Monthly Archives: June 2012

Representatives of the Association of American Planners applauded the Supreme Court’s health-care decision that a Congressional requirement to buy health insurance was a tax, not a mandate. “This provides us the tools we need to fix everything that’s wrong with America,” said association CEO Paul “Precious” Farmlands.

The association’s government affairs staff immediately began crafting legislation to save American cities and rural areas through compact development. “We would like everyone to enjoy the benefits of living in high-density, mixed-use housing,” said Jason Georgetown. “But it’s not a mandate; we’ll simply tax anyone who chooses not to live in this kind of housing $50,000 a year. The taxes will go to make high-density housing more affordable for low-income people.”
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AAP also was writing a law requiring everyone to walk, bicycle, or take transit to work. Anyone who refused to obey the law would pay a “tax” of $25 for every day they drove to work. The money would be used to subsidize rail transit. “The possibilities opened up by the Supreme Court’s health-care decision are endless,” said Georgetown.

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.