Category Archives: Random Blogging

Driving Us Nuts

We are hearing a lot about the need to elect a Mayor with a big vision for the city. I agree, but we ought not forget that management skills are also very important. It’s great to have leadership that knows where it wants to go-but it doesn’t do much good to know you want to go to San Francisco if you think you need to drive to the East Coast to get there.

We can argue about the financing of all the road work being done in our fair city–this administration’s willingness to sell off capital assets to fund operating costs, its willingness to shift costs from taxpayers to ratepayers, and the other games it has played, but done is done. What has me frustrated is the lack of management, co-ordination and plain common sense I see daily as I try to navigate the relatively short distance from my home to IUPUI.

I served in City Hall “back in the day” and I know it’s never easy to avoid traffic tie ups when you are fixing streets. Some inconvenience is unavoidable. But I remember the efforts made to minimize those problems, the planning that went into the process. There is no evidence of such planning in the current frenzy to pave every possible street before the Super Bowl (or perhaps before the election.) Work interrupts rush hour on our busiests streets. Equipment needed in Fountain Square to remove buried rail tracks is being used somewhere else, so traffic to stores in Fountain Square remains blocked for weeks more than necessary (with the result that some of those businesses didn’t survive). Streets are torn up, base pavement put down, then ignored for long periods until suddenly the paving crews are back to finish the top coat. If there is any method to any of this, it isn’t apparent.

I’m glad our streets are being paved, even if I worry about paying for it with fiscal smoke and mirrors. I just wish there were someone in City Hall with the ability to recognize the challenge of doing so much work with so many different contractors in so abbreviated a time frame–someone with the skill to manage the process.

Instead, the simplest trip is driving us nuts.

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A Question

Watching the news–and what passes for news–it’s hard not to wonder whether we’ve stumbled into an alternate university. The GOP is once again threatening to shut down the government, this time, apparently, over their insistence that funds spent for disaster relief be offset by other budget cuts. We still hear politicians insist that “austerity” will create jobs–despite a broad consensus among economists to the contrary, and despite the last jobs report which showed that private sector hiring gains were entirely offset by government layoffs.

You would think that the people who are trumpeting the need for cost reductions might be looking at long-standing boondoggles and expensive programs that are demonstrably failing to achieve their goals. I’ve written before about the monumentally expensive failure that is the drug war. Senator Lugar has long advocated cuts to agricultural subsidies (I’d start with the sugar subsidy that benefits a few well-connected producers while increasing costs to consumers)–there are plenty of places where we really could make significant cuts without damaging our already threadbare social safety net. (We might consider invading fewer countries…)

And I won’t even try to comprehend the mind-set that insists that “shared” sacrifices are those that fall exclusively on the people most likely to be hurt by them, so that millionaires and billionaires can be protected from returning to the historically low rates during the Clinton Administration. If Congress really believes that protecting millionaires’ pocketbooks leads to job creation, that they are protecting people who will invest in new jobs, why not raise their rates, but give them a generous tax credit for every job they create?

I could go on, but so could most of you reading this. We seem to live in a world where logic based upon credible information has become a very rare commodity.

So here is my question: what should reasonable people living in an unreasonable age do?

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And Now For Something Different……

A couple of old friends who read this blog have expressed surprise that I seem so gloomy (I’ve always been an optimist–not a Dr. Pangloss, but a believer in the common sense and good will of most people). So today I’m going to focus on one of the many good things that are happening around the world, despite our toxic politics.

While governments around the globe continue to dither about environmental policies, nonprofits are introducing bold new techniques that will not only ameliorate environmental degradation, but will cut the costs of delivering services in poor countries and neighborhoods. I found this one particularly impressive.

Now if we could just be that innovative in reforming our politics……..

Age and Perspective

One of the (very few) benefits of growing old is that you gain perspective. Sometimes, that also leads to a modicum of wisdom, sometimes not–but it does mean that one’s frame of reference is larger and longer. To use a very common example, you can’t truly appreciate how dramatically the internet has changed society if you were born after the invention of the world wide web.

This morning’s Paul Krugman column reminded me again that those of us born in the mid-twentieth century have a vantage point to assess political change that younger folks don’t have.

My students are frequently aghast when they learn that I was a Republican for most of my life–that I even ran for Congress as a fairly conservative Republican, and won a primary. But as Krugman points out, and as I try to explain to my students, the positions that made me “conservative” in 1980 make me a pinko/socialist/liberal today. Most of my students grew up in an environment where conservative Republicans reject evolution and the science of climate change, talk a lot about fiscal prudence, but practice “borrow and spend” economic policies, and are totally without compassion for the less fortunate. The only Republicans they’ve known are those who preach limited government while insisting on their right to control women’s reproduction and their right to discriminate against gays. They are shocked to learn that I was pro-choice and pro-gay rights and still was able to win a GOP primary.

Krugman explains the change with his usual clarity, beginning with the example of the Tea Party’s “let ’em die” eruption at the recent GOP Presidential debate:

“In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don’t take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in “The Road to Serfdom” his support for “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.

Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts.

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.”

What Krugman fails to note, and these radicals fail to understand, is that if they actually are successful in their frantic efforts to keep government from “stealing” even a penny in taxes to be distributed (in their fevered imaginations) to the “less deserving,” they would also be impoverished. What Hayek understood–and what those who invoke his name without reading his arguments do not-is that, just as a rising tide lifts all boats, an ebbing tide lowers all boats. They remind me of a two-year-old snatching a toy from a playmate while screaming “mine, mine, mine.”

What we are seeing from this radical fringe is not a political shift. It’s a tantrum.

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A Logic Question

Tom Friedman is not a favorite columnist of mine–although I often agree with him, he often seems a bit too smug, a bit too self-satisfied with his own superior analytical skills. But today, he hit one out of the ballpark. After asking “Is It Weird Enough Yet,” he eviscerates Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry for their insistence that climate change is just a hoax, perpetrated by research scientists to generate funding. Not only does Friedman explain (in language that even Rick Perry should be able to understand) how the extreme weather we are experiencing is a consequence of global climate change, he explains what is necessary if so-called “green jobs” are to generate real economic growth.

But let’s say you still aren’t convinced.

Ever hear of “Pascal’s wager”? The philosopher Blaise Pascal was dubious about the existence of God, but he reasoned that–since one could not know for certain–the logical course of action was to act as though he did.  If it turned out that God was real, great. If not, you would have lived a good life. In other words, by acting as though you believe even if you don’t, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Global climate change invites a similar logic. If we decide to act on the advice of the 98% of scientists whose research supports the finding, and climate change is real, we’ll save the planet. If it turns out that our fears are ill-founded or exaggerated, we’ll end up doing a lot of things we need to do anyway–recycle, use energy more efficiently, etc.

When we have everything to gain by a particular course of action, and nothing to lose, refusing to take that action is more than weird. It’s self-destructive.

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