Category Archives: Economics

Harvest Hope needs our help, so it can help others

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Director Denise Holland and Harvest Hope board members issue an urgent appeal for funds at a Tuesday press conference.

Running behind today, still catching up on stuff I wanted to write about yesterday…

Such as Harvest Hope Food Bank‘s urgent appeal for operating funds. You may have read about it already in The State today. It was hard to miss, since it was the lede story. That was gratifying not only because Harvest Hope, and the people it serves, need the communities in its 20 counties to know about the situation, but because ADCO was helping the agency get the word out. (When I saw that was the lede this morning, I thought, “Idiot! Why didn’t you put that on your Virtual Front Page yesterday? The reason — I was so close to it, it didn’t even occur to me.)

The situation is this: Harvest Hope needs our help, as it never has before in its 30-year history.

HH is the food safety net for 20 counties in South Carolina – the Midlands, Florence and Greenville. It is a regional food distribution organization that collects, stores, and distributes food and related items. Its 450 member agencies that feed the hungry in these communities – churches, private charities, others – depend on Harvest Hope to provide the food.

The increase in need recently has been startling. In the last six months, the number of families HH has fed has increased by 42 percent over the same period a year earlier. Harvest Hope served 91 percent more families in 2010 than it did in 2008. Another way to put it is that the private nonprofit served 2,037,496 individuals throughout the service area in 2010.

With double-digit unemployment in our state, HH sees no sign of this need abating soon.

While the need has increased, so have unavoidable expenses: Just fueling the fleet of vehicles that deliver food throughout the 20 counties costs $3,100 a day. With unrest sweeping the Mideast, fuel prices are expected to rise, not drop, for the foreseeable future. Harvest Hope has food in our warehouse, but if they can’t deliver it, it does no one any good.

Yet in this time of increasing need and expenses, over the last four months, donations to Harvest Hope have dropped.

Here is how Harvest Hope’s funding cycle typically works: Most of its cash donations come in during the last four months of the year. It gets through each spring and summer by tapping a $400,000 line of credit. HH pays off that line of credit with the money that comes in from September-December. Each year in the past, HH has paid off the line of credit by January 1.

This year, because of the drop-off in financial donations, HH has been unable to pay off the line of credit.

HH has cut most of the expense items it believes it can cut while still serving the needs of the hungry. It has cut back on mailings, switching to e-mail; reduced casual labor to help sort food, bringing in more volunteers for additional shifts on nights and weekends; tried to get food more from within the region to avoid shipping costs; eliminated travel to conferences and staff training; reduced the use of operational supplies. Next, if necessary, would be staff reductions.

Why has giving dropped off? Because regular donors, friends and neighbors who have been so generous in the past, are also hurting in this economic crisis. Some who have given regularly have told Denise Holland and HH staff that they are themselves just a step away from needing Harvest Hope’s help in order to eat.

Harvest Hope needs $2 million between now and the end of June, and as much of it as possible as soon as possible. This number arises from a combination of factors, including the accelerating increase in need, the rise in unavoidable expenses, and the drop-off in cash contributions. In asking for this money, HH is not only trying to pay off the line of credit, but also anticipating a continued greater monthly operating expense going forward. Another way to put it: HH is about a million in the hole now, and extrapolating forward, sees itself going in deeper and deeper if it keeps meeting the need — which it fully intends to do.

Some have already stepped up nobly to help meet this need. Mungo Homes has offered to donate $150,000 if it is matched by twice as much from the community. This is in keeping with a long tradition in the Mungo family of providing material support to Harvest Hope.

But even when that match challenge has been met, HH will need much more, and is hoping other major donors will follow the Mungos’ example and offer similar challenges.

Donations to Harvest Hope are of course tax-deductible, and 98 cents out of every dollar it receives goes directly to feeding hungry families in our area.

By the way — Harvest Hope does not foster a culture of dependency. Typically, if it is able to feed a family for three months in succession, it gets them through their crisis so that they are able to be self-sufficient going forward. During those three months, Harvest Hope frees them from worrying about food so that they can concentrate on the other things they need to do to get themselves out of financial difficulty.

Over the last three years more than 484,000 individuals came to HH for help through its two full-time emergency food pantries, and of those, 86,000 came for the first time. The top reasons? Unemployment, underemployment, and the high costs of shelter.

Less than 1 percent of our clients receive TANF (commonly called “welfare”) payments.

When this economic crisis first hit the nation in 2008, we heard a lot about financial institutions that were “too big to fail.” For the communities it serves, Harvest Hope is the institution that is too big to fail. The hungry of these communities, and the various agencies that feed them, depend on Harvest Hope too much.

And Harvest Hope is not failing. It is not going away. It is getting the job done, despite the challenges before it. But for the first time, it has gone into a financial hole doing so, and needs our help to get out of it, and continue the mission.

Here’s how to give:

•   Visit the donor page at the website: www.harvesthope.org.

•   If you have received a mailing from Harvest Hope, please use the reply envelope that came with it.

•   Send a check to Harvest Hope, 2220 Shop Road, Columbia, SC  29201.

OK, THAT SORT OF ENDS THE OFFICIAL MESSAGE. The above is an adaptation of the talking points that I helped Denise put together before Tuesday’s news conference. In fact, I changed so little of it that I may have missed a couple of places where it says “we,” though I meant to change it to “it” or “they” or “Harvest Hope.” Forgive me; I’m running behind and am in a hurry.

Now, allow me to add an editorial comment of my own:

We hear a lot from folks who subscribe to the ideology that keeps winning elections in our state that they don’t want government taking care of the needy, that they think private charities should take up the slack.

Well.

THIS is how private charities feed the hungry — the “deserving hungry,” for those of you who make such distinctions — in this area. You may see a church or other agency feeding people, but like as not, that entity got the food from Harvest Hope. That’s sort of what I meant about the “too big to fail” thing. This IS the private sector’s response to the existence of hunger in our communities.

So let’s step up.

“The economics of urinal cakes,” or, “To pee or not to pee” (Thanks, Andrew Sullivan!)

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Today I suddenly realized that, unlike on my old blog, I had never included Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish among my links in the rail at right.

I corrected that, and immediately ran across this item by Tim Harford, which Mr. Sullivan had thoughtfully brought to his readers’ attention:

Dear Economist,

Whenever I go to the gentlemen’s toilet in a pub, I’m unsure how to behave. The question is: Should I urinate on the urinal cakes or not? At first, I think that if I urinate on them I’ll help to finish them earlier, thus making the publican purchase more of them, and helping the economy.

But then I think, while I’m urinating, that if the publican has to buy more tablets, eventually he will probably have to raise the price of the beer, to my huge disappointment. So the question is, where should I urinate in the gentlemen’s toilets in the pub?…

It’s having the occasion to think deeply about such things as this that causes men’s minds to be so much more nimble and profound than women’s, right guys?

And the answer? Well, read the post. But he basically cites Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy” on the way to saying that not all economic activity grows the economy.

