Government – Page 129 – artdiamondblog.com

Federal Subsidies for “Those Who Choose to Live Far from a City”

Source of graphic: the online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1A) WASHINGTON — Opponents of federal air travel subsidies make two points: that subsidized airports are relatively close to regular commercial air service and subsidized flights are used by only a few people a day.
Both are true in Nebraska.
For example, U.S. taxpayers spend nearly $1.4 million a year so that fewer than two dozen travelers a day, on average, can fly out of Grand Island rather than drive the 100 miles to Lincoln.
Taxpayers also chip in $748,635 annually to maintain two daily flights from Alliance to Denver, even though only about a half dozen people a day board the planes.
. . .
(p. 2A) Groups such as Taxpayers for Common Sense and Citizens Against Government Waste say that although the subsidies might have made sense 30 years ago, to prevent communities from losing air service overnight, people know what they’re getting into today if they choose to live far from a city with regular air service.
It’s a matter of prioritizing public spending, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
“People have the right to food and clean water,” Ellis said. “We don’t need to make sure it’s a chicken in every pot and air service in every community.”

For the full story, see:
JOSEPH MORTON. “Rural travel subsidies still up in the air.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, February 24, 2008): 1A & 2A.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Federal spending on Essential Air Service
——————————————————————————–
Year   # of communities    Total funding for subsidies *
1998   101   $50
1999   100   $50
2000   106   $50
2001   115   $50
2002   123   $113
2003   126   $101.3
2004   140   $101.7
2005   146   $101.6
2006   151   $109.4
2007   145   $109.4
2008   142   $125
*Figures in millions
Source of data: Government Accountability Office; U.S. Department of Transportation
Source of version of table above: very slightly modified from the online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited above.

The Inefficiency of Zoning Laws

“It may not look like much, but the opening of this casino, for one day only, let its owner keep a crucial zoning designation.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) For eight hours on Tuesday, Station Casinos opened a nondescript 40-by-10-foot trailer on a vacant 26-acre plot about six miles east of the Strip with just 16 slot machines. The sole purpose was to comply with a state law that requires public gambling to occur on a property for at least one shift every two years in order for the landowner to retain the valuable zoning designation needed to conduct wagering.
. . .
As of midday, nobody but reporters had turned out for the event, which had been publicized by only a few bloggers on the Internet. The biggest payout on the bank of video poker and blackjack machines was $2.50.
. . .
The opening of the nameless temporary casino, which the local newspaper dubbed Trailer Station, was rich in red tape, including seven permits, approvals from the City Council and the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and a certificate of occupancy.
As required by the city code, the trailer, brought onto the land just for the day, came complete with a portable toilet outside and, to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, a wheelchair-accessible entrance. A casino floor manager sat at one end of the narrow room ready to pay out winnings should there be any, a security guard patrolled outside, and two city zoning officers visited for 20 minutes to inspect and fill out paperwork.

For the full story, see:
STEVE FRIESS. “If This Happens in Vegas, It Can Sure Stay in Vegas.” The New York Times (Weds., January 9, 2008): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
“A floor manager watched over 16 slot machines Tuesday, but there was hardly a rush on them.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“Frustration Opens the Door to Religiosity”

