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Freedom in the Fifty States

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The Cato Institute released its assessment of freedom in each of the fifty states last week, and it generally does a good job of distinguishing between states that heavily restrict people’s lives and ones that allow more freedom. But the Antiplanner has been concerned that the many different indices of freedom published by various groups don’t seriously consider property rights, which most libertarians believe are the fundamental basis of freedom.

This year’s report attributes about 11 percent of the score for each state to property rights. Most of that 11 percent comes from two factors: rent control (5.3 percent) and zoning (4.8 percent). Rent control is easy to identify but it is not a very good indicator of freedom because most states don’t allow it or allow it only under special circumstances. Only four states allow it outright, and not surprisingly given the weighting these make up four of the five lowest-scoring states on property rights.

Zoning is much more difficult. The fifty-states report relies on the Wharton Business School’s index of zoning, but that is more than a decade old and fails to accurately assess just how flexible zoning is in some states and inflexible in others. Even more than Wharton’s index, the report relies on an index of court decisions on land-use issues, which seems more reliable as a guide to how litigious people are than to how restrictive their land-use rules are. Continue reading →

Tampa Petition: Forward into the Past

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Anti-auto activists in Tampa say they have gathered enough signatures to put a measure on November’s ballot increasing sales taxes for Hillsborough County transportation. The news report about the measure claims that 55 percent will be used for roads while 45 percent will be used for transit, but that is only one of the major deceptions behind the measure.

The petition itself lists “improve roads and bridges” as the first goal of the sales tax. But in fact, only a small share of the money would be used to improve (which in transportation parlance means increase the capacity of) roads and none would be used to improve bridges. In fact, the petition specifically states that none of the money can be used to build new roads or bridges or add new lanes to existing roads or bridges. Some money — 14 percent — can be used to improve intersections, increasing their capacity, but that’s it.

The supposed 55-45 split is also wrong. First, it is really only a 54-45 split, as one percent of the money goes to the Hillsborough metropolitan planning organization to do all of its brilliant planning. The remaining 54 percent goes to Hillsborough County and cities within that county (proportional to population), but it won’t all be spent on roads either. In fact, the petition says it can be spent on “roads, bridges, sidewalks, intersections, and public transportation.” Continue reading →

Trump’s New CAFE Proposal

By | | News commentary
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It is likely that, by the time you read this, the Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency will have made a joint announcement about reforming the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. Originally adopted in 1978, when new cars were required to average all of 18 miles per gallon, the standards were increased by the Obama administration to a target of 54.5 mpg by 2025. (This 54.5 is actually an idealized number; as a practical matter, the real target for 2025 is about 39 mpg.)

As I am writing this, I don’t know exactly what today’s proposal will be, but an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal by DOT secretary Elaine Chao and acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler provides some hints. Most important, the article notes that the goal is “to create one national standard.” This means that California won’t be able to impose its own, stronger standards.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis observes, when Congress created the CAFE program in 1975, it specially forbade states from adopting their own stronger rules, probably because this would greatly increase the costs of compliance to manufacturers. Despite that, the Obama administration decided to exempt California from the one-national-standard rule. The Trump administration is going back to the actual law. Continue reading →

Can Government Shrink?

By | | News commentary
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“Limited government” is one of the key goals of the Cato Institute and libertarians in general. Research shows that “small governments . . . report better economic performance than big governments.” But it is one thing to compare two governments side by side. It is quite another thing to actually reduce the size of government.

Recent events suggest that shrinking government may be impossible. A slight majority of voters in Britain agreed to leave the European Union motivated, at least in part, by the idea that big-government bureaucrats in Brussels shouldn’t dictate policy to people in the United Kingdom. Yet actually carrying out an exit is proving to be far more difficult than imagined.

Similarly, Donald Trump campaigned for president on a promise that he would “drain the swamp,” which the Antiplanner interprets to mean reduce the size of the federal government. Many Republican members of Congress also claim to support smaller government. Yet, under a Republican Congress, deficits and debt are increasing. Meanwhile, Trump’s solution to many problems is to throw money at them. Continue reading →

Seattle About to Implode

By | | City planning, News commentary, Urban areas
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As the Antiplanner noted last week, Seattle is the only major city whose transit ridership grew in 2017 because the city has concentrated nearly 300,000 jobs in its downtown area. Yet, as noted earlier this week, Seattle transit ridership is starting to decline. That decline may may rapidly accelerate if the city council approves a proposed so-called “head tax” on all businesses that earn more than $20 million a year, which basically means Amazon and a few other companies.

The proposed tax would charge employers 26 cents per hour that each employee works in the city, or about $500 per full-time employee per year. For Amazon, which has something like 40,000 jobs in Seattle, the tax would amount to around $20 million a year — more than a quarter of total head-tax revenues — for the first couple of years, then go up to $30 million a year. The revenues from the tax would be used to provide affordable housing for homeless people.

