationship between the federal and state governments when it comes to money and influence.

For half a century the federal government has used the power of the pocketbook, and the ability to borrow lavishly, to homogenize state policies about everything from schools to highways. The long run result is seldom better policy, because supplanting many state experiments with a single system thwarts the innovation that leads to improvement.

whole thing here.

Clint Bolick and Matt Ladner at The Alliance for School Choice send word of another victory for Arizona children:

We are pleased to report that a budget agreement announced today between Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano and Senate President Ken Bennett and Speaker Jim Weirs includes a $5 million scholarship tax credit for corporations. The bill allows for maximum scholarships of $4,200 for grades K-8 and $5,500 for 9-12. Only public school students transferring to private schools are eligible for aid, and 70% of funds must be spent for children with family incomes below 185% of the income limit to qualify for reduced lunches. The credit will begin in 2006.

In addition, a bill eliminating marriage penalties in tax credits will raise the maximum amount which can be donated to a scholarship organization under the individual tax credit program passed in 1997. Originally, the law allowed for a $500 donation. In 2000, the maximum allowable credit for a couple was raised to $625 as part of a referendum. The new legislation will phase in an increase to the maximum credit allowed for a couple to $1,000. The governor has announced that she will sign the school choice provisions as a part of the overall budget agreement.

The feds just signed over $193 million to Charlotte officials to be used for the 9.6 mile light rail line, currently priced at $427 million.

In other words, rail backers have their first line. And the awkward partying-down has begun:

After hammering a golden spike into a section of track, a giddy Mayor Pat McCrory simultaneously hugged [FTA head Jennifer] Dorn and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C.

"We are doing this not for you in this audience," said McCrory, who has been pushing for transit since he became mayor 10 years ago. "We are doing this for future generations."

You got that right. It takes a lot of money to build rail systems, but it also takes a lot of time.

Way back in 1980 local leaders in LA promised a sales tax hike would pay for 11 rail lines. After yet another tax hike and a quarter-century wait, LA has four rail lines.

Then there’s San Diego, which became our nation's first light rail city in 1981. There has been more rail building since, and more is in the works. Yet the local metropolitan planning organization projects that the roadway system will still carry more than 90 percent of commute trips by 2030.

Or take San Jose. Even though light rail opened for business in1988, last year a high-ranking local transit official admitted that the system still had "a long way to go." This is what he told a Mercury News reporter: “Come back in 40 years and then maybe we can write a story on what success there has been.''

In other words, just sit tight till 2044.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has given offshore outsourcing in India a clean bill of health after investigating concerns about the safety of customer data.

The UK’s main City regulator visited 10 outsourcing operations in India to study their operations. Most of these provided services to UK retail banks and insurance companies.

After investigating the governance and data control systems in place for the operations visited, the FSA said offshore outsourcing posed no greater risk to customer data than in-house operations.

Read on.

When patients needed urgent CT scans, MRIs and ultrasounds late at night at St. Mary's Hospital in Waterbury, Conn., emergency room workers used to rouse a bleary-eyed staff radiologist from his bed to read the images. Not anymore.

The work now goes to Arjun Kalyanpur -- 8,000 miles away in Bangalore, India. When it is the middle of the night in Connecticut, Kalyanpur is in the middle of his day, handling calls from St. Mary's and dozens of other American hospitals that transmit pictures to him electronically so he can quickly assess them and advise their doctors.

Kalyanpur runs one of an increasing number of "nighthawk" companies operating in the United States and overseas to take advantage of time-zone differences and the latest technology by having radiologists read images from such far-flung places as Hawaii, India, Australia, Switzerland, Israel and Brazil.

The companies, and the doctors and hospitals using them, say the trend is improving care by guaranteeing that well-rested radiologists are always available, even in the middle of the night, even for the smallest hospitals and in the most rural areas.

…

The advent of remote radiology services was prompted by various factors, including a shortage of radiologists and rapid advances in imaging technology, which has caused a sharp increase in the number of tests. As a result, many hospital radiologists have a hard time keeping up with the demand, especially at night.

"We don't have the staff to have some guy up all night and then come back in the next day," said Robert Lehman, who heads the St. Mary's radiology department. "It's just too dangerous."

In response, St. Mary's and hundreds of other hospitals and radiology practices have begun outsourcing, allowing their staff radiologists to come to work fresh each morning.

"I'm convinced patient care is improved," said Paul Berger of NightHawk Radiology Services. The company, based in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, has about 40 radiologists in Zurich and Sydney serving about 600 U.S. hospitals and other facilities, including 16 in Virginia.

Here's the whole story.

Telemedicine is getting really big, and only some of the outsourcing involved is of the offshore variety.

