Sedente Animo

Fatimah Ali Loses Sight of the Big Picture

Despite the fact that an African-American stands a 50/50 chance of becoming president of the United States,  Fatimah Ali of the Daily News sees "a growing wave of intolerance sweeping the nation."

Did He Really Say This? Vol. 89

Barack Obamaon taxes and the economy:

“If you talk to Warren [Buffett], he’ll tell you his preference is not to meddle in the economy at all — let the market work, however way it’s going to work, and then just tax the heck out of people at the end and just redistribute it,” Obama said. “That way you’re not impeding efficiency, and you’re achieving equity on the back end.” He continued by saying that he thought there was some merit in Buffett’s argument. But, he said: “I do think that what the argument may miss is the sense of control that we want individuals to have in determining their own career paths, making their own life choices and so forth. And I also think you want to instill that sense of self-reliance and that what you do will help determine outcomes.”

Well, at least he is generous enough to let us keep our sense of self-reliance after taxes.

With Friends Like These...

In the mid-1990's, I took great offense to the Clintonians for accusing those that thought like me to be in favor of starving children just because we thought it might be a good idea to shrink the welfare state.

Ten to fifteen years later, I'm under similar fire, but this time, it's from the party with which I typically side.  Kind of ticks me off.

At any rate, the always eloquent Peggy Noonan explains the phenomenon much better than I can.

Park It

Neal Peirce writes on the value of parks in The Seattle Times:

The biggest splash by far is the new Millennium Park, $475 million worth of greenery, sculpture, fountain, grass and plantings between Michigan Avenue and the lakefront, including a stunningly designed outdoor music facility that provides 50 free concerts each summer.

Since Millennium's 2004 opening, Chicagoans and visitors have poured in, close to 4 million yearly, a kaleidoscope of races, ages and classes. But the park is also a perfect fit for the new green metaphor: Its exquisite plantings have replaced an open pit of railroad tracks, ugly trusses holding up railroad electric lines, and a dusty surface parking lot.

"Welcome to a park junkie's paradise," Alderman Mary Ann Smith told an Urban Park and Recreation Summit of directors and advocates from major cities, gathering in Chicago this month. Since the late 1980s, she said, Chicago's new and remade parks, its flowers and public art have begun to turn around many blighted, crime-ridden neighborhoods. "We're creating places people want to be, not places people want to flee."

One result: hundreds of millions of dollars invested in new housing, America's most dramatic "back to the city" movement. Real-estate values around Millennium Park alone have increased by at least $1.2 billion. Greenery has helped Chicago expand its visitor and convention industry to $9 billion in value a year.

And the phenomenon isn't Chicago's alone. Across the U.S., "there's a growing momentum — confidence that parks are no longer just a pretty face, but can drive economic development," Trust for Public Land President Will Rogers told the parks summit.

I am a suburbanite.  I live on a street with dozens of old trees that form a canopy over my street as well as neighboring streets.  Most of the lawns are maintained well, and for the past several months, a new bright color emerges from shrubs and beds almost daily.

Yet as I ride regional rail lines into Philadelphia, I am always saddened to see the parks and ball fields in decay, strewn with trash and debris.  The houses and buildings in these areas are in disrepair and often abandoned [at least I hope they are].

It often occurs to me, why can't these properties be reclaimed, the absentee owners bought out by the government and the areas turned into green space?  Government is rarely the answer to any problem, but this might be an instance where free markets need a little kick in the pants from city hall.

Though I'd like to see some more in the way of statistics, I have to say it seems like the time has come for Philadelphia to re-invent some of its neighborhoods, and I don't think free wi-fi is going to do it. 

Will Being Will

Reading George Will makes me want to put on a bow-tie and round-rimmed glasses.

His latest effort, this one on the last page of Newsweek, discusses the pork "emergencies" in the latest Congressional "emergency" spending bill.

...the "emergency" bill includes $594 million for highway projects, even in Hawaii, 4,000 miles from where Katrina hit. And $4 billion for supposed farm "disasters" unrelated to Katrina. And $150,000 for the Bronx Council of the Arts, $1.8 million to promote art in West Virginia, $500,000 for the Montana World Trade Center, and on and on. A poll shows approval of Congress down to 22 percent. Who are those 22 percent?