Amazon was so perturbed by this that it halted construction on a new office tower it was building in downtown Seattle and threatened to pull all of its employees out of another existing building. When Seattle city councillor Kshama Sawant held an outdoor press conference, laid-off construction workers disrupted the meeting with shouts of “no head tax.” Despite this, members of the city council insist they will approve the tax. Continue reading →

Watch Out in Minnesota

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Transportation
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If you are a critic of light rail, it would probably be a good idea to avoid the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for awhile. It turns out that light-rail operators in Minnesota can commit manslaughter with impunity.

Last July, a Metro Transit light-rail operator ran a red light in St. Paul and killed a 29-year-old man. Metro Transit tried to fire the operator, but the unions forced the agency to keep him on the payroll. If an auto driver killed someone after running a red light, they could be charged with vehicular manslaughter, but when the St. Paul city attorney contemplated charging the light-rail operator, she learned that trains are exempt from traffic codes unless “gross negligence” is involved.
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This exemption must have been passed by the state legislature when it was controlled by the Democratic Party (or, as they call it in Minnesota, the Democrat-Farm-Labor Party). At the present time, Republicans control the legislature, and one, Representative Linda Runbeck, has vowed to “close this loophole” as soon as possible. Until the legislature does so, be extra careful crossing a light-rail line if you are in the Twin Cities.

So Much for the Tea Party

By | | News commentary
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As most Antiplanner readers probably know, Congress last week decided to test whether the nation with the world’s dominant currency can borrow another trillion dollars or so without risking its economy. Before passage of the bill, the national debt was $21 trillion, and the bill will add at least $800 billion to that and probably more.

The good news is that the 2018 spending bill contains very few earmarks. The bad news is that it calls for so much spending that it didn’t really need any. For example, although it never names the Gateway project — Northeast Corridor improvements including new tunnels under the Hudson River which the Trump administration doesn’t want to fund — the bill includes more than $500 million that will probably go for that project.

Specifically, the bill spends $650 million on the Northeast Corridor, which is $292 million more than was authorized by previous Congressional law. Amtrak itself received $50 million more than was authorized. This includes $35.5 million to start service on new routes, such as New Orleans-Jacksonville, a route that stopped running when Hurricane Katrina hit much of its infrastructure. Continue reading →

Good-Bye Mayor Barry

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Megan Barry, the popular mayor of Nashville who wants the city to spend more than $5 billion on less than 30 miles of light-rail lines, has resigned from office after pleading guilty to “felony theft.” The thefts arose because she took her lover (who was the head of her security detail) with her on business trips at the city’s expense — for which he charged the city overtime.

Despite the loss of its biggest supporter, the May 1 election over the “absurdly expensive” light-rail plan will probably go ahead as scheduled. “Our traffic isn’t getting any better,” say supporters, not that it will get any better if the plan is approved.

Election or not, the Antiplanner has to wonder if there is a reason why mayors who support light rail seem to be more prone to sex scandals. There’s Portland’s Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, who had an affair with a 13-year-old girl. There’s Portland’s later mayor, Sam Adams, who had an affair with an 18-year-old boy (the affair started before the boy was 18, but Adams insisted that they only kissed in the city hall bathroom until he was of age). Then there’s Seattle mayor Ed Murray, who resigned after numerous people accused him of molesting them when they were children. It’s probably just a coincidence, but at least Nashville’s mayor had the good sense to have an affair with someone older than the age of consent.

The Difference Between Class & Income

By | | News commentary
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Business Insider is stunned by the notion that Silicon Valley residents who earn $400,000 a year consider themselves middle class. Yet they are; the only reason Business Insider doesn’t think so is that neither it nor Palo Alto Online — the source of Business Insider‘s data — understands the difference between class and income.

According to the Pew Research Center, “middle class” includes families of four that earn $48,000 and $144,000. But that’s not middle class; that’s middle income. While classes and incomes can be correlated, they are not the same. Social classes include upper, middle, and lower, but most of lower being working class.

The working class includes people who earn incomes through manual labor and who generally do not have college degrees. But some of them may earn a lot of money, such as the Long Island Railroad conductor who earned $239,000 in 2009. Continue reading →

RIP Tom Rapp

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner was surfing the web on Saturday and happened to learn that Tom Rapp died last week of cancer. That may not mean anything to you and he didn’t have anything to do with the Antiplanner’s usual issues, but his music had a big influence on me.

“If you cannot be universal,” Rapp said about this thought-provoking song, “you should at least be ambiguous,” a statement that applies to a lot of his work.

Growing up in Portland, I often listened to a radio station called KVAN, which from 1967 to 1979 focused on “progressive rock.” Its owner was Catholic and the station also played a mass every evening, but she apparently didn’t care what its disk jockeys did the rest of the day. So they often played full albums of then-unknown artists such as Pink Floyd (I first heard A Saucerful of Secrets on KVAN), Jethro Tull, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. In 1969, I was fortunate to be listening when they played the full album of These Things Too by Pearls Before Swine. Most of the songs on the album were written by the group’s lead singer, Tom Rapp. Continue reading →