Mortgaging Our Civic Future

You’d think Indianapolis lawmakers might have learned something from the Goldsmith Administration. (For those of you new to Indy or too young to recall, Goldsmith was blessed with a growing national economy and low interest rates, and he was able to avoid raising taxes by using the municipal credit card–refinancing everything in sight, and incurring lots of additional debt, all of which  we’re still paying off. )

The lesson isn’t that cities should never incur debt. There are all sorts of reasons–good reasons–to bond for civic improvements. Think bridges, sewer systems, public buildings. As with so many issues in public administration, the issue isn’t whether to do something, it is under what circumstances and how.

Right now, the Mayor and Council are arguing about the Mayor’s proposal to issue thirty-year bonds for “Rebuild Indy II.”  The City–that’s us, the taxpayers–would essentially be taking out a 30-year mortgage on an asset with at most a 10 year life.

That is profoundly stupid.

Think about your house. You may have a loan with a twenty or thirty year term, but at the end of that period, the house will be yours and it will still be standing. If historical trends persist, and you’ve taken care of it, the house will be worth more than you paid for it. That mortgage was for an investment, and it made sense.

Would you take out a 30-year loan to purchase a tent? How about a car? Why not? Because the tent and the car depreciate. Those aren’t investments, they are consumer goods.

Paving city streets is maintenance.

Do our streets need paving? Are you kidding? Of course. Should tax dollars pay for that maintenance? Absolutely.

But a 30-year loan for maintenance that has to be redone every few years?

That’s like taking out a mortgage to pay the plumber for fixing your toilet.

Comments

Your Assignment for Today…

…is to read Don Knebel’s most recent post at the Center for Civic Literacy blog.

You need to read the post in its entirety, but here’s the lead-in, to whet your appetite:

When some American reporters described the recent election in India as a victory for the Hindu Nationalist Party, an Indian comic tweeted that Indian reporters should begin referring to the Republican Party as the “Christian Nationalist Party.” The tweet was sarcastic, but nonetheless close to home. As the primary defeat of Virginia Representative Eric Cantor emphasizes, the current incarnation of the Republican Party is increasingly both Christian and nationalistic.

Don notes that today’s GOP is most popular among citizens with the least education and the lowest incomes, and posits that those are the Americans who are also the most fearful– those most threatened by immigration and social change in general.  He also notes that those citizens are also more likely to be Christians. (I would add a few descriptors: older, white, male, heterosexual…). And he concludes:

Ironically, the Republican Party, long considered the party of the rich, seems increasingly to be the party of the poor or at least the working poor. While Republicans continue to advocate for lower taxes and less government spending, because of the correlation between a state’s poverty and its likelihood of voting Republican, eight of the ten states most heavily dependent on federal assistance also voted Republican in the 2012 Presidential election. Who would have thought?

Read the whole thing.

Comments

It’s the Culture, Stupid!

One of the many ways we might “slice and dice” humanity is to describe the wide gulf between people who understand the importance of systems and those who see the world entirely as a creation of individual actors and actions.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of leadership, because ultimately it is leaders and those they persuade who move the culture, but folklore to the contrary, that kid who stuck his finger in the dyke did not singlehandedly avert the deluge.

I understand the temptation to attribute social ills to personal failures. Saying “that guy is poor because he’s lazy,” is a much more satisfying analysis than one that tries to quantify the role(s) played by an inferior education or economic shifts that made his skills obsolete or bankrupted his employer–let alone public policies with unintended consequences.

There are two possible responses to a recognition of the immense influence of culture and social systems: you can shrug your shoulders, accept the brutal truth that you cannot change the world or even a small portion thereof, and spend your days cultivating your own garden (a la Candide); or you can join with others working for systemic changes, recognizing that life offers no guarantees. If and when change comes, its form will be unpredictable, its trajectory uncertain and its emergence maddeningly slow.

A lot of us struggle with that reality, and that choice, every day.

My garden is pretty appealing….and the magnitude of the cultural change we need is pretty daunting.

Withdrawal is tempting.

Comments

Why We Need More “Out” Secularists

Politics is largely a power struggle, and when any one group or constituency amasses disproportionate power, democracy and liberty suffer. We tend to see the disproportion most clearly when money is involved–hence the current focus on the 1%–but checkbooks aren’t  the only way special interests gain control.

When I was growing up, unions were powerful (yes, I’m old). In my house, they were feared and despised. Union “thugs”were a periodic feature of the landscape in Anderson, Indiana, where Delco Remy, Guide Lamp and other large automotive manufacturers were the source of most employment, and where folks who lived in our little “suburb” of Edgewood tended to come from management.

One of the reasons unions lost power was that some of them abused their (short-lived) dominance. But–surprise!–by emasculating unions, rather than simply constraining them, we enabled equivalent abuses by management. The lesson was–and is–that a balance of power is what’s important. When power is concentrated, abuses are inevitable.

So what does any of this have to do with secularism?

I spent the last weekend with a coalition of secularist groups: humanists, atheists, defenders of science and reason, among others. Their common mission is to restore the necessary balance between secular and religious-right Americans.

Here’s the take-away: in a country founded on the premise that authentic belief must be personal and freely chosen, a country where freedom of conscience includes not only the right to worship but the right to question and/or reject religion, it is unhealthy–indeed, it is positively dangerous–when the balance of political power favors biblical literalists and would-be theocrats.

Don’t get me wrong: those who want to revise history to make ours a “Christian” nation are entitled to their beliefs. They are entitled to bring those beliefs into the public square and to argue for their adoption. But they are not entitled to use the power of the state to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, or to marginalize and demean those who do not share them, or to demand that American policies reflect them.

When the voices of self-righteous literalists threaten to drown out the voices of other citizens–be they Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, secularists or Rastifarians–America has a problem. When religion is used as a weapon against science, the whole world has a problem.

In the United States, the past decades have seen a rising dominance of those I can only call Christian thugs. Much like the union thugs of my youth, these folks are flexing their political muscles. They have completely taken over one of America’s two political parties, and they have twisted and distorted the meaning of religious liberty: suddenly, “liberty” is the right of an employer to dictate the reproductive choices of his female employees, the right of a merchant to discriminate against GLBT customers, the right of governing bodies to begin public meetings with exclusionary prayers, and the right of churches to ignore laws the rest of us must follow.

These folks absolutely have a right to a place at the civic table. But so do the rest of us.

Reasonable religious folks and secularists alike, all of us who understand that government must remain a secular institution, need to emulate the gay community.

We need to come out and demand our place at the civic table.

Comments

How Are We Doing?

When Ed Koch was Mayor of New York, he was famous for stopping people on the street and asking them “How’m I doing?”

Very few mayors are interested in generating such face-to-face feedback; most, like Mayor Ballard, seem to resent efforts to grade their performance. And that raises a legitimate question: How do we citizens decide whether Indianapolis is being governed well or poorly? How do we decide that for any city?

Are all such evaluations hopelessly subjective and/or political?

Perhaps not. As Citiscope reported recently, the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization is trying to help. It has issued a new measurement standard for cities–a rubric to follow when collecting data. Cities that choose to participate will have a new, objective mechanism with which to compare themselves with peer cities around the globe.

Take a look at the 46 performance indicators that participating cities will need to track (or fudge), and then use to compare themselves to others.

Where are we doing well, and where are we falling short?

How are we doing?
Comments