3D Politics: And that puts the UnParty… smack dab in the middle, more squarely than ever

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As you know, I strenuously resist any attempt to place me along America’s left-right political spectrum, even to the extent of being in the middle. Personally, I just don’t feel comfortable anywhere on that line, and “middle” suggests always being somewhere between the two extremes (or, to use another paradigm I reject, between the two parties), which I most certainly am not. Depending on the issue, sometimes I’m in the middle, sometimes I agree with Democrats, sometimes with Republicans, and sometimes I’m out beyond either of them on their respective “wings.”

That’s because I think about each issue and the various factors bearing upon it, rather than buying a prefab set of values selected by someone else to appeal to some variation on the lowest common denominator. I passionately believe that that’s an inadequate, and intellectually dishonest, way to approach important public issues.

Considering all of that, I was intrigued by a chart Herb Brasher shared with me, which was compiled by his son, a teaching fellow in political science at Indiana University.

Here’s the description. The chart itself is above:

I’ve been thinking about messing around with a 3-dimensional model of partisan ideology for a while. Usually we only talk of right vs. left, although some political science literature works with two dimensions. While somewhat difficult to display for an artistically challenged person like me, I make a rough shot at placing European, Canadian, and American parties in a more complex political spectrum. Any thoughts, suggestions?
1) Parties / Party Families
a) SOC: European socialists
b) SOD: European Social Democrats and some socialists; British labour; Canadian NDP;
c) Green: Greens/environmental parties
d) CD: European Christian Democrats
e) DEM: American Democrats
f) CON: European and Canadian conservatives
g) LIB: European liberals
h) CLIB: Canadian Liberals
i) REP: American Republicans
j) TEA: American Tea-party
2) Partisan Ideology Dimensions:
a) Some assumptions:
i. Instead of the common left-right model, or even two-dimensional one in some political science literature, a three-dimensional one; added complexity, but also better representation of reality?
ii. Note: all parties fit within the liberal democratic framework – I’m not including parties that want to get rid of democratic regime form
b) Dimensions
i. Free vs. social market – degree to which party advocates government involvement in the economy, and social welfare policies
ii. Environment vs. Growth – degree to which party advocates environmental protection, quality of life vs. growth of economy (particularly jobs) – this is separate from the
above issue – strong interventionist parties, like the social democrats, are not traditionally known as pro-environment (blue-collar jobs, etc.)
iii. Secular-Religious – degree to which party/party family either rhetorically or programmatically promotes traditional vs. progressive values; or situates itself as a secularizing force, or protective of religion, etc.
3) Interpreting Party Position
a) Position: I place the parties in the figure based on a quick and dirty assessment of its ideological positioning vis-à-vis each of these dimensions
b) Size: I’m assuming that each party ‘box’ is the same size; however, in order to get a 3D effect, the bigger the box appears in the figure (and the bigger the font), the closer it is to the front, and the smaller, the further back it is. In this case, since the secular-religious dimension is the third dimension, the more secular a given party/party family is, the further up front it is, the further back, the more religious.

Unfortunately, this did not help place me, really — except, if you assume that these are the three axes that must be considered, to put me right in the middle, even in three dimensions. Here’s why:

  • Free vs. Social Market — This just doesn’t cause a flutter in my heart either way. The libertarians on the blog will cry, “He’s a statist!,” but I’m not. I sound like it sometime because the prevailing wind in South Carolina is radically libertarian, libertarian to a harmful degree, and I resist it strenuously in an effort to pull the conversation toward a neutral middle ground. I believe there is nothing inherently superior about either the public or the private sector (which is why I’m always arguing with people who believe, ideologically, that the private is inherently better — I never run into anyone on the opposite side of that equation to argue with). There are simply issues that are better solved one way, and others that are better solved another.
  • Environment vs. Growth — I’ve cared deeply about the Earth since before the first Earth Day, when I was in high school. But I think some people take some really ridiculous, harmful positions in the name of love of the Earth. I reject those who reflexively reject nuclear power, for instance. And of course we should drill in the ANWR and offshore — taking care to do so safely. In fact, my whole Energy Party Manifesto sits squarely along the center of this axis. Or perhaps I should say, borrows from various points along it. And one of the reasons why is that I think the country’s strategic position in the world is tied up with, and just as important as, the two issues on this axis. That affects the way I look at both.
  • Secular-Religious — No question that I endorse the First Amendment and the liberal democracy it makes possible. I also think secularists are off their trolleys with their oversensitivity about religion in public life, seeing every small expression — a nativity, a blue law, a public prayer — as some sort of establishment of a theocracy. So again, I can’t be comfortable in either camp.

    • The thing is, I think a lot more than those three factors are involved, and I try to take all the other factors into account as well. So does the UnParty, bless them.

    Whether CAE succeeds depends on all of us

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    Columbia Metropolitan Airport Executive Director Dan Mann introduces Bill Maloney of Vision Airlines Wednesday at CAE.

    You may have heard that discount carrier Vision Airlines will soon offer flights out of Columbia to its home in the Destin, Florida, area. Yesterday, Bill Maloney, Vision’s director of business development, introduced himself to local media.

    He didn’t offer a lot of new details beyond what had been reported previously, so I pass on this from Columbia Regional Business Report, which provides the basics:

    A charter airline that got its start in 1994 offering aerial tours of the Grand Canyon, Vision is expanding the scheduled commercial service it started just two years ago. The company announced today that it will launch service in 20 Southeastern cities this spring. In addition to Columbia, the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport is on the list.

    Vision, headquartered outside Atlanta, will fly to the Northwest Florida Regional Airport, providing a gateway to the coastal towns in the Florida panhandle.

    The company operates a mixed fleet of Boeing 767, Boeing 737 and Dornier 328 aircraft. At Columbia, Vision will fly a 148-seat Boeing 737-400 aircraft….

    Vision is offering introductory fares of $49 one-way if booked Jan. 18-23. After that, rates start at $89 one-way.

    The other cities where Vision is launching service include Atlanta; Little Rock, Ark.; Hunstville, Ala.; Punta Gorda, Fla.; Baton Rouge, La.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Macon, Ga.; Savannah, Ga.; Birmingham, Ala.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Louisville, Ky.; Orlando, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Asheville, N.C. and Shreveport, La.

    Will Vision make it where others have not? Will it grow here, and add destinations to its modest initial offering? Will it help broaden the menu of destinations from CAE and lower fares?

    Well, that depends on us. Of everything said at the press conference Wednesday, the most pertinent to me was this, from CMA Executive Director Dan Mann:

    The key is going to be community support, and getting on the aircraft.

    It’s all up to us. Either Columbia — and by “Columbia” I mean the economic community that sprawls across Richland and Lexington counties and beyond — gets in the habit of flying out of its own airport when feasible (and cost-effective), or it doesn’t. We all want lower fares (the lack of which is the biggest reason many folks drive to other cities to catch flights), but we’ll never get them unless we fill up the flights we have here, so the airlines can make money flying bigger planes, with more seats, out of CAE.

    As consultant Michael Boyd made clear last year, airlines aren’t going to do that out of sympathy for our plight. We, the community, have to change the math for them. And for the airlines to schedule more flights out of here, with bigger planes – thereby lowering fares – we have to provide them with more passengers wanting to fly from HERE to those destinations.

    Too many of us don’t fly out of Columbia because of the fares. And we can’t lower the fares without more of us flying out of here. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. Or a tomato thing.

