Mason: Outlook 'bleak' for state budget remedies

I'm intimately familiar with what Rep Mason is saying to the District 1 municipalities -- we talk about it every week on The People's Business (2pm Sat and Sun, 89.5 and 90.1 FM) -- and while I wasn't there on Tuesday, I can be pretty confident that she said a whole lot more in her presentation to Council than shows up in Cindy's story. Tune in this weekend for the full megillah from Lucy, or check out the meeting itself on Access13.

The reason the outlook is so bleak is not because we don't have good choices available to us, but rather that the hardline Republican leadership, including our own Mr Tobin, refuses to consider those choices in favor of an ideology that demands taking advantage of every opportunity to kill off government services. Beyond reducing quality of life for all of us, this adolescent approach also stunts the business environment they think they favor.

Elections matter. If you've been resisting involvement in politics -- unlikely if you're reading this, I'm sure -- get up off your lazy duff and do your part to understand the issues and elect better people.

Editorial: Earmarked finances at risk of reallocation

Our legislators, continuously frustrated that voter protections keep it from exerting control over a large portion of the state's budget, are looking at how they can change the law to allow them to graze the forbidden fruit.

The unnamed Courier editor characterizes this as focusing only on "money that is not being spent," and while some lawmakers may be saying that, it would be supremely naive to imagine that any breach in the initiative firewall won't lead to wholesale withdrawal of any funds the Legislature wants. And bear in mind that our Legislature is currently owned and operated by the radical right, which risks the decimation of any program created by voter initiative that's to the left of Jesse Helms.

The editor goes further, imagining that the Legislature can simply repeal inconvenient initiatives. This betrays a gross lack of understanding of the Arizona Constitution. The initiative process is designed specifically to prevent legislative meddling in voter-created laws. It just don't work that way. This also implies a complete misunderstanding of the legislative process, in that programs and funding mechanisms generally go hand in hand, so repealing an initiative repeals its funding as well. That's a no-gainer, budget-wise, so you have to essentially siphon off taxes that the people have dedicated to a specific purpose and apply them somewhere else. That tends to piss people off.

There are a lot of good reasons for amending the Constitution to eliminate or restructure the initiative process. Voter-protection of funding really does impair legislative work to build constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, and as these protected chunks have built up over decades, everyone agrees the system is now seriously out of balance. Large out-of-state and corporate interests have also discovered that an initiative can be packaged and sold to voters like corn flakes, and this can be very convenient for snaking something into law that even the most expensive and devious lobbyists can't get through the normal process. We have a lot of bad and clunky law on our books as a result, and other states have found themselves facing bankruptcy over such idiocies.

What's happening now may result in the Legislature creating legal fig leaves for borrowing voter-protected funds to pay back later, while a Constitutional amendment goes forward to change the initiative process. This cannot legally change previous voter protections except by other specific initiatives, the Supreme Court will see to that. There's no going back, we can only go forward.

The editor's glib conclusion, that we should just "enact smart spending at all levels," is easy to say, but very hard to manage both politically and practically. The essential part he leaves out is gathering the necessary revenue and building a dependable tax structure, no surprise as he's never seen a tax he liked. We can only hope that our lawmakers are able to cobble together a more useful understanding of the complexity of our situation and more respect for voters and the law than our editor exhibits in this piece.

Update, 5pm: It seems our governor and legislative leadership aren't even competent to count days. ABC is reporting that tomorrow's special session will be too late to legally do anything about the March ballot measures on the agenda. (Readers of the linked story will note that Ken Bennett used to be Senate President, now he's Secretary of State, of course. Gad.) Now they're talking about a May ballot. Why not do the session anyway, aiming for May instead, rather than put it off again? I swear.

Editorial: Balancing bonuses in unbalanced times

The unnamed editor is cribbing from an article in The Arizona Capitol Times you'll find here. (Did the Courier carry this in the paper version, maybe?)

The first thing that jumps out at me is that the editor equates obscenely large bonuses for executives of big corporations with standard-practice longevity bonuses for non-executive employees of municipal authorities. The logic there is undeniably weak.

But his central point is that it doesn't make sense to pay bonuses to some employees while laying off others, not too strange on the surface, especially for the majority of people, who've never received workplace bonuses other than as holiday gifts and such.