Another exciting development is eICU, which feeds real time patient data and high resolution images to doctors located in remote locations. It’s often used to supplement on-site staff, and it’s especially useful in boosting the level of care in rural hospitals.

This arrangement is also 24/7 care. Many on-site specialists go home at night, which would be fine if there were no such thing as middle-of-the-night complications.

From a new Heritage study:

[E]ach of [Virginia Railway Express’] 7,800 passengers will require a taxpayer subsidy of $4,481 per year to keep the system going and growing. At that annual cost, taxpayers could lease or buy on credit a new mid-priced car for every VRE rider, and the government would still have millions of dollars left over for schools or tax relief.

Sounds familiar.

From a 2004 St. Louis Federal Reserve study:

Based solely on dollar cost, the annual light-rail subsidies could instead be used to buy an environmentally friendly hybrid Toyota Prius every five years for each poor rider and even to pay annual maintenance costs of $6,000. Increases in pollution would be minimal with the hybrid vehicle, and 7,700 new vehicles on the roadway would result in only a 0.5 percent increase in traffic congestion. And there would still be funds left over—about $49 million per year. These funds could be given to all other MetroLink riders (amounting to roughly $1,045 per person per year) and be used for cab fare, bus fare, etc.

Want more? Go here.

And, you know, cars would really do a lot of good for a lot of poor people.

Billionaires ask for millions.

Twins owner Carl Pohlad is worth about $2.3 billion. He’s the 93rd richest person in America.

But he’s still got his hand out:

A divided Hennepin County Board ended an emotionally draining day of public testimony Tuesday by endorsing a proposed countywide sales tax increase to help build a $478 million baseball stadium in downtown Minneapolis.

The plan now goes to the Legislature.

Here's the whole story.

Journalist bias against single family housing and low density is rarely blatant, but the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey ran a recent column by self-described "journalism educator" Arthur C. Kamin that even turned my head.

Kamin was lamenting New Jersey's "fast track" legislation intended to expedite development review. "First," he writes, "some background", as if he were presenting an objective description of the program, but this is what follows:

"Fast track" would give developers the expedited permits they need to build more houses and highway strip malls, ruin the environment, clog the roadways, destroy quality of life, crowd the schools and, in the process, raise municipal taxes even higher.

That sounds objective, doesn't it?

This is unfortunate, becaues Kamin could have used this as an opportunity to point out the legitimate complaints (and frustrations) developers and builders face when they try to build houses people want to buy--in greenfields or existing urban areas. The Fast Track legislation may have flaws, but Kamin's kind of careless and flippant approach does little, if anything, to fashion better public policy.

I'm sure many people in New Jersey are sleeping better knowing that the news they read in the local paper is written by professionals educated at journalism schools that teach Kamin's version of objectivity.

No wonder Amtrak is struggling.

Peter Gordon has the scoop.

See other recent Amtrak-related posts here, here, and here.

The air is getting cleaner. Even the American Lung Association says so.

ALA found that the number of counties in which unhealthy air was recorded fell significantly for the first time in six years …

Now for the “but.”

But Janice Nolen, the group's director of national policy, emphasized that the counties where problems persist are home to 152 million people, or 52 percent of the U.S. population.

"People's lives are shortened by months to years because of the air they're breathing," she said.

It’s interesting to note how news reports describe those who find fault with the ALA’s work:

Conservatives and energy-industry groups have criticized the Lung Association's methodology, saying it's misleading to give counties "failing" grades for air pollution that might have been recorded at just one monitoring station.

"I wish they would do more informing and less scaring," said Ben Lieberman, a senior environment and energy policy analyst at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group.

As if “advocacy” groups, “consumer rights” groups, unions, government agencies, and others that escape ideological qualifiers are not motivated by ideology.

Joel Schwartz has been on this issue for a long time, and this article by him should be read along with any other news reports on this issue.

For example:

ALA creates the impression that everyone living in areas that exceed EPA's standards is suffering serious health damage or even death. In reality, EPA's pollution standards have become so stringent that exceeding them has few implications for people's health.

…

The California Air Resources Board's Children's Health Study followed more than 1,000 children from ages 10 to 18 during the 1990s and reported no relationship between ozone levels and lung function. The CHS also reported that asthma incidence was 30 percent lower in areas with the highest ozone levels.

Coverage improved somewhat, but bad news is still an easier sell:

This year's most egregious entry was the Oakland Tribune's "Air pollution still abysmal in Bay Area." It would be hard to make a more ridiculous statement about the San Francisco Bay Area's air quality. The entire region complies with all of EPA's air pollution health standards and has some of the cleanest air of any large metropolitan area in the entire world.