    I liked what airport commission vice chair Anne Sinclair said in my hearing recently:

    People used to not care where their tomato comes from. Now they do. That didn’t happen by magic… I honestly think people take this airport for granted.

    Columbia needs an aviation version of the locavore movement. Increasingly, consumers care that their tomato is homegrown. That’s what Emile DeFelice played on so effectively when he ran for state commissioner of agriculture on the slogan, “Put Your State on Your Plate.” He didn’t get elected, but his campaign spurred the agriculture department to step up its own program to promote local products, “Certified South Carolina.” Not quite as catchy or engaging to the imagination, but now you see those stickers in every supermarket, and they are increasingly part of the consciousness of the shopping public.

    For CAE, the challenge is to get its friends and neighbors to Think Columbia First. Without a united community that sees Columbia Metropolitan as OUR airport, the airport can’t grow. And without a growing, dynamic airport, our community can’t grow.

    More people in the Midlands need to think of Columbia Metropolitan Airport as their airport, the one in which they have a stake, the one they want to see succeed (and want to be a part of bringing about that success). Of course, that also involves having a more positive attitude toward their own community. There are people who turn up their noses at things because they are local, the function of a collective inferiority complex. That needs to change (and fortunately, I think that on a number of fronts it IS changing). As I’ve said before — stand in the place where you live.

    Dan Mann — the guy who won my admiration when he introduced himself to Columbia Rotary by showing a Louis C.K. video making fun of people who gripe about air travel — understands this. The challenge for him, and for all who want to grow this community, is to make sure the rest of us get it.

    Lindsey, fill yer hands; I’m a-callin’ you out

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    Did you get the “True Grit” reference? I do try to be topical (although I have no idea whether that line is in the remake)…

    Back on this post, Doug Ross said, “So will Brad call out Lindsey for wasting resources?”

    That kind of stuff makes me tired. You know why bloggers and sure-enough journalists avoid ever saying anything nice about anybody in public life? Because they never hear the end of it. They’re constantly getting this Well I hope now you see what a jerk your buddy is, and see the error of your ways stuff.

    Let’s be clear. There is no one I respect in the U.S. Senate more than Lindsey Graham, so stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, you cynics. There are good men in public life, and Graham is highly intelligent, principled and hard-working. He has proved this time and time again. He is good for South Carolina, and good for the country. I am proud that he is our senior senator. Now that John Spratt is gone, I think Lindsey is clearly the best member of the SC congressional delegation.

    But you know what? Sometimes, even on an important issue, he’s dead wrong. That happens. It happens with the best of men. (Women, too, probably, but far be it from me as a gentleman to reflect negatively upon the ladies.) And there’s one that he and two of my other favorites in the Senate, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, and that’s the one Doug and I were talking about — national health care policy.

    He’s really, really wrong on it. I mean, Jim DeMint just wants it to be Obama’s Waterloo, but I get the feeling that Lindsey Graham really means it. He really wants to gut Obamacare. And he doesn’t just want to vote on a purely symbolic “repeal;” he want to hang it, draw it and quarter it, slice and dice it, by passing legislation that deprives it of its central elements, the only things that give it any chance of having a good effect on the health care crisis in this country.

    Here’s the release he put out today:

    Barrasso, Graham Introduce Legislation Allowing States to ‘Opt-Out’ of Obamacare

    WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) today introduced S.244, The State Health Care Choice Act, to repeal and replace Obamacare by allowing states to ‘Opt-Out’ of its major provisions.  Under the legislation, states could choose to ‘Opt-Out’ of:

    • Individual mandate – the requirement to buy government-approved health insurance coupled with a financial penalty for not doing so.
    • Employer mandate – the requirement for businesses to provide government-approved health insurance coupled with financial penalties for not doing so.
    • Medicaid mandate – the forced expansion of state Medicaid programs.
    • Benefit mandates – defines what qualifies as a health plan as well as new federal requirements for regulating health insurance.

    “As a doctor in Wyoming, I witnessed regularly how Washington simply didn’t understand the needs of the people of our state,” said Barrasso.  “After Obamacare, Washington is more out of touch than ever.  Instead of requiring states to follow Obamacare’s one-size-fits-all health care policy, our bill lets states decide what works best for them.  We will fight to repeal the President’s bad health spending law and provide states with flexibility, freedom and choice.”
    “Our legislation opens up a third front in the fight against Obama health care,” said Graham, noting the other ‘fronts’ include legal challenges moving through the courts and the House-passed repeal.  “Our bill takes the fight out of Washington and puts it back in the states.  I would hope every Senator, regardless of party, would give the people of their home state a chance to be heard.  I’m confident that if given the chance, a large number of states would opt-out of the provisions regarding the individual mandate, employer mandate, and expansion of Medicaid.  As more states opt-out, it will have the effect of repealing and replacing Obamacare.”

    “Medicaid expansion under Obama health care will be devastating to many states, including South Carolina,” continued Graham.  “We are already facing a severe budget shortfall this year.  The future expansion of Medicaid – which adds an additional one billion dollars of state matching funding requirements and will result in nearly 30 percent of South Carolinians being eligible for Medicaid – only adds to our budget problems.  This combination of Medicaid expansion and increased state funding makes it virtually impossible for South Carolina to pull out of her economic woes.”

    The Senators noted the Obama Administration has already issued 733 waivers to businesses allowing them to continue offering insurance to their employees and questioned why states should not have the same ability to obtain relief.

    #####

    To read the text of the bill, click here.

    Note that this masquerades as a substitute for Obama care — not mere repeal, but replacement. What a mockery. It is most certainly nothing of the kind.

    The absolute worst thing you could do to last year’s health-care bill — which is deeply flawed, but would at least take a step or two in the direction of real reform — would be to let anyone opt out of it, much less entire states.

    Either we’re all in it, or it will not work. It may not work anyway. I still firmly believe that simple, straightforward single-payer is the way to go. But hey, critics of Obamacare say it’s a back-door way to get us there, and maybe they’re right. One thing I know for sure is that there isn’t a plan in the wings to replace it. I mean, if this is the best that a smart guy like Lindsey Graham can come up with, we’d better cling to Obamacare as though it were our last chance to avoid drowning.

    And this fantasy that states can in any way affect this mega-economic hole that we are in — or that they would (especially if they are South Carolina). Again, either we come up with a national solution and we’re all in it — a risk pool of 300-plus million people — or there’s not much use talking, because you really don’t get the problem. Sen. Barrasso says Washington doesn’t get it. He may be right; I can certainly point to one guy in Washington who doesn’t get it. No, make that two. (And for that matter, the Dems don’t either, or they’d have gone for single-payer. So I guess he’s right; it’s a majority.)

    This is just sad. So sad, that I marvel at it.

    I’m going to issue another invitation to Sen. Graham to join me on “The Brad Show” and explain this. He always has good explanations for what he does, and I’d love to hear this one.

    In the meantime, satisfy yourselves with this video of him and Barrasso talking about this abomination…

    Is celebrating secession offensive? Yeah. Duh. And so much more than that…

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    Today I retweeted something that I got from Chris Haire, who got it from @skirtCharleston:

    someone shouted “you lie” at mayor riley when he said secession was caused by a defense of slavery at sesquicentennial event this am.