A newspaper editor is supposed to have wider knowledge than that, though. "Bonus" is a hot-button word in the media context of big-bank bailouts, but that doesn't change its real-world value as a normal part of the pay package for many. It's clear from the Capitol Times piece that this is standard practice among Valley municipalities, and it's offered to reward and retain experienced employees.

Let's bring the numbers into human perspective. This year Phoenix is putting 14.3 million clams, from a budget of over a billion, into bonuses for about 7,000 employees. This amounts to an average of a little over two grand per employee. Not a huge differential, if you ask me.

Perhaps the editor forgets that the quality of municipal services depends on the quality of the people furnishing them, and that an experienced employee is usually far more valuable than a new one. The editor's corporatist worldview tends to see workers as interchangeable and disposable, but real-world business knows better. Quality specialized workers are in constant demand, regardless of the economic weather, and municipalities are never at the top of the list of high-paying employers.

But the big fail here is that the editor doesn't bother to ask the most fundamental question: do Prescott, PV or Chino Valley include this sort of bonus in their pay packages? If so, we have something to talk about and some numbers to look at. If not, he's wasting everyone's time, as no one cares what the Courier thinks about what Mesa is doing.

Krugman on reregulation

Pursuant to my point below, just go read.

The infrastructure clown parade

Following up on Karen Fann's two-part Talk of My Ass two weeks ago, today we see a letter from the Yavapai County Contractors Association neatly juxtaposed with the editorial saying essentially the same things Mayor Fann did, adding exactly nothing to the argument.

All three of these entities argue quite reasonably that our infrastructure is in sad shape and needs revamping. I agree completely. But none bothers to lay out any ideas for how to pay for it other than vague references to federal stimulus funds.

None seems to notice that we gave up trillions in revenue with the Bush tax cuts for the rich, that we've run our economy on the rocks with insane spending on pointless, self-defeating wars, or that we're giving away hundreds of billions to patch the mistakes of crazed profiteers in financial institutions. These are a big part of why there's no money, folks. And they all -- the editor, Ms Fann and I'll bet Ms Griffis -- supported every one of these stupid decisions to the hilt, so I wouldn't look to them for sensible solutions to the problem.

We're where we are, so what can we do about infrastructure? First we have to look at the problem in realistic context. A given bridge or highway is the responsibility of a municipality, the state or the federal government, so funding for the repair has to come to its governing authority. The federal government legally can't do it all, as our commenters imply. Even if it could, the money has to come from somewhere, just printing it at the mint would rob us all in a hundred ways. So we have to grit our teeth and admit that we have to pay for it.

At the state level, expenditures this year are still running around 20% ahead of revenues even after the draconian cuts the legislature has instituted, and the numbers continue to head south. Everyone who's paying attention on left and right agree that this derives from structural problems in the budget, specifically an overdependence on sales taxes (generated primarily by home construction) and neglect of more dependable revenue sources, specifically income and residential property taxes, both among the lowest in the nation. This is a bit like basing your weekly budget on your Xmas bonus.

We can do a lot to fix that and it won't hurt much, by raising the income tax a little or by broadening property taxes and lowering the rates. Our legislative Democrats are waiting with the ideas in hand for when the Republicans finally realize that their ideas can't work, cut their radical fringe loose and grudgingly let the Dems into the room. There's really no other good option on the table.

At the federal level, we need a massive rethink of our spending priorities, particularly on our war machine. We're like a 16th-century mounted knight, weighed down with so much armor that we can't stand up on our own (our Chinese squire propping us up), while our adversaries have switched to light infantry with economic rifles. Our dependence on war as an industry is serving everyone's interests but our own. Diverting just a small part of the resources we devote to warmaking instead to clean energy development would build us an industry for the future as well as bring that value back into our economy as vital long-term infrastructure.

On the revenue side, we still have to repair the damage done by the Bush administration. Allowing those tax cuts to expire will be a huge help and won't hurt anyone at all, and moving a portion of those funds into New Deal-style infrastructure-building is exactly what the doctor is ordering here. Going further and reregulating the financial industry, starting with reinstituting Glass-Steagall (the repeal of which was a Clinton-era mistake) will help stabilize our economy and get us back on track to sensible growth by repairing our credit infrastructure. This will require steady public pressure, as it appears the Obama administration is substantially favoring Wall Street over Main Street.

