Category: Politics

Bringing it Home: Earmarks

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John Wilke:

Charles Taylor, wealthy businessman and banker, owns at least 14,000 acres of prime land in western North Carolina. He’s also the local congressman. So when he steers federal dollars to his district, sometimes he helps himself, too.

Last year, Mr. Taylor added $11.4 million to a big federal transportation bill to widen U.S. Highway 19, the main road through Maggie Valley, a rural resort town in the Great Smoky Mountains. His companies own thousands of acres near the highway there and had already developed a subdivision called Maggie Valley Leisure Estates.

Mr. Taylor also got $3.8 million in federal funds for a park now being built in downtown Asheville with fountains, tree-shaded terraces and an open-air stage. It’s directly in front of the Blue Ridge Savings Bank, flagship of his financial empire. He is among the richest congressmen with assets of at least $72 million, records show.

The Republican lawmaker is one of at least a half-dozen House members whose public actions in directing special-interest spending known as earmarks have also benefited their private interests or those of business partners, according to congressional, corporate and real-estate records. Among them is a senior Democrat, Rep. Alan Mollohan of West Virginia.

More on earmarks.

Our Federal Tax Dollars (and politicians) at Work: Intrastate Internet Gambling OK, but other Internet Gambling is Not

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Cringely:

Last Saturday the United States Congress passed a port security bill that carried an amendment banning Internet gambling. This was a huge mistake, not because Internet gambling is a good thing (it was already illegal, in fact), but because the new law is either unenforceable or — if it can be enforced — will tear away the last shreds of financial privacy enjoyed by U.S. citizens. The stocks of Internet gambling companies, primarily traded in the UK, went into free-fall as their largest market was effectively taken away. I don’t own any of those shares, but I guarantee you they will fully recover, which is part of what makes this situation so pathetically stupid.

Ironically, many of the senators who voted for this legislation may not have even known the gambling bill was attached, since it didn’t appear in the officially published version of the port bill. But such ignorance is common in Congress, along with a smug confidence that people and institutions can be compelled to comply with laws, no matter how complex and arcane. The amendment was a surprise late addition, pushed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has presidential ambitions and reportedly sees this battle against Internet gambling as part of his eventual campaign platform.

Only the new law isn’t really against Internet gambling at all, since it specifically authorizes intrastate Internet gambling, imposing on the net the artificial constraint of state boundaries. So the law that is supposed to end Internet gambling for good will actually make the practice more common, though evidently out of the hands of foreigners, which in this case includes not just operators from the UK but, if you live in South Carolina as I do, it also includes people from Florida and New York. Let a million local poker hands be dealt.

What the new law actually tries to control is the payment of gambling debts through the U.S. banking system, making such practices illegal (except, of course, for intrastate gambling, which probably means your state lottery). Once President Bush signs the bill, your bank and credit card companies will have 270 days to come up with a way to prohibit you from using your own money to pay for gambling debts or — though far less likely– to keep you from receiving your gambling profits. The law covers not just credit card payments but also checks and electronic funds transfers.

Congressional and Senate votes here. Tammy Baldwin voted yes as did Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl. It would be interesting to know if any of them were aware of what was in this bill.

Miller Park Economics, or Your Tax Dollars at Work

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Tom Haudricourt and Don Walker:

In the three years after moving into Miller Park in 2001, the Milwaukee Brewers made a yearly economic impact of $327.3 million on the five-county area that was taxed to build the ballpark, according to a study by the Institute for Survey and Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The director of the UWM Center for Economic Development offered a different view, saying the study was a “standard nonsensical sports study that inflates the impact of spending on baseball.”

The study, which local public relations firm Mueller Communications Inc. commissioned on behalf of Major League Baseball and the Brewers, was completed in January 2005. It is to be made public for the first time Monday, when baseball Commissioner Bud Selig addresses a meeting of the Greater Milwaukee Committee at Miller Park.

Much more on Miller Park and Bud Selig here. The mosting interesting link is a June, 2004 article in the Washington Post of all places where Bud Selig’s hardball tactics were discussed and we learned that former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson won’t set foot in the place. Clearly, the opportunity to place the park downtown was a major miss.