    Did that actually happen? Apparently so:

    Charleston Mayor Joe Riley was interrupted by an audience member who yelled out, “You’re a liar!” as Riley talked about the direct relationship between slavery and secession during the unveiling of a historical marker Monday.

    About 100 people crowded along a Meeting Street sidewalk at the site of the former Institute Hall — where South Carolinians signed the Ordinance of Secession exactly 150 years before.

    “That the cause of this disastrous secession was an expressed need to protect the inhumane and immoral institution of slavery is undeniable,” Riley said, prompting the outburst. “The statement of causes mentions slavery 31 times.”…

    Where else in the world, I ask you, would such a simple, mild and OBVIOUS statement (few historical documents make fewer bones about motives than the document Mayor Joe alludes to) elicit such a response? Wherever it is, I don’t want to go there. We’ve got our hands full dealing with our homegrown madness.

    Earlier, I got this come-on to an online survey:

    POLL – Celebrating Secession: Do you find it offensive to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the signing of  the…http://bit.ly/dNLi1h

    Sigh. OK, I’ll answer the question which doesn’t seem worth asking: Yes. Duh. The operative word being “celebrate.”

    As for the word “offensive,” well, that seems rather inadequate. I suppose in our PC times, it’s the highest opprobrium that most folks in the MSM seem capable of coming up with. “Appalling” would work. “Insupportable” would, too. “Unconscionable” would be another. Then there’s always “embarrassing.”

    My point is not that someone somewhere — say, to oversimplify, the descendants of slaves — would be “offended.” That’s too easily dismissed by too many. (As the surly whites who resent blacks’ resentment over slavery would point out, everybody’s offended by something. They would say this as though such moral equivalence were valid, as though black folks’ being touchy about celebrations of secession were like my being offended by Reality TV.) My point is that the very notion that anyone would even conceive of celebrating — rather than “commemorating,” or “marking,” or “mourning,” or “ritualistically regretting” — the very worst moment in South Carolina history, is a slap in the face to anyone who hopes in general for the human species (one would hope it could make some progress) or specifically for South Carolina.

    It’s awful enough that this one act stands as the single indisputably biggest impact that South Carolina has ever had on U.S., or world, history. But what does one say about a people, a population, that — 150 years after this Greatest Error of All Time, which led directly to our bloodiest war and to a century and a half of South Carolina trailing the rest of the world economically — they would think it cute, or fun, or a lark, or what have you, to mark the episode by dressing up and dancing the Virginia Reel?

    I mean, seriously, what is WRONG with such a people, such an organism, that would celebrate something so harmful to itself, much less to others?

    Lonnie Randolph of the NAACP calls it “nothing more than a celebration of slavery.” Well, yeah. Duh again. But that pretty much goes without saying. The point I’d like to add to the obvious is that it is also a celebration of stupidity, of dysfunction, of never, ever learning.

    In fact, what we’ve done, from the time of Wade Hampton to the time of Glenn McConnell, is devolve. We’ve slipped backwards. The guys who signed the Ordinance of Secession were acting in their rational self-interest, something even the merchants of the North probably understood. Be morally appalled at that if you’re so inclined (and most people living in the West in this century would be), but it made some kind of sense. But for anyone today to look back on that act and celebrate it, seek to identify with it, get jollies from dressing up and in any way trying to re-enact that occurrence, makes NO sense of any kind, beyond a sort of self-destructive perversity.

    And don’t give me that about the act of secession being an assertion of freedom-loving SC whites throwing off the oppressive gummint yoke, because it just proves my point. That attitude — that “Goldang it, but ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live MAH LAHF” or make me pay taxes or whatever — is probably the single pathological manifestation most responsible for the fact that we have been unable to get it together in this state and climb out from under the shadow of the conflict that we insisted upon precipitating. The far more refined forms of this — Sanfordism, and other ways of asserting that we do NOT need to work together as a society to solve common problems, because we are free individuals who don’t need each other — have done just as much to hold us back as the old racist creeds of Tillman and the like.

    It is, indeed, a pathology. And parties that “celebrate” secession are a manifestation of it.

    Lie of the year: “Gummint takeover of health care”

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    A Tweet from the WashPost brings to my attention this item:

    PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: ‘A government takeover of health care’

    By Bill Adair, Angie Drobnic Holan
    Published on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 at 11:30 p.m.

    In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama’s ambitious plan to overhaul America’s health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a “government takeover.”

    “Takeovers are like coups,” Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. “They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.”

    The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the “public option” concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.

    But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.

    PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections….

    And indeed, it’s tough to think of a bigger lie recently propagated than the idea of the lame, tepid, timid health care bill that Dems crammed through over Repubs’ kicking and screaming was anything in the same universe as a government takeover of anything.

    If only it were. That is, if only it were a takeover, not of “health care,” but of the mechanism for paying for it. A few minutes ago on the radio, I heard ol’ Henry McMaster rumbling in that distinctive old-Columbia drawl of his about that mean awful nasty mandate, and again found myself wondering how he or anyone can even begin to imagine that we could address health care expense in any meaningful way without a mandate of some kind. Not THIS mandate, but a real one — a mandate for all of us to be in the same system, the same risk pool. Nothing else would really work.

    I experienced actual gummint-run health care when I was a kid, because my Dad was in the Navy. Navy doctors, Navy hospitals. And let me tell you something: It was great. My Dad devoted his career to his country, frequently (at sea, and in the Rung Sat Special Zone of Vietnam with the river patrol boats) putting his life on the line. And in return, my family’s health care was taken care of. Made all the sense in the world to me. Way I see it, we should all pay into the system one way or another — for most of us, through taxes or premiums or whatever you choose to call them — and then everybody’s in the pool and we achieve maximum economies of scale.

    But essentially, even that wouldn’t be a gummint-run health-care system, but a government-run (actually, I don’t care who runs it, as long as we’re all in it and nobody’s adding cost by building profit into the transaction, and the way you usually accomplish that is with a public approach) medical insurance program.

    But we never even considered THAT. No one dared, from the beginning of the debate, breathe the two words that should have been nonnegotiable — “single payer.” Which is idiotic. No, we started with a premise far short of that, and negotiated farther and farther away from it until we ended up with something that bore no resemblance to anything even within that universe.

    And still, people like Joe Wilson went around saying “government takeover of health care” as if the words coming out of their mouths bore some relationship to reality.

    Talk about a big lie. Yeah, you lie, Joe. Whether you understand that you’re doing that or not. Even if you believe it, which you most likely do.

    But I find myself wondering — when he said it, did anyone actually believe it? I mean, besides Joe? I find that hard to fathom, if anyone did…

    The Congress that wasn’t going to get anything done (until Obama made them do it)

    3 Replies

    Seems like everything I read over the last few months, before and after the election, was that this lame-duck Congress wouldn’t accomplish squat before its well-deserved demise. And when it DID talk about getting anything done, its sense of priorities was bizarre. For instance, just the other day on the radio I heard some Democratic leader (and I’m totally drawing a blank on who it was, which disappoints me, because it means I don’t get to castigate him or her by name) talking about how the Congress had Two Big Things to act on before quitting — the Obama/GOP tax cut deal, and DADT. Really. I’m serious. A bill with huge, systemic impact on our economy at a moment when we’re desperately trying to climb out of the hole the Great Recession put us in was mentioned in the same breath, and as being equally important to, a Kulturkampf wish list item. Really. This is the way these people think.

