Faith-Based Economics

The IBJ recently reported that Indiana is advertising on billboards in New York, during the Super Bowl, in what appears to be an effort to get businesses to move here. The ads tout Indiana’s low, low business taxes.

As the IBJ points out, however, while low taxes may be great for employers,

if industrious workers are looking for a place to thrive, evidence strongly suggests they’re better off in New York City—and, really, just about any major city besides Indianapolis. Which is to say, we rank very poorly in upward mobility. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research weighed the chances of a person from the bottom 20th economic percentile (poor) being able to reach the upper 20th percentile (rich) in different cities. NYC ranked sixth; Indy ranked 46th. Your odds are quite low. MarketWatch has an in-depth look at the report and its findings.

As I’ve previously noted, New York City is safer than Indianapolis; its crime rate is substantially lower than ours. My husband and I get to the Big Apple pretty often–our middle son lives in Manhattan–and I can attest to the city’s superior public amenities and services: a robust bike sharing program, well-maintained parks, great public transportation, efficient snow removal…the list goes on.

Indianapolis cannot claim any of these things. Some people like big cities, others don’t, and that’s a different issue, but it is indisputable that we rank lower than New York (and lower than many, if not most, other metropolitan areas) on virtually every public administration metric.

Some of this reflects poor management, but a lot of it is because Hoosiers’ faith-based economic policies have starved local government.

As this is written, the General Assembly is preparing to pass yet another business tax break–without identifying offsetting revenue for the state’s strapped cities and towns. The result will be fatter wallets for Hoosier employers (aka political donors), and an even worse quality of life for ordinary citizens.

Local government warnings that further revenue cuts will be devastating have fallen on deaf ears. According to one legislator, the lower taxes will generate new jobs and those jobs will make up the lost taxes. That has been the justification for virtually every previous tax reduction, but the jobs–and added revenues– have consistently failed to materialize. (“13 Investigates” reports that IEDC has “cooked the books” for years in order to mask that inconvenient fact.)

I have a suggested tag line for that ad campaign: Indiana! Making Mississippi look good.

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Hope for Journalism?

There are some welcome signs that our muddled and fragmented media landscape–which has clearly been “in transition” to something–is beginning to figure out how to do real journalism in the post-Newspaper age.

Recently, Ezra Klein announced that he was leaving the Washington Post, where he ran a very well-regarded and well-read blog, in order to start a new (as yet unidentified) media venture. As the Poynter Center reported, he is not the only one:

Klein’s new venture joins a suddenly crowded market of startups founded or staffed by journalists with large personal brands:

• Nate Silver decided last year to leave The New York Times for ESPN, which plans to relaunch his FiveThirtyEight.com under its auspices soon.

• Glenn Greenwald left the Guardian last year to join a “a new mass media organization” funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Dan Froomkin and Jay Rosen also joined the new organization in varying capacities.

• Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman will be the editor-in-chief of a starting shareup called Whisper.

• Gabriel Snyder, formerly the editor-in-chief of The Wire, will be chief content officer of a mobile news startup called Inside.com.

• Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s site AllThingsD announced last year they would part ways with Dow Jones & Co. and relaunched as Re/Code this year. The Wall Street Journal launched a replacement site, WSJD. Both promised live events. Another spinoff from the Journal: The Information, a subscription tech-news site edited by former WSJ reporter Jessica Lessin.

• Proto-blogger Andrew Sullivan left The Daily Beast in early 2013 to relaunch his Daily Dish as an independent, subscription-based publication. Sullivan wrote on Dec. 31 that in its first year, the publication had raised more than $800,000 in subscription revenue and has “almost 34,000 subscribers.”

• The New York Times, while obviously not exactly a startup, announced late last year that it would launch “two newsroom startups,” including one headed by former Times Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt aimed at the same subject areas as FiveThirtyEight.com.

These moves are a welcome sign that some journalists, at least, disagree with the conventional wisdom that has paralyzed the media and all but destroyed news geared to a general audience: the belief that there is simply no business model that will generate enough money to sustain a mass news-gathering organization in the age of the internet.

Of course, even if these efforts are successful, they don’t address citizens’ most pressing need: coverage of local government, which is virtually non-existent in far too many places. (Just today, the Indianapolis Star announced the departure of one of the few remaining reporters covering city hall.)  Interestingly, Pew reports an uptick in audiences for local television news–which I take as a sign that folks aren’t getting such news from the sad remnants of their local newspapers. Let’s hope that the new national ventures prove so successful that they spark a renewal of interest in investigative reporting focused on city halls and statehouses.

Relying on the Mayor’s office to tell us what’s happening really doesn’t cut it.

 

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Three Cheers for the Indianapolis Bar Association!

A couple of days ago, right before the Indiana House voted to strip the second sentence from HJR 3, the Indianapolis Bar Association did something it almost never does: it took a public position on a contentious policy issue.