MaHunt

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Fascinating:


“Life consists with wildness….The most alive is the wildest…In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Henry David Thoreau

“There are certain things that cannot be enjoyed by everybody. If everybody tries to enjoy them, nobody gets any pleasure out of them.” Robert Marshall

“Hunting partakes directly in Nature’s sacrament — transcending a vacuous voyeur to a guiding guardian.” James A. Schneider

“Everybody knows, for example, that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead. An enormous amount of some kind of motive power has been lost.” Aldo Leopold

“The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody’s nose.” A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

“Remember that with large corporations and rich individuals gobbling up property to keep everyone out and conservancies, big government and its agencies devouring land through purchase and eminent domain condemnations to let everyone or no one in, there must be places preserved for “everyman/everywoman” plus one human companion to use unbothered by his/her brethren.” James A. Schneider

“Perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.” Henry David Thoreau

Jim Schneider, a UW Grad and Drexel Burnham Lambert alum is behind MaHunt intellectually and financially.

Fools to the Farm

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Daniel Griswold:

A hearing in the House Agricultural Committee last week highlighted everything wrong with U.S. farm policy. In preparation for writing the 2007 farm bill, House members heard from 17 witnesses representing every possible farm lobby —from cotton to corn, sugar to potatoes, rice to eggs, and sorghum — but not a single spokesperson for the interests of the American people as a whole.


Fewer than two percent of Americans farm for a living, and only a third of those farmers receive subsidies. Yet the interests of subsidized and protected farmers dominate every farm bill discussion in Washington. The broader interests of the United States and the other 98 percent of Americans are systematically ignored.


The biggest losers from U.S. farm policy are taxpayers. From 2000 to 2005, Congress spent an average of $17 billion a year in direct payments to farmers. That’s real money, even in Washington. Most of those payments did not go to small “family farms,” but to large operations and agribusinesses, including some Fortune 500 companies. Indeed, according to the Environmental Working Group, the top 10 percent of recipients collected two-thirds of the payments on offer, and the top 5 percent collected 55 percent.


Trade barriers and domestic price supports also force tens of millions of families to pay higher food prices. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, U.S. farm programs transferred an average of $10.5 billion a year from U.S. food consumers to producers from 2003 through 2005. That amounts to an annual food tax of $140 for a family of four — a regressive tax that falls most heavily on poor families that spend a larger share of their budgets on foo

Milwaukee Passenger Detained over “idiot” barb

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IAG:

A Wisconsin man who wrote “Kip Hawley is an Idiot” on a plastic bag containing toiletries said he was detained at an airport security checkpoint for about 25 minutes before authorities concluded the statement was not a threat.

Ryan Bird, 31, said he wrote the comment about Hawley — head of the Transportation Security Administration — as a political statement. He said he feels the TSA is imposing unreasonable rules on passengers while ignoring bigger threats.

How Useful Are Oil Projections?

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Edward Tufte:

n 1974 the Federal Energy Administration asked 4 statisticians to provide independent estimates of the amount of oil still underground. The four groups worked completely independently; I found out the names of the other three groups long after the reports were filed. The results, as I recall, were one very low forecast, one very high forecast, and two skeptical reports (including mine) in effect saying the error bound around the forecasts covered all reasonable policy alternatives. Thus the collective result confirmed the views of the two skeptical reports!

Here is my analysis. Perhaps this should have appeared as a short case study in Beautiful Evidence, but the idea never occurred to me.

What about now, 31 years later? My skepticism about resource forecasts might be confirmed or might not by a fresh analysis, which would reveal what a fresh analysis of the evidence would reveal. In policy relevant studies of evidence, there is too often a rage to conclude.

Chicago’s Wireless RFP

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Esme Vos:

Chicago has finally released its RFP for a citywide Wi-Fi network. In May 2006, Mayor Richard M Daley had announced a plan to provide affordable broadband Internet service to all Chicagoans and to make computers more widely available to low-income residents. The Mayor also offered $250,000 in grants to help community groups come up with innovative ways to help close the digital divide, and he appointed an advisory panel to make further recommendations on the issue.

The City of Chicago’s Department of Business and Information Services (BIS) introduced a Draft RFP for comments on May 30, 2006. The City received many meaningful comments and suggestions, which are incorporated in the Final RFP, which it issued today.

Full RFP [pdf]