    Where was I? Oh, yeah, they weren’t going to get anything done.

    Well, today they passed this:

    Congress passes extension of Bush-era tax cuts

    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Friday, December 17, 2010; 12:40 AMCongress approved the most significant tax bill in nearly a decade late Thursday, overcoming liberal resistance to continue for two more years tax breaks enacted under president George W. Bush and to provide a fresh boost of federal support to the tepid economic recovery….

    How about that?

    Of course, it wasn’t actually the Congress that made this happen. President Obama did, by very astutely making a deal with Republicans for something they wanted in order to get something he wanted while he still could.

    Which is interesting. I mean, set aside the rather obvious reasons to worry about this bill. This actual effective action by the POTUS could have implications in all sorts of areas. This may be the clearest, most overt case since entering office in which Barack Obama has clearly stepped out and led, without deferring to the ditherers in his own party (as he so wrongly did on health care) or anyone else.

    He showed, you know, leadership. The thing we elect presidents to show. This is important. It is perhaps even promising. Basically, what I’m saying here is that what Obama pulled off is quite the opposite of conventional wisdom among some on the left and the right, summarized in this cartoon by my buddy Robert.

    Oh, by the way, no word on DADT. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe you’d better check with someone who is actually into following that…

    I’d like to see Obama COMMIT to something

    90 Replies

    My friends at The State were right today to praise the fact that President Obama is working with Republicans on a compromise on taxes and unemployment benefits. But they were equally right to be unenthusiastic about the deal itself.

    On the one hand, it’s good that we’re not going to see our economy further crippled by untimely tax increases (even if all they are are restorations to pre-Bush levels). And it’s good that the jobless needing those benefits will have them. (At least, that these things will happen if this deal gets through Congress.) On the other, we’re looking at a deal that embodies some of the worst deficit-ballooning values of both parties: tax cuts for the Republicans, more spending for the Democrats.

    It’s tragic, and bodes very ill for our country, that this flawed compromise stirs such anger on both partisan extremes: Some Democrats are beside themselves at this “betrayal” by the president. (Which bemuses me — as y’all know, I have trouble understanding how people get so EMOTIONAL about such a dull, gray topic as taxes, whether it’s the rantings of the Tea Partiers who don’t want to pay them, especially if the dough goes to the “undeserving poor,” or the ravings of the liberal class warriors who don’t want “the undeserving rich” to get any breaks. Why not save that passion for something that really matters?) Meanwhile, people on the right — such as Daniel Henninger in the WSJ today — chide Obama for not going far enough on taxes.

    In this particular case, I think the folks on the right have a bit of a point (some of them — I have no patience for DeMint demanding the tax cuts and fighting the spending part), but it doesn’t have to do with taxes — it has to do with the president’s overall approach to leadership, and a flaw I see in it. Henninger complains that these tax cut extensions are unlikely to get businesses to go out and invest and create jobs, since the president threatens to eliminate the cuts a year or two down the line.

    That actually makes sense (even if it does occur in a column redolent with offensive right-wing attitudes — he sneers at Ma Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath”), and I see in it echoes of the president’s flawed approach in another important arena — Afghanistan.

    Here’s the thing: If keeping these tax cuts is the right thing to do to help our economy, then they should be kept in place indefinitely — or “permanently,” as the Republicans say. Of course, there is nothing permanent in government. The next Congress, or the one after that, can raise taxes through the roof if it chooses.

    The problem, in other words, isn’t that the cuts won’t be permanent, because nothing is in politics. The problem is that the president is, on the front end, negating whatever beneficial effect might be gained from extending the cuts by coming out and promising that they won’t last.

    One of the big reasons why the economy hasn’t improved faster than it has this year is that businesses, small and large, have not known what to expect from the recent election in terms of future tax policy with these tax cuts expiring. People were waiting to see what would happen on taxes before taking investment risks. (Even if the liberal Democrats were to eliminate the cuts, knowing that would be better than the uncertainty.) And even with the election over, the future has remained murky. The best thing about such a deal between the president and the GOP should be that it wipes away those clouds and provides clarity.

    But the president negates that by saying yes, we’ll keep the cuts in place, but only for a short time. You may look forward now to a time when there are unspecified increases. And Henninger has a point when he says:

    But if an angry, let-me-be-clear Barack Obama just looked into the cameras and said he’s coming to get you in two years, what rational economic choice would you make? Spend the profit or gains 2011 might produce on new workers, or bury any new income in the backyard until the 2012 presidential clouds clear?

    Ditto with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What good is it to say we’re going to stay and fight NOW if at the same time you give a future date when you’re going to leave (or, as the president has said, start leaving)? What are they going to do? They’re going to sit tight and wait for you to leave on schedule.  (And yes, pragmatic people may take comfort from the fact that the president has allowed himself lots of wiggle-room to stay there — but the harm has been done by the announcement of the intention to leave). Every effort should be taken to make one’s adversaries believe you’re willing to fight them forever (even if you aren’t), if you ever hope to achieve anything by fighting.

    The problem in both cases is trying to have one’s cake and eat it, too — making a deal with the Republicans without one’s base getting too mad at you, or maintain our security commitment without (here comes that base thing again) freaking out the anti-war faction too much. What this ignores is that out in the REAL world, as opposed to the one where the parties play partisan tit-for-tat games, real people react in ways that matter to your policy moves: Business people continue to sit rather than creating jobs; the Taliban waits you out while your allies move away from you because they know they have to live there when you’re gone.

    What would be great would be if Barack Obama should commit for the duration to something. He should have committed to a single-payer approach to health care from the beginning. Going in with a compromise meant that we got this mish-mash that health care “reform” turned into. He should commit to a plan on the economy, and not undermine it by saying he’s only going to do it for a little while. And most of all, he should commit to Afghanistan, and not try to mollify his base with dangerous deadlines.

    What the president does, and even says, matters. He needs to recognize that, pick a direction, and stick with it long enough to have a salutary effect. Whatever their ideology, that’s what leaders do. And we could use some leadership.

    I took care of that deficit thing. Ya got anything else needs doin’?

    16 Replies

    Thanks to Phillip for bringing our attention to this NYT page, where you, too, can try to eliminate the national deficit.

    I managed to do it. And it wasn’t especially hard. It was a little hard, just not especially. I’ll be happy to let the Congress use my plan, for a consideration of a mere half a percent of the amount by which I reduced it.

    The only thing I did that I had real qualms about (and yeah, I know that credible arguments can be mounted against everything I did, but the rules of the game, in real life and here, are that you’ve got to do something) was when I decided to cap Medicare growth starting in 2013. That sounds to me suspiciously like the kind of arbitrary limit that Tom Davis et al. want to enact in South Carolina. But I excused myself in the hope that it would exert downward pressure on costs. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t, though. The only way the federal gummint would really be able to lower costs is if we are ALL in the program — then there wouldn’t be anyone left to raise prices on. Note that I did NOT raise the age of Medicare eligibility. That’s because I think it should be extended to everybody — except that those of us under 65 would pay for it, just the way we do for employer-provided insurance.