Those on the left like to point out how silly W.’s years-old “uniter not divider” line sounds now. But are we really that divided?

The red-state, blue-state obsession overstates the degree of divisiveness among voters, and there’s actually plenty of agreement among the ruling class. Maybe it’s precisely because there is so much agreement on foundational issues—both parties, for example, are keen on keeping Social Security around, they just differ on the means—that smaller disagreements become so heated.

Republicans wouldn’t dare propose ending Social Security, the best they can hope for is sneaking in a touch of personal choice.

Take another step back and it’s clear—as libertarians have pointed out again and again— that the GOP is quite comfortable with an enormous federal government. In fact, the Rs doing a good job of out-spending the Ds.

Check out this new Cato study:

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.

Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.
The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.

The GOP was once effective at controlling nondefense spending. The final nondefense budgets under Clinton were a combined $57 billion smaller than what he proposed from 1996 to 2001. Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the president requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every one of those bills during his first term. Even if Congress passes Bush’s new budget exactly as proposed, not a single cabinet-level agency will be smaller than when Bush assumed office.

Not so long ago there was talk about actually eliminating certain agencies. Now its unrealistic to even give them a trim?

Yesterday it was the internet. Today it’s outsourcing. Tomorrow it might be CAFTA.

The issue: efficiency seeking innovations that stir job security fears, but end up creating more than they destroy.

So it’s a good time to turn to Russell Roberts. Here he’s making his case before Congress:

CAFTA remains highly controversial with concerns that the agreement will cost the United States jobs trying to compete with low-wage workers in Central America working in a less demanding regulatory environment. Having recently traveled to Costa Rica at the invitation of the State Department to speak on trade issues, I was struck by the similarity of the concerns raised in Costa Rica. Surely, little Costa Rica would have no chance of standing up to the United States economy. Jobs would be lost to the powerful American workers.

Both arguments cannot be right.

…

Costa Rica currently has a state monopoly on telecommunications. There are a lot of engineers employed by that state monopoly. What will happen to them when that monopoly is opened to competition by CAFTA? Some will keep their jobs working in areas like land-line phones that the government will probably still be able to provide competitively. Some will find work with American firms now free to operate profitably in Costa Rica. Some will lose their jobs and find work as engineers outside of the telecommunications industry. And some will lose their jobs and find work outside of engineering.

The average Costa Rican who is not an engineer employed by the state-run telecom company will be better off. The average Costa Rican will enjoy lower prices and more choices. That will mean more resources left over to do new things with, new products and services to enjoy that were not affordable before. That in turn will mean more employment in Costa Rica as those products and services expand, offsetting any job losses in the engineering sector.

How interesting that CAFTA hardly touches policies that protect the U.S. sugar industry:

Despite the words “free trade” in the title of the agreement, CAFTA would allow only the tiniest of expansions in sugar imports phased in over 15 years. CAFTA limits the expansion of sugar imports into the United States to less than 2% of US consumption over the next 15 years.

…

So we negotiate a trade agreement with some of the poorest countries in the region but we make sure that one of the things that they do best, grow sugar, is essentially off the table. There is no attractive way to defend that policy when you’re standing in the fields of a poor country.

And yet groups that aim to help the worlds' poor keep insisting that what developing nations need is more aid.

Matt Welch examines how baseball came back to D.C. He points to three lies:

Lie #1: Baseball is hemorrhaging money and needs to downsize.

Lie #2: Major League Baseball won’t take over management of the Expos.

Lie #3: Teams can’t compete without a publicly financed stadium.

Read the whole thing here.

Antisprawl crusaders make a big deal about how low-density housing--with its yards, trees, and furry backyard creatures--damanges the environment. However, I have a hard time believing suburban kids in the U.S. don't know what kind of trees grow in their back yard.

This is apparently the dilemma faced by many kids in England and Scotland, a country often heralded by Smart Growth proponents for its greenbelts, high densities, and strict controls on greenfield development. An article in the on-line issue of the Scotsman.com,for example, laments a survey by the Woodland Trust that found most kids could not identify native trees and 1 out of 7 had never been to "the countryside".

The Trust’s survey blames the sprawl of urban living and states that the majority of the children were unable to identify the leaves of our most common native trees.

But saddest part of the commentary may be the solutin: Programs that take kids from their urban environment to the countryside:

But Scotland’s increasing urban sprawl can’t be all that is to blame. Why aren’t these potential eco-warriors taken out of town on day trips and adventures by their parents? It can’t cost much more than the equivalent in petrol used on the weekly trip to Asda. And once you get there, it’s all completely free.

In suburbs in the U.S., low density living ensures kids have daily exposure to the environment. Having a manicured lawn may be more important for promoting an environmentalist ethic than no lawn at all.