You may notice that while they are coming from the political left, all these ideas are deeply conservative at their core. Sensible revenue-generation, sensible spending on things that will have lasting value. The years-long binge by the political right has reached its inevitable sad end, much as it did in 1929, albeit with far less extreme results, and now we have to be adults and deal sensibly with the mess.

Please remove shoes and belt

I've been getting more frequent spam in the comments, so I've added a little security step to the routine. Sorry about that. It's too much like taking your shoes off at the airport for my taste, but the bad guys just never let up.

Radio news

As of yesterday morning KJZA/KJZP is running on 90.1 in Prescott in partnership with KAWC in Yuma. Hope you like it!

Feed-your-head Friday

Okay, so I stole the idea from Science Friday on NPR. So sue me. And yeah, I'm a day late. No cookie for you.

How snakes slither:

The Catch-22 list again, ack

Never mind how Joe Heller might feel about this ugly use of the title of his great novel. I'm wondering who's being served by our annual 22 Days of Prescott's Most Wanted (cue musical theme ripping off Highway Patrol).

If you thought a lot of these mugshots seem familiar, there's little wonder, just look at the dates. Many of them have been on the list for years.

Adam Stevenson, wanted since 2004. Manuel Acosta, 2002. Miguel Franco and Claudio Lopez, 2006. Hector Reyes, 2002. Joel Medina-Ortiz, 2006. Domingo Valdez-Anguiano, 2004. Others have no dates, but I'm sure I've seen them before, and not this year.

Yavapai Silent Witness, which is the primary source of these stories, carries the list. The Courier ran that list on May 1 of this year, and it contained all the same names as were on last year's Catch-22 list, one going back to 1998, one wanted for "prescription fraud," another a probation violation, locations from Holbrook to Wickenburg.

What does it mean when the annual push to "catch 22 felons in 22 days" focuses on the same people year after year? Maybe it means that there really aren't enough bad guys out there to scare us with. Averaged over ten years, that's only 2.2 per year.

I've seen and written about the tilt toward Hispanics we see on this list. Add in that the editors have at least ten years of bad guys to choose from, and the racial-profiling angle really lights up.

But what concerns me more is the suspicion that reportage is drifting over into newsmaking and adjusting public perceptions of reality for political purpose. Cherry-pick 22 uncaught, mostly Latino felons from over ten years, dump their mugshots and precious little else one by one on the front page over three weeks, and you might create the impression among those who aren't paying close attention that there's a lot of crime going on around here by scary brown people. Which spreads unwarranted fear, which sells newspapers and, not incidentally, Republican candidates for office.

Now note today's editorial, defending it as "a new list" of "the most violent offenders currently at large." Prescription fraud. Hmmm.

City use of pulverized glass on streets raises questions

Lots of people are clearly hopping mad about the glass-in-the-streets story, but a different factor comes to mind for me.

The point of recycling glass, going all the way back to the first new-era mandatory bottle deposits in Michigan in the '70s, was to keep the glass out of the environment and make more new glass with it, since it is so easy to recycle cheaply. It's not waste, it's a resource.

Recall a couple of years ago, when Mr Norwood removed the City glass containers from supermarket parking lots, calling the operation unprofitable? Now we see what should be reasonably valuable materials crushed and spread on our streets. We've come full circle, only where citizens were once the litterers, now it's our government.

The angle I'd have liked to see in the Courier's story isn't who's to blame for this little incident, but rather why a City asset is being systematically wasted in this manner. Has the raw-glass market crashed, leaving municipalities with worthless piles of glass? Have we failed to build the necessary market-to-manufacturer infrastructure to make recycling worthwhile? Are other materials similarly in glut or nearing it? Or are our administrators just unwilling to make it a priority and deal with it? There are many interesting questions of vital public interest to be asked here.

















This is from secondarycommodity.com, which tracks prices on recyclables, and this chart covers curbside-gathered materials over the past two years. I dunno much about interpreting these data, but it looks to me like prices track fairly well with the economy overall, and they're up substantially over a year ago. To me that means the City is wasting public assets of increasing value into our environment, not unlike burning a ten-dollar bill to light a cigarette.