    I really went back and forth on that one. But if I didn’t do it, I fell short of the goal, and there wasn’t anything else I would consider doing. If I did do it, I exceeded the goal. (As you can see if you check my plan, I have surpluses. Am I good or what?)

    And of course, of COURSE, we should raise the age for full Social Security eligibility. Average life expectancy today is 77.9 years. Those born in 1900 only expected to live 50 years. So 70 is like the new, I don’t know, 45.

    And yeah, I know states are hurting, but aid to states is just not a core function — and maybe not even a legitimate function at all — of the federal government.

    I didn’t touch military spending, particularly not ongoing operations — except for cutting some new weapons programs.

    Overall, 33 percent of my deficit reduction came from tax increases, and 67 percent from spending cuts. So take THAT, all of you think I love all tax increases.

    Seriously, I charted a middle road on the whole Bush tax cuts issue, because I find both sides of the debate sort of persuasive and sort of not. Democrats’ ranting about Republicans’ “tax cuts for the rich” leave me cold. So does Republicans’ love for tax cuts for the rich. Heh. The issue is what makes sense for both our economy and the proper functions of government. Hence my middle road.

    That wonderful, marvelous Adam Smith

    6 Replies

    I said something about “Adam Smith sermonizing” in The Wall Street Journal back on this post.

    Speak of the devil, I just happened to read a book review in that paper this morning about the book, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (I am not making this title up), By Nicholas Phillipson.

    Talk about your gushing. The reviewer writes, breathily,

    Even his appearance is a mystery. The only contemporary likenesses of him are two small, carved medallions. We know Adam Smith as we know the ancients, in colorless stone.

    It is a measure of Nicholas Phillipson’s gifts as a writer that he has, from this unpromising material, produced a fascinating book. Mr. Phillipson is the world’s leading historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. His “Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life” animates Smith’s prosaic personal history with an account of the eventful times through which he lived and the revolutionary ideas that inspired him. Adam Smith finally has the biography that he deserves, and it could not be more timely.

    Smith’s fame, of course, was made by the “Wealth of Nations.” The book appeared in 1776, a good year in the annals of human liberty. Its teachings are so fundamental to modern economics that familiarity often dulls our appreciation of its brilliance.

    Smith constructed his masterpiece on a few ingenious insights into the workings of a commercial economy….

    He’s so wonderful, but so unknowable! His ways are so far above our ways, and his thoughts so far above our thoughts, that we know him only through colorless stone! Quick, a paper bag — I’m hyperventilating…

    Of course, I must admit, I haven’t read Wealth of Nations. For two centuries and more, I’ve been holding out for the movie version. Maybe it’s all that and more. But at the moment I’m giving myself a break from nonfiction to reread O’Brian’s The Wine-Dark Sea, which of course actually is wonderful. (Speaking of the movie, I watched “Master and Commander” last night on Blu-Ray. If only someone would undertake to make a separate film on each book in the Aubrey/Maturin canon! As soon as it came out on Netflix, you wouldn’t see me for a year…)

    After that, I’m going to read the books I got for my birthday, starting with Tony Blair’s new political autobio. Then there’s Woodward’s Obama’s War. Only then will I allow myself the pleasure of reading the latest Arkady Renko mystery, Three Stations.

    Then, before I read Adam Smith, I will go back and finish Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, which I set aside to read Bob Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed, back-to-back. Then, sometime after Trotsky, I’ll go read Adam Smith — right after I poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick. Twice. Colorless stone, indeed.

    “Use to was:” Small town South Carolina

    2 Replies

    Dang it, I searched on Google Books for the quote I wanted, but you know how they leave out pages here and there? Apparently the page I wanted was one of those.

    Anyway, there’s a page somewhere in John le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl in which our heroine Charlie is being escorted through a bombed-out 1980s Beirut by a couple of young Palestinian-affiliated gunmen whom she, and the reader, find utterly charming. One of them speaks English with an odd tick: He throws “use to” in front of all verbs, giving his speech a strange poignancy at all times. At one point, he’s indicating where a certain landmark — I want to say a Holiday Inn, but my memory could be failing me (and maybe it wasn’t even in the book but in the movie, but good luck finding that; Netflix doesn’t even have it) — back before the city’s devastation, back when it was the Paris of the Mideast. Let’s say it was a Holiday Inn, in which case he would have said, “Holiday Inn — use to was…”

    That line kept running through my head when I went home to Bennettsville Saturday for the funeral of “Teenie” Parks — my grandmother’s best friend, who lived next door to my grandparents and then my young uncle (only six years older than I) as he raised his family there, with Teenie taking the place for his kids of my grandmother, who died in 1969. There are people in B’ville who would ask Teenie how I was related to her, even though I wasn’t. We were all that close. Her husband Frank, who died in 1984, had grown up in the house that my grandparents lived in during my childhood and my uncle still lives in today. Then they sold the house to my grandfather and moved next door. From then on it was like one household; we walked in and out of each others’ houses as though the doors weren’t there. We were, as I said, that close.

    The funeral was at Thomas Memorial Baptist Church, where I was baptized long before I became Catholic. It’s the scene of an incident for which I’m still remembered by some of the older folks in town — far more than for anything else, really. While at the visitation various folks made a point of saying what I hear so often, that “We miss you so much from the newspaper,” a couple of my relatives made a point of mentioning The Incident, and admonishing me not to repeat it.

    (Here’s what happened: It was 1957, and I was four years old. Our preacher then, Mr. Thomas, was not the most accomplished homilist. He tended to drone and lose his train of thought. He was reciting a list of some sort in which towns in the Pee Dee were ranked. It went something like this: “Cheraw was first, Dillon second. Um, Marion was third. And Bennettsville was… it was… um… Bennettsville was, um…” I couldn’t take it. I shouted out, as loud as I could, “FOURTH!!!” The congregation, which had been as tense as I was, erupted into laughter, drowning out Mr. Thomas as he murmured “fourth.” I had not known I was going to do it; it was involuntary. Four, after all, was my favorite number because I was four years old. How could he not think of it? But now that I’d shouted it, the laughter of all those grownups overwhelmed me with embarrassment. I lay my head on my mother’s lap and pretended to be asleep for the rest of the service. Bottom line, to this day, I am known by some as the little boy who yelled “Fourth!”)

    After the funeral, driving back through town on Main Street, I pointed out to my wife landmarks that once had been. That’s what put me in mind of the le Carre character. B.B. Sanders’ Esso station, where the proprietor would always lean into the driver’s window, while his employees swarmed over the car to check the oil and the tires and the water and wash the windshield, and ask us, “Y’all want a Co-Cola?” Use to was. Belk’s — use to was. The Bennettsville Department Store — use to was. Penney’s, Miller Thompson pharmacy, the dime stores, Bill Stanton’s daddy’s store, the movie theater, the A&P, the Harris Teeter. All “use to was.” The buildings are all still there, and most look fine from the outside. But they aren’t what they were. And there is almost no one walking on the once-busy sidewalks.

