Click on WORD or PDF for full content
The NY Times says the spirit of barack obama lives in CA school districts.
School officials in Santa Ana were in a bind several years ago: they wanted to build hundreds of new classrooms, but feared that voters would rebel against tax increases to pay for the construction.
So in 2009, the Santa Ana Unified School District borrowed $35 million using an inventive if increasingly controversial method known as capital appreciation bonds, which pushed the cost of the construction on to future taxpayers. Not a cent is owed until 2026. But taxpayers will eventually have to pay $340 million to retire that $35 million debt.
Since 2007, hundreds of school districts and community colleges across California have used capital appreciation bonds to raise nearly $7 billion for various construction projects, according to data from the state treasurer’s office. The bonds have allowed school districts that are short on cash to finance classroom renovations and new athletic facilities while delaying payment for years, or even decades.
But these new facilities often come at an enormous cost to future taxpayers, who will be liable for huge interest payments that sometimes balloon to more than 10 times the amount borrowed over as much as 40 years. By contrast, repayment on traditional school bonds usually costs no more than two to three times what was borrowed.
“It’s the school district version of printing money,” said Bill Lockyer, the state treasurer. “These bonds are bad deals for taxpayers, and they contribute to the general view that the government doesn’t spend their money intelligently.”
In San Diego, property owners owe $630 million on a $164 million bond. For the Folsom Cordova Unified School District, a $514,000 bond will cost $9.1 million.
And in the most expensive case yet, the Poway Unified School District borrowed $105 million to finish modernizing older school buildings, which local property owners will be paying off until four decades from now at an eventual cost of nearly $1 billion. Because payments on the bond do not start for 20 years, current school board members faced little risk of resistance from property owners. …
John Fund posts on voter fraud in Ohio.
… Democrat Melowese Richardson has been an official poll worker for the last quarter century and registered thousands of people to vote last year. She candidly admitted to Cincinnati’s Channel 9 this week that she voted twice in the last election.
This is how Channel 9′s website summarized the case:
According to county documents, Richardson’s absentee ballot was accepted on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. On Nov. 11, she told an official she also voted at a precinct because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time.
“There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Richardson. . . .
The board’s documents also state that Richardson was allegedly disruptive and hid things from other poll workers on Election Day after another female worker reported she was intimidated by Richardson. . . .
During the investigation it was also discovered that her granddaughter, India Richardson, who was a first time voter in the 2012 election, cast two ballots in November.
Richardson insists she has done nothing wrong and promises to contest the charges: “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States.”
But, of course, as you know there is no voter fraud. Pay no attention to that lightning coming out of Ohio.
Michael Barone says the SOTU speechwriters will try to hide the left wing jerk.
The well-sourced Ron Fournier of National Journal reports that White House aides say they and the president were “stung by the coverage of the inaugural address.” They were evidently surprised that the feisty liberal speech was seen as a feisty liberal speech.
And so, they say, Barack Obama is going to be less partisan in his State of the Union address Tuesday and will talk more about jobs and the economy than about gun control and immigration. Sounds like still another pivot to jobs, which we’ve been hearing about for nearly four years.
This apparent failure to anticipate how others would respond to his words fortifies my suspicion that Obama may be actually sincere in believing that every decent person with common sense would share his views. After all, just about everybody in the places he has chosen to live—Manhattan, Cambridge, the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago—does.
Far from being an instinctive compromiser with respect for those with different views, he seems to be an angry non-compromiser with no idea how decent people could disagree with him.
Byron York says he’s going to pretend he cares about jobs.
White House spinners are working furiously in the final 72 hours before President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Their job: convince the recession-scarred American public that economic recovery is Obama’s top priority — after everything he has said and done to suggest otherwise.
The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent — one tenth of a point higher than it was when Obama took office in January 2009. But the true toll of joblessness is far higher. The Labor Department’s so-called U-6 rate, which includes people who want a job but have become so discouraged they have quit looking, is 14.4 percent. And a new study, by RutgersUniversity scholars, shows that 23 percent of those surveyed have lost a job sometime in the last four years, while another 11 percent have seen someone in their household lose a job. That is one-third of the American people who have experienced unemployment during Obama’s time in office, along with many more who have experienced other hardships of the economic downturn.
“Unemployment and what happened in the recession are society-wide experiences,” Rutgers professor Carl Van Horn, a co-author of the report, told me recently. And indeed, thousands of polls in the last four years have shown that jobs and the economy are the public’s top concern, ranking far above any other issue or set of issues.