I can see the amped-up Hollywood treatment now -- a film about Prescott City government with Heath Ledger as Steve Norwood.

Gettin' the ol' Xmas spirit on

Not a lot of time for blogging this week, we've got a big project to finish before the weekend, but but given the season I just had to get in here and deck the blog, as they say. This pretty well expresses the whole thing for me. Enjoy!

Feed-your-head Friday

The universe is quite likely weirder than we can imagine.

Holiday travel kept me away last week, so I've got a bonus for this week. National Geographic presents a piece in its latest issue to help us understand and teach about the carbon problem and why it's really important to get ahead of it. Check it out.

Editorial: DVDs free to use, not for the taking

This is exactly the sort of thing a careful reader might expect to see when editors get lazy. The unnamed Courier editor's Barcalounger has turned in yet another cut-and-paste version of yesterday's page-one story. But this time it ought to be particularly embarrassing, because he's failed to think through the basis for the story, uncritically passing on nonsense from a press release that seems designed to unfairly manipulate him and the public.

I like Toni Kaus and she seems to be doing well with a tough job as head of the library. This is the first indication I've seen that she or her staff may be doing anything less than above board. But the story of 1,500 stolen DVDs smells of week-old fish.

The library wants a new security system to mesh with those at other libraries in its network and reduce the workload on its staff and volunteers, and this will cost a lot of money. But to justify this expense, it points to people picking way too many things up and neglecting to check them out. This indicates to me that the library has been pretty well failing to provide adequate security against theft of public property. One might think that security would have been an important design factor in the recent total renovation of the library, but we must infer that it wasn't considered or isn't working. That's a fail worthy of note by a local paper. The editor misses it completely.

The library uses the value of the stolen DVDs to help justify the expense, valuing its donated, secondhand, hard-used discs at $25 each. Actual replacement cost for discs in better shape might run to six or seven bucks tops, more like four or five in my experience. Average that high with labor involved, factor in donations of a third of them, and replacing 1,500 DVDs might cost around $7K. Not cheap, but not any $37K. That's ridiculous price-inflation to justify the $93K price tag on the RFID system and imply that it will amortize in a fifth of the time. It may be in a good cause, but it's underhanded all the same, and a local newspaper editor ought to be asking why, if this is such a good thing for the library, the staff needs to use such tactics in pitching it.

We also see nothing but acceptance that the new system will be airtight -- it won't be, there will still be shrinkage, and we ought to know the relative projection -- and we don't hear how many DVDs wear out and have to be replaced anyway, another useful data point in gauging the importance of the security system relative to other spending priorities.

An important part of a news editor's job is critical thinking and skepticism about what people in authority say, particularly where it involves public policy and the public purse. On seeing this ham-handed move by the library, the editors could have asked pointed questions, or simply dropped the smelly elements from what is otherwise a perfectly good story. Instead the readers (and advertisers) get simple-minded stenography. Our city deserves better.

ToT: Fann on infrastructure

Since there was nothing in the first section, I was hoping that in her followup Karen Fann might suggest some ideas for solving the problems she copiously cites. I was disappointed.

It matters because Ms Fann is the anointed successor to Lucy Mason in the House, so her abilities as a leader and problem-solver are important. (The idea that a Dem challenger might beat her for the seat seems remote at this point.)

Ms Fann risks public derision for complaining about the state of public infrastructure -- because of her close ties to firms that do so much of it on the public dime -- so you'd think she would want to offer some sort of plan that makes sense. Instead we see nothing but complaints about other public initiatives that she thinks have little or no value, like research on how we can reduce the impact of climate change and keep Arizona habitable.

This illustrates exactly the sort of conventional pigheadedness that has rammed us full-speed into an obvious economic wall. It does not bode well for our legislative delegation.

I agree wholeheartedly that our infrastructure is woefully neglected, including portions of it that Ms Fann neglects to mention. But our problem is not addressing other problems, rather it's that Americans are unusually resistant to the idea that we have to pay for everything we need, and unwilling to accept that the majority rules on what we need.

In the comments, George Seaman brings up a good point. It appears that the editors are showing marked favoritism toward Ms Fann in getting her views published. I'm so surprised.

