Category Archives: News commentary

This week’s Rolling Stone has an article on the “sharp, sudden decline of America’s middle class.” The only problem is that few if any of the people discussed in the article are in the middle class; instead, they are working class.

As the Antiplanner has noted elsewhere, Americans often pretend to ignore the line between working class and middle class, yet it is very real and difficult to cross. The middle class includes people with college educations and jobs that involve thinking and creating, usually described as “white-collar” jobs. The working class includes people with less education and jobs that require physical labor or repetitive work, usually described as “blue-collar” jobs.

Many people in the middle class have very few working-class friends, so they can’t relate to working-class lives and lifestyles. We imagine that most people are middle class, and only a few unfortunates are in the working class. In fact, less than 30 percent of working-age Americans have college degrees, which is a pretty good proxy for the size of the middle class.

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When Congress created the New Starts fund for new rail transit projects in 1991, it required that the grants be awarded to projects that were “cost effective.” This same requirement was applied to the small starts fund, for transit projects costing less than $250 million, which Congress created in 2003. The Obama administration, however, is proposing to eliminate the cost-effectiveness test in favor of “livability,” “multi-modalism,” and “environmental justice.”

The Antiplanner’s comments on the proposed rules argue that these criteria are not authorized by law and, moreover, are vague and open to such broad interpretation that they are effectively meaningless. My comments focused mainly on livability and multi-modalism as I hadn’t ever heard of transit projects being justified based on environmental justice.

A recent series of articles in the Washington Times, however, reviews the administration’s infatuation with environmental justice in detail. As the first article in the series notes, seventeen federal agencies recently signed a “memorandum of understanding” agreeing to integrate environmental justice into all of their “programs, policies, and activities.”

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Walking through Portland airport recently, the Antiplanner noticed a sign from the Oregon Lottery claiming that 97 cents of every dollar paid for lottery tickets was “returned to Oregon.” As the Lottery’s web site says, “97 cents of every dollar played comes back to Oregon . . . money that goes to jobs, schools, parks and watersheds.”

That number sounded suspicious to me. If 97 cents is kept by the state, and no doubt some additional is used for administering the lotteries, where do they get the money to pay out lottery winners?

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The Oregonian says this is “disingenuous.” The Antiplanner calls it lying, also known as government on an ordinary day.

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, who has announced that he plans to leave office at the end of this year even if Obama is re-elected, is spending his last few months in office taking a tour of the United States. He has recently been to Hawaii (and Guam), and he plans to soon visit Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming, which will allow him to say he has been to 50 states.

Back in the 1970s, a man named Ronald Walker helped coordinate President Nixon’s famous visit to China. As a reward, Nixon offered him any job in the administration he wanted, and he asked to be director of the National Park Service. As director, all he did was tour national parks and float rivers, forcing Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nathanial Reed to do Walker’s job for him. As soon as possible after Nixon resigned the presidency, Reed replaced Walker with Gary Everhardt, a career Park Service employee.
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It looks like LaHood is pulling a Walker, at least for the last year of his lame-duck administration. There’s a reason why he hasn’t visited states like Wyoming and South Dakota during his term in office: they just aren’t places where federal transportation funding is a big issue. If he wants to visit those states, he should do it on his own time and his own dime.

Oregon has a 1 percent for art law requiring that one percent of all state construction funds be spent on art works. But that’s not enough for greedy Oregon artists, so they have proposed that Portland impose a $35 tax on every non-poverty-stricken resident over the age of 17 in the city that would be used for art. This is projected to generate $12 million a year for art.

The Antiplanner has no objection to people making art and other people buying it. I’ve purchased a variety of art pieces for my home. But what makes art so important that the government needs to tax everyone to make more?
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Some people might say, “It’s only $35 per person.” But, hey, I love trains and love to help restore old trains. For $12 million a year, I could fund a lot of rail restoration work. But just why should everyone else subsidize my hobby? If this measure passes, it will be just one more reason to anyone who actually works for a living to leave Portland.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker handily survived the recall attempt brought by public employees unions angered over his efforts to weaken their ability to negotiate for higher pay and benefits. This proves that Wisconsin isn’t Greece, the nation whose residents violently object to similar reductions in public sector pay and benefits even as the country is going bankrupt.

Fiscal conservatives can take heart from this, but they shouldn’t learn the wrong lesson. That lesson (the wrong one, that is) would be that, once they take power, they can do whatever they feel is needed without regard to the political consequences. As the Antiplanner has previously noted, Walker’s strategy of reducing spending was fine, but his tactic of taking the unions head on was unnecessarily polarizing.

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