Yet in what was likely to be the most-watched speech of his second term, his January 21 inaugural address, Obama ignored the issue of unemployment. Simply ignored it. The closest he came to even acknowledging a problem with the economy is when he said, “An economic recovery has begun” — five words out of a 2,100-word speech. Instead, Obama devoted significant portions of the address to gay marriage, global warming, immigration, and other priorities.
At other times since his re-election last November, Obama has made clear that other issues top his second-term agenda. In a New Year’s interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Obama was asked to name his top priority for the next few years. He put immigration reform at the top of the list. “That’s something we should get done,” Obama said. Economic recovery, Obama added, is “the second thing that we’ve got to do.” …
Speaking of jobs, Joel Kotkin writes about the cities that are growing.
In an era in which many businesses that pay high wages have been shedding jobs, the wide-ranging employment category of professional, scientific and technical services has been a relatively stellar performer, expanding some 15% since 2001. In contrast, employment dropped over 20% in such lucrative fields as manufacturing and information-related businesses (media, telecom providers, software publishing) over the same period, and finance and wholesale trade experienced small declines.
With an average annual wage nearing $90,000, this category — which includes computer consulting and technical services, accounting, engineering and scientific research, as well as legal, management and marketing services — increasingly shapes the ability of regions to generate higher-wage jobs. In order to determine which metropolitan areas are doing best, Forbes and Praxis Strategy Group compiled rankings based on both long and short-term growth, as well as the extent and growth of each region’s business service economy compared to the national average.
Notably absent from the top 10 are Chicago and the big metropolitan areas of the Northeast and California that have traditionally dominated high-end business services. The only exception is the third-ranked San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metropolitan statistical area, which has logged 21% growth in this sector since 2001, while expanding the proportion of such jobs in the local economy to nearly twice the national average. Over the past year alone the region added 22,000 professional and business services jobs, which was more than a quarter of all new positions during that period.
The continuing vitality of nearby Silicon Valley, and the region’s attraction to educated workers, have made the Bay Area easily the best performer of the nation’s mega-regions. Yet the other leaders on our list are generally smaller, growing metro areas whose expansions have been propelled by a rapid increase in employment in technology and professional management services. These include our top-ranked metro area, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas, which enjoyed over 46% growth in employment in professional services since 2001; fourth-place Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and No. 5 Salt Lake City, Utah. These areas have enjoyed strong net-in migration of educated workers, and have poached companies from more expensive regions. …
Amity Shlaes has written a biography of Calvin Coolidge. It is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.
‘Debt takes its Toll.’ Thus does Amity Shlaes begin her biography of Calvin Coolidge, the laconic, flinty-faced New Englander who became America’s 30th president upon the death of Warren Harding in 1923 and then captured the office in his own right in 1924. Ms. Shlaes, the author of a best-selling history of the Great Depression, “The Forgotten Man” (2007), issues her debt admonition in the course of introducing Oliver Coolidge, a brother of Silent Cal’s great-grandfather, who went to jail in 1849 because he couldn’t pay a $29.48 debt to a neighbor. She then glides briskly from Oliver’s plight to the problem of government debt, particularly when it reaches proportions that threaten the public fisc and undermine national confidence. “There have been times,” Ms. Shlaes writes in the introduction to “Coolidge,” “when debt pinned down the United States as it once pinned down Oliver.
Calvin Coolidge lived in such a time—as do we. At the end of World War I, the national debt stood at $27 billion, nine times its level before the war. But Coolidge, and Harding as well, slashed the country’s credit obligation to just $17.65 billion. They did it by cutting taxes, generating economic growth and, in the process, flooding federal coffers with surplus dollars. This accomplishment merits attention today, with the national debt exceeding $16 trillion—more than 70% of gross domestic product. If that number hits 90%, some economists warn, it will squeeze the national economy inexorably.
And if that crisis hits, the country will face a binary choice. It can return to a free-market system of lower taxes, smaller government and the curtailment of the Federal Reserve’s promiscuous fiat monetary policies—in short, abandoning Keynesian sensibilities and the trend toward European-style social democratic governance. Or it can opt for what energy-industry executive Jay Zawatsky has called “increasing financial repression”—further federal spending and intrusion into the economy, rising tax rates on the wealthy, ever greater federal debt financed by Fed money creation and, eventually, rising inflation. …