Restoration uncovers intact 1920s Elks marquee

I've been rubbing my hands hoping for this. The face work comes down and we can see the original electric-era sign. I'm guessing that certain people in the Foundation were hoping it had been previously erased, because now they'll have to figure out what to do with it.

They want to restore the theatre to its look before the electric era, putting that sign out of period. But no one will be able to even suggest taking it down, nor should they. There's also the little problem of the name of the place. It might be embarrassing after these several years of calling it an opera house (it is not, never has been and never could be an opera house) to have to go back and start calling it Elks Theatre again, as it always was. But with that sign there'll be no choice.

It's not the marquee, by the way, that would be a projecting structure holding the signage. It's the sign.

The mammogram tempest

I don't really wonder that a lot of people are confused by the media treatment of this week's announcement about mammograms, and clearly the unnamed Courier editor is among them. There are a couple of factors involved in this that shouldn't be, and they muddy the water considerably.

The first is that this is a science story, an area where we can count on our journalists to fail us pretty generally. Start talking about random trials, control groups and methodologies and their eyes instantly glaze over. They just want the bottom line, and they have a hard time remembering that the conclusion of a scientific study does not constitute a fact, but rather the best estimate the scientists can get of the truth given the specific conditions involved. Big difference.

In this case what we have is a new report from the US Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts on preventive care set up by the Reagan administration to "review the evidence of effectiveness and develop recommendations for clinical preventive services." The PSTF

"recommends against routine screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years. The decision to start regular, biennial screening mammography before the age of 50 years should be an individual one and take patient context into account, including the patient's values regarding specific benefits and harms."

(Incidentally, this backs up a similar conclusion from a study not long ago in Canada.) It's a simple, straightforward message. On looking at the current evidence, the panel found that the benefits of routine mammograms for low-risk women do not outweigh the associated risks.

The second factor making a huge mess of this is that a small proportion of people in this country are convinced that health-care reform is about rationing, killing off Republicans early and making lots of Democrats, and so they jumped in with both feet on the idea that this is a a nefarious scheme to deprive women of their necessary cancer tests. (Like they ever gave a rat's behind before about preventive services for women.) They came out screaming bloody murder (again) over nothing, and this is where we are.

In a way I wish it were a little more like the screamers fear. The profit motive in US health care leads to huge amounts of overprescription, overtesting, unnecessary procedures and other highly profitable waste. I think it would be reasonable to infer that profitmaking insurance companies will look for a way to use this to deny reasonable coverage. This has nothing to do with the public plan, which of course does not yet exist.

But it just isn't that important. It's another data point in the continuing refinement of our understanding that science pursues, no more, no less, and if more experts agree, a consensus may emerge to stop pushing women to have these tests because they're not necessary.

The editor basically gets it right in describing how to respond, but his tut-tutting the experts for unclear communication is ridiculous. The media have messed up the message, not them.

Where do the elements come from? It's feed-your-head Friday.

Talk of My Ass: Kirkpatrick won't get his vote again

Fred Veil leads by calling Democrats "Neo-Socialists," ticks off a few of the outright falsehoods the radical right is flogging as talking points, then complains that the representative failed to respond to his list of nonsense questions inspired by those talking points. He's right in that she should have responded, preferably telling him to take his disrespect and attitude and stuff it.

The piece wouldn't matter a bit except that the Courier editors slapped a "Talk of the Town" flag on this idiotic rant, giving it column status, rather than leaving it in the letters box. Dumb move.

To the headline-writer: Where did Mr Veil state that he voted for Ms Kirkpatrick the first time?

Editorial: Peavine Trail calls for right crossings

I've looked at the design presentation for the Road 39 trail crossing, and none of the options look all that good. I have to disagree with the unnamed Courier editor and probably with most of the trail-lovers, though. Building a tunnel or a bridge for the trail would suck for the trail in terms of environmental damage and access problems for horses and wheels, it would suck for the adjacent properties in terms of acres of earthwork encroachment, and it would suck for the taxpayer in terms of untenable expense.

I notice something missing from the plan though. The at-grade crossing design does not include a traffic light. With pedestrian request buttons to stop traffic when necessary (estimating from current numbers, not that often), it seems to me that the at-grade crossing would be a lot safer.

Anybody know otherwise?

Wiederaenders: Should we buy gold?