“Ahmed Muhammad Sayyid, center, praying at a Cairo mosque, has drawn religion closer after many disappointments.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) Here in Egypt and across the Middle East, many young people are being forced to put off marriage, the gateway to independence, sexual activity and societal respect. Stymied by the government’s failure to provide adequate schooling and thwarted by an economy without jobs to match their abilities or aspirations, they are stuck in limbo between youth and adulthood.
“I can’t get a job, I have no money, I can’t get married, what can I say?” Mr. Sayyid said one day after becoming so overwhelmed that he refused to go to work, or to go home, and spent the day hiding at a friend’s apartment.
In their frustration, the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments along with them.
. . .
The wave of religious identification has forced governments that are increasingly seen as corrupt or inept to seek their own public redemption through religion.
. . .
(p. 11) Depression and despair tormented dozens of men and women in their 20s interviewed across Egypt, from urban men like Mr. Sayyid to frustrated village residents like Walid Faragallah, who once hoped education would guarantee him social mobility. Their stifled dreams stoke anger toward the government.
“Nobody cares about the people,” Mr. Sayyid said, slapping his hands against the air, echoing sentiment repeated in many interviews with young people across Egypt. “Nobody cares. What is holding me back is the system. Find a general with children and he will have an apartment for each of them. My government is only close to those close to the government.”
. . .
Mr. Sayyid’s path to stalemate began years ago, in school.
Like most Egyptians educated in public schools, his course of study was determined entirely by grades on standardized tests. He was not a serious student, often skipping school, but scored well enough to go on to an academy, something between high school and a university. He was put in a five-year program to study tourism and hotel operations.
His diploma qualified him for little but unemployment. Education experts say that while Egypt has lifted many citizens out of il-(p. 12)literacy, its education system does not prepare young people for work in the modern world. Nor, according to a recent Population Council report issued in Cairo, does its economy provide enough well-paying jobs to allow many young people to afford marriage.
Egypt’s education system was originally devised to produce government workers under a compact with society forged in the heady early days of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s administration in the late 1950s and ’60s.
Every graduate was guaranteed a government job, and peasant families for the first time were offered the prospect of social mobility through education. Now children of illiterate peasant farmers have degrees in engineering, law or business. The dream of mobility survives, but there are not enough government jobs for the floods of graduates. And many are not qualified for the private sector jobs that do exist, government and business officials said, because of their poor schooling. Business students often never touch a computer, for example.
On average, it takes several years for graduates to find their first job, in part because they would rather remain unemployed than work in a blue-collar factory position. It is considered a blow to family honor for a college graduate to take a blue-collar job, leaving large numbers of young people with nothing to do.
“O.K., he’s a college graduate,” said Muhammad el-Seweedy, who runs a government council that has tried with television commercials to persuade college graduates to take factory jobs and has provided training to help improve their skills. “It’s done. Now forget it. This is a reality.”
But more widespread access to education has raised expectations. “Life was much more bearable for the poor when they did accept their social status,” said Galal Amin, an economist and the author of “Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?” “But it is unimaginable when you have an education, to have this thought accepted. Frustration opens the door to religiosity.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL SLACKMAN. “Generation Faithful; Dreams Stifled, Egypt’s Young Turn to Islamic Fervor.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., February 17, 2008): 1 & 11-12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Entrepreneur Calls 2008 “The Year of the Spaceship”

Burt Rutan’s current design for WhiteKnightTwo, carrying the smaller SpaceShipTwo spaceship. Source of image: http://www.techno-science.net/?onglet=news&news=4993

(p. A18) Virgin Galactic, the company that hopes to fly well-heeled tourists to the edge of space by the end of 2009, provided a peek Wednesday at the craft that will take them there.
During a news conference at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur whose Virgin Airways is the parent company of the project, said 2008 would be “the year of the spaceship.”
Mr. Branson showed models of two vehicles, both created by the airplane designer Burt Rutan. WhiteKnightTwo, a two-fuselage, four-engine plane, is designed to ferry a smaller spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, high into the sky and release it. The pilot of SpaceShipTwo will then fire the craft’s rocket engine, which burns a combination of nitrous oxide and a rubber-based solid fuel, shooting the vehicle to an altitude of more than 62 miles into the realm of black sky.

For the full story, see:
JOHN SCHWARTZ. “Built to Fly Into Space With the Greatest of Ease (They Hope).” The New York Times (Thurs., January 24, 2008): A18.