    This morning, I almost got a parking ticket because lobbyist Jay Hicks sat across from me as I was about to get up from breakfast, and I stayed, and we started talking about a number of things. Eventually, we got onto the state of South Carolina’s small towns, especially the ones well off the Interstates. He spoke of Bamberg, and I mentioned to him how impressed I was the one time I visited Allendale — all those abandoned motels along 301, which died when the Interstates opened.

    We talked about whether there was any hope for turning around South Carolina’s small towns, whether Nikki Haley (who hales from Bamberg) or Camden’s Vincent Sheheen is elected. We reached no conclusions.

    And I spoke of visiting Bennettsville over the weekend. I didn’t mention the “use to was” part, because it would have taken too long to explain.

    Joe just can’t (“liberal!”) help himself (“liberal, liberal! Pelosi, liberal!”). It’s like Tourette’s…

    21 Replies

    When I saw that Joe Wilson had put out a press release talking about incentives to create jobs, I thought Great! Some substance! A release in which I won’t have to read any fulmination about “liberals” and how they’re the root of all evil! After all, a jobs plan has to be pragmatic thing, meant to address the broad complex of practical, real-world problems leading to our current economic malaise.

    Silly me:

    Wilson Urges Job Creation Incentives as Unemployment Rises

    (Washington, DC) – Congressman Joe Wilson (SC-02) today released the following statement after the Department of Labor announced the unemployment rate rose to 9.6 percent and the U.S. economy lost jobs for the third straight month:

    “I’m not sure where Administration officials are spending their summer, but here in South Carolina, this is certainly not the ‘Recovery Summer’ we were promised.

    “For 16 straight months, unemployment has been above nine percent.  Why the Administration and liberal leadership in Congress isn’t talking about job creation plans each and every day is beyond belief.  People are hurting and the time to act is now, not later or in another 16 months,” said Congressman Joe Wilson.

    Congressman Joe Wilson has outlined a job creation plan that offers incentives to small business owners to hire more employees and gives American families more money to invest.  See his plan here and pass it along to Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

    ###

    The boldfacing is Joe’s, not mine.

    He just can’t help himself. It’s like Tourette’s or something. He’s incapable of completing a thought without reference to “liberals” or “Pelosi.” Just watch, and see if I’m not right.

    “Again with the negative waves, Moriarty!”

    5 Replies

    Again with the negative waves!

    Once again, the media are filled with negative vibes about our economy, utterly heedless of the fact that the central tenet of the Warthen School of Economics is that “the economy” is an utterly abstract and theoretical thing built from collective emotions, and that the greatest single cause of “bad economic conditions” is negative thoughts regarding the economy.

    This time, my beef is with this headline in the Columbia Regional Business Report:

    Final accounting for S.C. fiscal ’10 paints grim financial picture

    Thing is, the story (by my old friend Jim Hammond) is actually about what already happened with the state budget, which is fine. What gets me is that the headline implies bad economic times ahead. At least that’s the way I erroneously read it. And headlines are enough to make things bad.

    To end with the words with which Oddball ends the above serious of clips, Why don’t you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?

    And yeah, I’m kind of being facetious here. I just wanted an excuse to run the Oddball clips from “Kelly’s Heroes.” This, by the way, was what I was looking for earlier when I ran across the Kerouac clip.

    Cut out the swooning already and get it together

    13 Replies

    I’ve just really been getting fed up with domestic and world markets the last couple of days, what with headlines such as this one in the WSJ this morning:

    Markets Swoon on Fears

    Stocks Pummeled on Signs of Global Slowdown; Money Flees to Dollar and Yen

    Investors around the world scrambled for safe havens as fears of a global economic slowdown grew.

    The yen briefly touched a 15-year high against the U.S. dollar, the euro suffered its worst selloff in nearly two years, and global stock markets tumbled.

    A day after briefly cheering the Federal Reserve’s announcement it would buy Treasury debt to bolster the U.S. economy, investors Wednesday began fretting about the negative implications of the move: The world’s biggest economy still needs extraordinary government help…

    And then there’s stuff like the stories I just put on my virtual front page about the three-day market slide, and the sharp upswing in foreclosures in SC in July.

    Enough! No more bad news on the economic front!

    Here’s the thing: I firmly believe that this whole business of the economy being up or down is all in our heads. Or if not our heads, in whatever parts of our bodies are extremely emotional and easily frightened about the future. (Yes, there can be conditions that are not in our heads — like a pestilence that wipes out our food supply. But I haven’t noticed anything like that happening. We just panicked back in September 2008, and we’ve been panicking ever since.)

    If we have confidence, we will act in a way that justifies confidence. We’ll take risks, make investments, spend money; people will be hired and will in turn take risks, invest, and spend, and things will just be booming.

    But if we’re all nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, everything freezes up. There’s no commerce, no jobs, no hope.

    So enough with the swooning. The last two years have been more than enough for me.

    I can’t afford it, but I think I’m gonna run out and buy something. Of course, you other several billion people need to do the same thing. So let’s get on the stick.

    The Midlands Aviation Summit today

    16 Replies

    Went to the Midlands Aviation Summit today at the convention center, which was the community’s chance to hear airport consultant Michael Boyd of Boyd Group International (above) assessing the state of, and future prospects for, Columbia Metropolitan Airport.

    As you can see below, there was a pretty decent turnout of concerned folks. They ran the gamut from professional ecodevo types from the Chamber, the Midlands Alliance and Midlands Authority for Conventions, Sports & Tourism to business travelers with a beef about the cost of parking at CAE.

    Some main points from what he said:

    • “That scraping sound is not an iceberg.” The fact that Southwest chose Charleston and Greenville and not Columbia is not a huge deal. Southwest is what it is, and he doesn’t see it as the cure for Columbia’s ills. It’s not “the giant sucking sound.”
    • While we might have challenges with fares and losing passengers to Charlotte, for business purposes CAE provides what Columbia needs — connections to where business travelers need to be.
    • Main thing travel into and out of Columbia needs to be is reliable, to not have our flights be among those that get canceled when there’s a rainstorm.
    • Airlines don’t care about our civic enthusiasm. They don’t want to view cute or pleading videos. Don’t send them the mayor. What they care about is whether they’re going to make any money, because nobody’s taking risks these days.
    • No, don’t start your own airline. Air South? “We don’t talk about that in polite society.”
    • What can civic-minded folks who want to see the airport grow as a boost to the local economy DO? Check out the local airport first. Don’t assume it can’t meet your needs. Give it a chance.
    • We just don’t have enough traffic — enough passengers on big enough airplanes — to bring down fares. When someone pointed out that smaller airports such as Florence and Augusta have lower fares, he said he had no idea why. “I used to be in airline pricing, so I have no understanding of it whatsoever.”
    • The cost of parking is not a problem.

    On that last one I had to challenge him. When he said “Nobody cares about the cost of parking,” several people around me muttered, “I care.” I told him that, and also told him that I hear all the time from people who have run the numbers, and come out ahead paying for the gas to drive to Charlotte and park there. I added that even if it didn’t make sense, even if it were totally irrational, it would still be a real problem we had to deal with. Airport Executive Director Dan Mann told me afterward that he gets it. Perception is reality.