Gosh, what a mess. I hardly know where to begin.

First, as some of you know, for 22 years I've earned a major portion of my income from work for Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's business paper of record, equivalent to The Wall Street Journal. Japan's economy lives and dies on international currency exchange rates, so to stay current I read a lot about this stuff. I won't claim expert status, but I know more about it that your average Courier editor.

Next, two points of fact.

Tim asserts that "China is ... purposely deflating its currency." This is plain nonsense. In point of simple fact the yuan has been rising steadily against the dollar for many years, albeit more slowly than it would naturally because the Chinese government has been buying dollars like crazy. The purpose of this has indeed been to protect export values, yes. But deflation? No way. US and international pressure is what's causing the Chinese to slowly relent on their currency, and this is positive progress from our perspective. Everyone manipulates their currencies, that's the primary purpose of central banks. This stuff goes on everywhere all the time.

Tim goes on: "the world economy’s recession led Russia and China to call for a One World Currency – other than the U.S. dollar – earlier this year." Tim's conflating two different discussions. One -- which hit the news not this year but over four years ago, while the economy was still hot and oil was becoming stupidly expensive -- was not about a scary "One World Currency," as Fox News would have it, but rather the idea of denominating more international trade in one or more currencies in addition to the dollar, which would help hedge the risk of loss of value of the dollar. Our currency has been vastly overvalued for decades, in small part because of its hegemony in international trade in vital commodities like oil, but more because other countries (especially China) buy dollars to reduce their own currency values to support exports to us. The other, going back to October last year, involves China and Russia agreeing to oil trade between them denominated in rubles and yuan rather than the dollar, which is perfectly reasonable and beside the point.

It helps to understand that currency has no intrinsic value. It's like atomic structure -- it seems solid, but if you look really closely, there's almost nothing there. Currency is just a medium of exchange, and its value is always relative. Domestically we judge value by purchasing power -- how many burgers or gallons of gas it will buy. Internationally it's set relative to other currencies. These two factors rarely track together. So, with no intrinsic value, the idea that the dollar "should" have a high value is just wrong. The value you want depends on whether you're buying or selling.

Tim says, "Within the past week we have seen reports of the U.S. dollar’s value dropping." He's behind the curve by a couple of years. Against the yen, for example, the dollar has fallen by about 20% since June of '07.

That matters to me because I earn yen and spend dollars. But changes in the international value of the dollar mean almost nothing to you if you earn dollars and spend dollars. Think -- has the dollar's 'loss' of 20% of its relative value raised prices here by 20%? Of course not. It does affect the cost of imported goods, materials and resources somewhat, but bear in mind that exchange rate is only one factor in prices. No manufacturer wants to cut his own throat by allowing his prices to rise above norms in the world's largest consumer market, so exporters to the US are mostly eating the exchange losses. (What about oil!? I hear you cry. It's generally denominated in dollars, so no change!)

If anyone's been purposely deflating a currency recently, it's been the US, and that's generally a good thing. Since what goes up must eventually come down, artificial inflation of the dollar to improve international buying power caused international investors to gradually lose confidence in it, and the return to natural balance is restoring the soundness of the currency. It's also giving a little boost to what's left of our manufacturing base by making US goods cheaper internationally and foreign goods more expensive for us.

Now we get to the real nutty stuff. Tim says darkly, "Could the U.S. dollar fully collapse? I suppose so," imagining that the dollar could lose value to the point where it becomes useless, like Confederate scrip or the Iraqi dinar as the bombs were falling. Tim may suppose it, but the idea is plainly preposterous short of an asteroid strike. The US economy is huge and it has a strong (sometimes too strong) central bank. There is no risk of real military threat to us. Most important, the entire world is holding our bonds, which means both that our currency is the one they prefer when theirs seem shaky, and they have a closely vested interest in maintaining the value of that currency. Where people agree that something has value, for whatever reason, it has value.

Sure, go buy gold if you like, and make the gold dealers richer (both when you buy it and when you sell it later). But bear in mind that gold has volatile relative value just as currency does, so it carries exactly the same risks.

If you really want to maintain the value of what you own, on the other hand, invest in your community, vote against warmongers (the single most reliable cause of lost value is war), vote against oil interests, and help make sure everyone is healthy and the kids are well educated.