Artist’s rendering of SpaceShipTwo spaceship. Source of image: http://www.techno-science.net/?onglet=news&news=4993

Non-Market Health Care Pricing Results in Health Care Shortages

(p. A22) When my Labrador retriever became acutely lame, we were able to locate a veterinary orthopedic expert in Atlanta within 48 hours who was able to repair a ruptured tendon within one week. But my prospects of identifying an endocrinologist who can care for my daughter’s diabetes when she turns 18 are much less promising.
The limited number of endocrine specialists is a not a consequence of limited demand — everyone is aware of the epidemic of diabetes we are facing. There are also shortages of generalists and other specialists, and the reason is the absence of market signals — i.e., market-based prices — for influencing the supply of physicians in various specialties.
The roots of this problem lay in the use of administrative pricing structures in medicine. The way prices are set in health care already distorts the appropriate allocation of efforts and resources in health care today. Unfortunately, many of the suggested reforms of our health care system — including the various plans for universal care, or universal insurance, or a single-payer system, that various policy makers and Democratic presidential candidates espouse — rest on the same unsound foundations, and will produce more of the same.
. . .
One important lesson of the 20th century is that, while markets are far from perfect, more choices are available when people are able to use free markets to interact with each other. Markets may not get the prices exactly correct all the time, but they are capable of self- correction, a capacity that has yet to be demonstrated by administrative pricing.
It tells you something when the supply of and demand for specialist veterinary care is so easily matched when the prices of these services are established on the market — while shortages and oversupplies are common for human medical care when the prices of these services are set by administrators in the public sector. Will health-care reformers — and American citizens — get the message?

For the full commentary, see:
Robert A. Swerlick. “Our Soviet Health System.” Wall Street Journal (Tues., Jun 5, 2007): A22.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Creative Sparks Arise from Opportunistic Innovation

Source of book image:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51vovIVI5sL.jpg

(p. D16) One of the insights of “Strategic Intuition” is that business makes progress by following the opportunistic innovation model, while governments and international-aid agencies aim repetitively at rigid social goals. Such rigidity happens partly for a reason that Mr. Duggan is too polite to mention — bureaucrats, by nature, rarely give off a creative spark. Mr. Duggan prefers to emphasize a structural cause: The public demands solutions to problems of great social importance; thus bureaucrats get stuck with fixed objectives. Yet Mr. Duggan also shows that social progress often happens by emulating the opportunism of business. Among the most powerful of his examples is Muhammad Yunus’s invention of microcredit.
. . .
If there are still businessmen who feel compelled to follow a fixed-goal plan — missing out on the profits of opportunistic flexibility — then at least there is the free market to punish them. Market feedback is surely one big reason that we have so many innovative entrepreneurs. Where the old approach does most of the damage is in social policy, where the feedback is either fuzzy (as in domestic policy) or absent (foreign aid). Social policy could use a lot fewer commencement speakers and a lot more creative sparkers.

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM EASTERLY. “BOOKSHELF; Surprised by Opportunity.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., November 14, 2007): D16.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The reference to the Stratetic Intuition book is:
Duggan, William. Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Market Prices Send “the Right Signal to the Customer to Save Energy”

In the passage quoted below, the “commission” refers to China’s “National Development and Reform Commission.”

(p. A6) The commission estimates China’s energy efficiency is about 10% below that of developed countries because of obsolete technology. But many experts say Beijing’s policy priorities are a bigger obstacle.
Worries about social unrest and inflation led Beijing to put the brakes on pricing overhauls, at tremendous cost to state refiners PetroChina Co. and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., known as Sinopec.
“Market prices are a very important and key issue because they send out the right signal to the customer to save energy,” said Yang Fuqiang, vice president of the Energy Foundation in Beijing.

For the full story, see:
David Winning. “Why Energy Efficiencies Prove Elusive in China.” Wall Street Journal (Tues., Nov. 6, 2007): A6.

Government Post-Doc Funding Creates “Glut” of Scientists

The quotes below from a WSJ summary of a Nov. 16, 2007 The Chronicle of Higher Education article, suggests that we do not need to worry about the sometimes-alleged “shortage” of scientists and engineers:

(p. B14) The federal dollars pumped into university science departments has created more scientists and engineers than the market wants, said Michael S. Teitelbaum, vice president of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which sponsors research, at a hearing in Congress last week. Mr. Teitelbaum said the federal government should find a way to adjust how it funds university research so that university departments don’t end up using the extra money to add graduate students and postdoctoral fellows

For the full summary, see:
“The Informed Reader; Science; U.S. Faces a Glut (Really) of Scientists, Engineers.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., November 13, 2007): B14.