And Will being Will, he wraps up the column with a dose of perspective:

Americans, endowed by their solicitous government with an ever-expanding array of entitlements, now have the whiny mentality that an entitlement culture breeds. They feel entitled to purchase gasoline at the price they paid for it 25 years ago. Guess what? Last week they could do even better than that. The average price of a gallon of regular was $2.91. In April 1981, the real, inflation-adjusted price was $3.10.

He's got a great point.  Additionally, as a friend pointed out to me, that at the time for every ten dollars an American spent, one went to gasoline.  Today, it is one out of sixteen.

But as I wrote a few days ago, let the whine go on.  Each extra decibel of whining is another minute less that America will be dependent on those that would prefer to see us weakened, or worse, destroyed.  Indeed, Max Boot writes in the Los Angeles Times of the "dictatorship dividend"

Of the top 14 oil exporters, only one is a well-established liberal democracy — Norway. Two others have recently made a transition to democracy — Mexico and Nigeria. Iraq is trying to follow in their footsteps. That's it. Every other major oil exporter is a dictatorship — and the run-up in oil prices has been a tremendous boon to them.

Level Browsing Field

Recently, computer processor company Intel offered support for legislation that would ensure that all traffic on the internet receives the same priority.  Internet provider companies like Verizon and AT&T would prefer to tier content in order to optimize high-bandwidth applications.

On the one hand, one could argue that it is their wires, their cable, their servers, their ether, their...whatever else it is that makes the interweb tick, and so therefore, the companies should be allowed to use the technology as they see fit. 
But we tend to forget that the internet is still in its infancy.  One of the reasons the internet has enjoyed such phenomenal success since Al Gore invented it is because it is so open.  Anyone can participate in its use and often, it is the little guy that makes some of the biggest breakthroughs.  Allowing service providers to tier traffic would stifle future growth of the web.

Technorati Tag: internet neutrality

Can My SUV Run on Starbucks?

Today, I paid roughly the same price for a grande Americano from Starbucks as I did for a gallon of gasoline.

The espresso drink tasted good, briefly put a small smile on my face and put an extra spring in my step for a few hours.  The gallon of gasoline enabled me to travel approximately 20 miles (I drive a small SUV, and it was part highway traffic, part city traffic) to my job, where I recouped the travel cost in approximately 5 to 10 minutes of work.

When I purchased the beverage from Starbucks I did so quite willingly and without any duress whatsoever.  When I pumped the gasoline into my vehicle, I huffed, puffed, sighed, and rolled my eyes.

Fairly warped perspective isn't it?

My only condolence is that I am not alone.  While gas prices creep up and up, so does the health of the economy as Americans spend and spend.  Certainly there is a limit to how much the economy can bear to transport goods and services from point A to point B, but from the looks of things, we haven't reached that point yet.

But while I try and put the rising cost of gasoline in perspective, on the contrary, I don't want people to calm down about the matter.  Please, by all means, get amped up about it.  The more attention my fellow citizens and the politicians that represent us pay the matter, the sooner we will move towards reducing our nation's dependence on foreign oil.

People are acting as if the current oil prices are a crisis.  Clearly, if we can afford Starbucks drinks and high definition televisions and cell phones that take pictures and sneakers for our children that light up for heaven's sake, then we are no where near the status of "crisis".

But we are playing with borrowed time.  At some point, soon or later, next month, next year, or next decade, we are going to have a real crisis.  The nation is one violent incident in the Middle East or change in policy based on the whim of a former desert nomad away from serious problems that would bring our economy and lives to a screeching halt.

Some call for increasing our supply of oil through domestic means.  Go for it I say.  Some advocate a "let's send a man to the moon in ten years" style scientific effort to develop alternative energy sources.  Again I say, go for it.  I would even suggest tax credits to oil companies to build refineries, tax incentives to automobile manufacturers to increase fuel efficiency.

When President Bush stated that the nation was addicted to oil, he was right.  And what happens when an addict's addiction is removed cold turkey?  I for one would rather see America weaned off of foreign oil than abruptly sent to detox.