Saying the proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage “stands out as inappropriate” and would likely lead to “years of litigation and significant expense for individual citizens and Indiana businesses,” the Indianapolis Bar Association today announced its formal opposition to HJR-3, the bill that would send the controversial amendment to a voter referendum.

The Bar Association took this position only after surveying its entire membership–another unusual step. (It has been some 20 years since they last did so.) Tellingly, three quarters of those surveyed favored taking a public position against HJR 3, and another twenty percent wanted to stay out of the issue. Only 5% favored the measure.

I have to believe that the willingness of the Bar Association to speak out–coming after the steady parade of businesses, mayors, and religious leaders–helped turn the tide with respect to HJR 3’s second sentence. That provision was a mess, an invitation to litigation, and many activists and bloggers had said so. But individual opinions on its legality and effects don’t carry the weight of the organized Bar, which is why their willingness to speak out was so important.

HJR 3 isn’t dead yet. At best, this latest vote to amend its language “kicks the can” down the road for another couple of years. Given the speed with which attitudes on same-sex marriage are changing, however, even that is no small matter.

Three cheers, Indianapolis Bar Association! Welcome to the good fight– and thanks for reminding all of us that “showing up” matters.

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Listen Up, Mr. Me Myself and I….

Okay–it’s cold and snowy and I’m old and cranky and in a bad mood. But this is the sort of attitude that just sends me over the edge!

A commenter responding to yesterday’s post about drug testing TANF recipients said, and I quote: “Government has no business in supplying food stamps, or any other of my earnings to those who did not earn it. Period.”

This is a standard meme employed by self-styled libertarians, the folks who like to equate taxation with theft and scorn recipients of social welfare programs as “takers” and “losers.”

I think the rest of us should make a deal with people like Mr. Clueless. Here’s my proposal:

You don’t want your hard-earned money going to the “takers”? Fine. You can keep every penny you earn. But you can’t drive on the streets that we suckers (er..taxpayers) paved. You can’t attend the public schools or universities we support. When trash collection day comes around, we’re going to skip your house, and if a real thief comes for your possessions, the police we support with our tax dollars aren’t going to respond.

If your house catches fire, tough. Hope you have a hose–and a private water supply. When you go to the grocery, you can’t buy any meats and vegetables that have been inspected by  government agencies that our taxes support. If you get sick, don’t expect to be treated by a doctor we educated in a hospital we built.

Go buy all of those services–and the others that we supply and you take as your due–in the private marketplace. If you can.

And if the unthinkable (at least unthinkable to you) happens, and you fall on hard times, you’d better hope for charity, because we’re going to respond with the same human compassion and understanding of social obligation that you’ve displayed.

You see, the real “takers” are the people who unthinkingly accept all the benefits of a social infrastructure, but who whine when they’re asked to pay their fair share.

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And You Thought HJR 3 Was Dumb….

Am I the only resident of the Hoosier state who cannot comprehend the priorities and prejudices–let alone the analytical abilities–of Indiana lawmakers?

It’s bad enough that the most high-profile battle of this session–HJR 3–has given the rest of the country the impression that Hoosiers are 19th Century yahoos determined to buck the headwinds of change. What’s worse is that all the high-profile jockeying to keep GLBT folks in second-class citizenship status has sucked the wind out of everything else going on–obscuring all the other stupid decisions being made at the Statehouse.

One example: HB 1351 which requires the drug testing of TANF recipients. This measure, which will cost taxpayers nearly 1.5 million in fiscal 2016-17 alone — is moving steadily through the General Assembly, despite the fact that in states that have passed such laws , like Florida, courts have held it unconstitutional–and despite the fact that very few abusers were found. (If I had to guess, I’d bet the percentage of drug abusers in the General Assembly is substantially higher than the percentage on welfare. Drugs cost money, and TANF pays $288 per month for a family of three. You try living and buying drugs on that.)

As of March 2013, there were just 26,364 individual Hoosiers receiving TANF.  Of that number, 23,128 were children. So Indiana is proposing to spend a million and a half dollars to test three thousand adults for drug abuse.

Dumb or not, this costly measure of dubious constitutionality and demonstrated ineffectiveness is speeding merrily through the process.  Meanwhile, SB 413, a bill that  would encourage TANF families to accumulate the assets they need to transition off of public assistance [and save taxpayer money], is not expected to go anywhere–despite the fact that other states that have implemented that measure have saved money and helped poor people move toward self-sufficiency.

It’s hard to escape the suspicion that our legislators not only don’t want to help poor folks–they want to punish them for being poor. One reason there are so few adults receiving TANF is that we have already made the process so difficult and demeaning that only 2.9% of impoverished Hoosiers participate.

I guess GLBT folks aren’t the only people Indiana doesn’t want.

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