Former New Orleanians Do Not Miss the Crime and Chaos

“Carla Reese, left, with her daughter Renee Roussell, who said that “there is nothing to go back to” in New Orleans.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) LAKE CHARLES, La. — With resignation, anger or stoicism, thousands of former New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city for which they still yearn.

They now cast their votes in small Louisiana towns and in big cities of neighboring states. They have found new jobs and bought new houses. They have forsaken their favorite foods and cherished pastors. But they do not for a moment miss the crime, the chaos and the bad memories they left behind in New Orleans.

This vast diaspora — largely black, often poor, sometimes struggling — stretches across the country but is concentrated in cities near the coast, like this one, or Atlanta or Baton Rouge or Houston, places where the newcomers are still reaching for accommodation.

The break came fairly recently. Sometime between the New Orleans mayor’s race in spring 2006, when thousands of displaced citizens voted absentee or drove in to cast a ballot, and the city election this fall, when thousands did not — resulting in a sharply diminished electorate and a white-majority City Council — the decision was made: there was no going back. Life in New Orleans was over.

For the full story, see:
ADAM NOSSITER. “With Regrets, New Orleans Is Left Behind.” The New York Times (Tues., December 18, 2007): A1 & A29.

“Cynthia Jones, left, her sister, Pauline Hurst, and their mother, Evelyn Williams, at the church warehouse where they now work.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Bill Clinton’s Role in “Fueling the Mother of All Housing Bubbles”

The author of the lines quoted below won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.

(p. A20) The joint housing and mortgage-market crisis once again reminds us that all financial implosions stem from the same cause: borrowing short and lending long without enough equity to weather periodic storms in the gap between.
But this bubble was different. Besides being fueled by housing purchases and repackaged loans, each with inadequate equity — doubling down with other people’s money — at the end of the capital-gains rainbow was the right to take up to $500,000 of profit, tax free.
Thank you President Bill Clinton for your 1997 action, applauded by the banks, the realtors and all citizens in search of half-millionaire status from an investment they could understand and self deceptively believe to be low risk; thank you for fueling the mother of all housing bubbles; thank you for enabling so many of us who bought second or third homes, and homes before construction began, which we then sold to someone else who dreamed of riches from owning homes long enough to sell to another fool.
Once again, try as we might and in spite of our political rhetoric, we have failed to help the poor in applauding government action intended to help ourselves.

For the full commentary, see:
VERNON L. SMITH. “The Clinton Housing Bubble.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 18, 2007): A20.

Motive Power Really Does Matter: More on Why Africa is Poor

“A crowded train traveling through Katanga Province. Goods and people are crammed in, and bathrooms are used for storage.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) In large swaths of Congo, a vast country the size of Western Europe, roads are impassable or nonexistent, large riverboats no longer ply the waterways and air travel is prohibitively expensive, leaving many people to rely on an increasingly dangerous railway system long past its prime.
Fresh from its first democratic elections in nearly 50 years and still struggling to emerge from civil war, Congo is trying to get its trains running again. But it has a long way to go.
. . .
The bathrooms in first class become filthy soon after a trip begins. In second and third class, the bathrooms are used for storage. In one car, five large bags of charcoal were stuffed into a bathroom, and people relieved themselves in buckets or out windows.
The railway employs over 13,000 people, but the last time paychecks were sent out was in May, and that was payment for the spring of 2005. So many employees do not go to work, and bribes are widespread.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to resist temptations,” said Agustín, the police chief at the Kamina station, who gave only his first name. “I do bad things.”
“I haven’t been paid in 29 months,” he added. “How am I supposed to send my children to school?”
Léon, a conductor and machinist who gave only his first name, thinks the problem begins in Kinshasa, the capital. “This is a state-owned company,” he said. “It’s bankrupt because of the government. The way things are going, we won’t last two years.”

For the full story, see:
WILL CONNORS. “Congo by Rail: Filthy, Crowded and Dangerous.” The New York Times (Tues., September 4, 2007): A4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“A train controller relays the position of a train to another station. Because pay is so infrequent, many employees do not go to work and bribes are widespread.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.