    (It occurs to me that next time local governments want to invest money in boosting air travel, rather than starting an airline, maybe they could help the airport lower those parking costs. I realize it’s based on the need to pay for the capital investment, but maybe there’s some way to restructure the debt. Or something.)

    On the lower pricing in Augusta and Florence… I was glad someone brought that up, and somewhat disappointed he couldn’t tell us why that was the case. But it occurs to me that there must be some reason, his joke about the illogical nature of pricing aside. And if we could find out that reason, and apply it here, it would help.

    Based on what Mr. Boyd said and a brief conversation with Dan Mann after the presentation, the thinking seems to be that Columbia’s best chance for expansion of air service lies with Delta, not USAirways. So our local economic developers in the air transportation field are likely to be looking more to Atlanta, less to Charlotte.

    Oh, ‘whine, bitch, moan…’ just write us a letter, why don’tcha…

    12 Replies

    Hey, since I am no longer with the MSM, I don’t have to listen to your whining, bitching and moaning about us.

    So it is that I don’t have to be diplomatic, and can now answer your feeble complaints with the full disdain that characterizes the finest traditions of the MSM.

    Such as when our valued friend Kathryn brought our attention (see how easily I slip back into the royal, editorial first-person plural?)  to this article, headlined “Journalism monopoly was also a market failure,” and particularly this passage:

    “If your neighborhood or community or issue didn’t interest the newspaper, it might as well have been banned from the community agenda. And if you had something to say, and wanted the community to hear or read it, your options were to pray you could get a letter to the editor published, or an even-rarer Op-Ed piece, or put out fliers around town. “

    Added Kathryn, who passionately cares about Columbia and is always getting involved up to her elbows in the nitty-gritty of community issues, “I found this to be true, far too often…”

    Oh, yeah? Well, now hear this:

    I’m sorry, but we in the MSM are too busy to care about your esoteric, narrow personal concern. If you’d like to hire a consultant who can write us a press release about it, sexing it up with great quotes and some cool graphics, and maybe work in Gamecocks football, we may put it in the queue. But keep it simple — left-right, liberal-conservative, whatever. Don’t confuse us with gradations of meaning. Stuff like that makes our heads spin like that girl in “The Exorcist” — yeah, the one who threw up the green pea soup.
    Meanwhile, write us a letter. But keep it short. And include your full address and a daytime telephone number, a photocopy of a picture ID, at least, three references, and annotated supporting material to back up your assertions. And pick a number between one and 1,000, and we’ll let you know whether your number wins. If it doesn’t, we will grind your epistle up with the other 999 and turn it into compost, so that it will be useful to us.

    Apparently, the B&C Board has lost the big one

    32 Replies

    Looks like maybe the governor won — meaning South Carolina lost — on the big Budget and Control Board $25 million vote, according to James Smith via Twitter this afternoon:

    RepJamesSmith

    25 million eliminated from B&C Board jeopardizes our AAA credit rating & eliminates 800 MHz radio funding essential for emergency response.

    Actually, I wrote this post right after getting that Tweet late this afternoon. But then I got another Tweet from Anton Gunn saying that wasn’t right, and I got confused, and I had to go do “Pub Politics,” so I took this post down. But everything I’ve seen since then indicates James was right the first time: The $25 million veto has been sustained. So this post is back up.

    That’s all I know right now. If you’ll recall, this is the veto that Frank Fusco said would key functions of the Board. To quote, he said:

    If our General Fund budget is not restored, these areas of the Board would have to virtually cease operation:

    • The State Budget Office

    • The SCEIS statewide financial system

    • The Board of Economic Advisors

    • The Office of Human Resources

    • The Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum

    More when I know more.

    But if this report is right, there are essentially no grownups in charge over at the State House.

    Folks, just so you know where we all stand: I agree 100 percent with the governor that the Budget and Control Board should not exist. In fact, I’m pretty sure he got the idea from ME.

    But until we actually do away with it, it actually performs a lot of vital government tasks (which would be performed by the executive branch in a more rational system, but we don’t have such a system — all we have is the B&C Board). To simply eliminate its funding, thereby making it impossible for it to perform these tasks, is simply insane. It’s anarchistic. It’s nihilistic. It’s appalling. It’s… it’s … South Carolina.

    ‘Ideas… having sex with each other:’ The collective, interactive nature of human progress

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    There was a fascinating piece in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, which I particularly enjoyed because of the way it cut across the way we tend to group ideas, particularly political and philosophical ideas, in popular dialogue.

    In particular, I liked the way it applied economics to evolution to explain how human progress — innovation, wealth production, and other blessings of modernity — is a collective, interdependent process:

    The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead—because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

    The piece started wondering why our ancestors, who could make tools for a couple of million years, didn’t really start to take off technologically or culturally until 45,000 years ago. The answer is that we are dependent on each other to move forward, and there have to be enough of us to reach critical mass if we’re really to take off.

    The best part was right here:

    But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.

    In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur argues in his book “The Nature of Technology,” nearly all technologies are combinations of other technologies and new ideas come from swapping things and thoughts. (My favorite example is the camera pill—invented after a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.) We tend to forget that trade and urbanization are the grand stimuli to invention, far more important than governments, money or individual genius. It is no coincidence that trade-obsessed cities—Tyre, Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the places where invention and discovery happened. Think of them as well-endowed collective brains.

    I like the way this celebrates human achievement — from science to culture to capitalism — while at the same time blowing apart the fantasy that so many (the Mark Sanfords of the world) harbor: That we function best as little individual islands left alone by society at large. We are all in this together, or we simply don’t progress.

    I don’t know about you, but I find it far more elevating to think about ideas having sex than certain, um, people:

    The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.

    Reading all this caused me to have a depressing thought, however. I think these ways of looking at human progress may help explain why political ideas in this country seem so counterproductive, so mutually canceling, like intellectual dead-ends, with the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” locked in perpetual battle with each having a slight majority for a time, but no progress ever being made (by anyone’s notion of “progress”)…

    I think it’s because our political ideas no longer “have sex” with one another, borrowing memes from each other and changing and producing new, more vibrant and robust, hybrid ideas. Not only do the ideas of today’s so-called “liberals” and so-called “conservatives” not only don’t jump into the sack together, they don’t hold hands, or even look at each other across a crowded room. They don’t even listen to each other, much less join to be fruitful and multiply productive new ideas.

    Our political system, centered around a legislative process that depends on deliberation — with real debate between people listening to each other in good faith — can’t function with all the dancers standing on opposite sides of the dance hall and refusing to speak to each other.

    Maybe I should start marketing my UnParty as a political/intellectual fertility cult, and sponsor monthly idea orgies. Or something.

    Just a thought.

    Note how markets react to stimulus news

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    Just thought I’d point something about about gummints and markets.

    Markets rose yesterday on news of massive European bailout. That’s because markets are pragmatic, not ideological, things.

    Also, while I know Europe has it’s own psychoses (thank God our own neo-Nazis are marginal), I haven’t heard of anything equating to a Tea Party movement arising across the Continent to complain about the gummint taking steps to stave off disaster. That’s a peculiarly American phenomenon.

    Of course, it’s early yet.