We're No. 2, We're No. 2 !!!

Mad City

A great place to retire.

Take that, Scott Fitzgerald.



The Milken Institute has just compiled its ranking of the best U.S. major metro areas and small metro areas for seniors to retire:  Best Cities for Successful Aging.  Madison ranks just behind Provo, Utah as the second best major metropolitan area in the United States (of 100 major metro areas) for retirement.   No Florida or Arizona metropolitan area made the top twenty.   Milwaukee/Waukesha/West Allis came in 32nd.  In the small metro category, Eau Claire ranked 34th and LaCrosse just one spot behind.  The full report is available here.

The University, museums, and cultural opportunities and the hospitals in the area were important as was the low unemployment rate, particularly among seniors.  Housing costs were a bit of a negative as well as "binge drinking" and inadequate access to groceries for seniors.

Feeling fortunate that I won't need to hire a moving company anytime soon.

Blood Pot

 Cannabis







Greg Campbell, the author of Blood Diamonds, about the global trade in conflict diamonds, discusses the morality of pot use in an article in The New Republic:

Many smokers will point to the carnage south of the border as an argument for legalization. They’re right, of course, but legalization isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, the responsibility for ethical behavior falls squarely on the end-user—the casual marijuana smoker. When diamond customers learned that their purchases of rings and necklaces were inadvertently supporting a barbaric insurgency, they were outraged and changed their buying habits; some stopped buying diamonds altogether if they couldn’t be certain of the source. Marijuana users should adopt the same moral calculus.

In other words, if you can’t prove your pot is conflict-free, you shouldn’t be smoking it. The only people who face a genuine ethical dilemma are medical patients who find relief from debilitating illnesses with cannabis and who can only access it through the black market. Recreational smokers, though, have no such excuse. Buying marijuana for the purpose of getting stoned is a luxury. And when luxuries come with a cost that is measured in thousands of human lives, continuing to fund the killers is simply indefensible. That’s as true of pot as it is of diamonds.

Taxing the Rich. Will it Depress Employment by Small Businesses?

 The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in a post yesterday, disputes the claim that letting the Bush Tax Cuts expire on taxpayers earning over $250,000 will impact job creation by small businesses:

The arguments against allowing the high-end tax cuts to expire on schedule echo those made against President Clinton’s proposed 1993 tax increases, which set marginal rates at the levels to which they are set to return when the Bush rate cuts expire.  Critics claimed at the time that those tax increases would seriously harm economic growth and even send the economy back into recession.  As it turned out, job creation and economic growth proved significantly stronger following the 1993 tax increases than following the 2001 Bush tax cuts.  Further, small businesses generated jobs at twice the rate during the Clinton years than they did under the Bush tax code.

 . . .

Extending the tax cuts on incomes in excess of $250,000 would add nearly $1 trillion to deficits over 2013 to 2022, but benefit only about the highest-income 2 percent of households.[27]  The biggest benefits would flow to the very highest-income people: as Figures 3 shows, more than 80 percent of the value of the upper-income tax cuts would go to people who make more than $1 million a year. 

As discussed above, very few of the high-income taxpayers who benefit from the upper-income tax cuts are in fact “small businesses” in the way the term is commonly understood. Moreover, there is no good evidence that cutting the taxes of small business owners is an effective way to boost hiring or growth in either the short run or the long run. 

Policymakers ought not let myths and lobbyists’ slogans regarding high-income taxpayers and small businesses drive them toward a costly policy that would add heavily to deficits while delivering little economic benefit.

"Back of the Bus!"

London Olympics dust-up.

What The? Unemployment Rate in Wisconsin Rises to 7.0%

"I meant what I said and I said what I meant.  A promise is a promise one hundred percent"


Horton the Elephant, paraphrased ever so slightly.





Wisconsin DWD just released the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs numbers for June 2012, and they are Ugly (with a capital "U").  In the eighteen months since the Governor was inaugurated, Wisconsin has lost 12,400 private sector jobs.

Here are the numbers:

 

The Governor's promise was to create 250,000 new private sector jobs in Wisconsin in his first term.  His "nut" has now grown to 262,400 private sector jobs.  There are 30 months left in his term.  He needs to see an average of about 8,750 new jobs per month for the remainder of his term,

The Walker Administration by the Numbers - Not a Pretty Picture

The Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election has folks on the left scratching their heads over how the results could have turned out as they did.  Many bemoaning the result credit the great disparity in spending between the two candidates, but that seems a hard sell when you see that with far less of a spending disparity in 2010, the results were pretty much exactly the same.

One easy explanation is found in exit polling that showed that 60 percent of voters thought that recall elections were only appropriate in the event of official misconduct in office, and ten percent felt that recall elections were never appropriate.  But that may not adequately explain the result either.  The New York Times  report on the exit polling showed that even where voters felt that a recall should be reserved for official misconduct in office, 31% of those voters identified themselves as having voted for Barrett.  That suggests that a substantial plurality of voters who support the concept of restricting recall to instances of misconduct walked into the polling booth thinking to themselves:  "While I feel this is an inappropriate way to use the recall mechanism, I am going to vote for the candidate I like the best."  In addition, the likelihood is that the voters who were in favor of restricting the recall process (or never seeing it used) were by nature more conservative voters, who could be expected to favor more stability growing out of general elections. 

Another possibility is that voters felt that Barrett simply didn't convince them that Governor Walker needed to be tossed.   Barrett's campaign was excessively based on "I am not Scott Walker," rather than "here is my economic plan for getting the state working again."  To my knowledge, the Barrett campaign never answered the question posed to it:  "How would you have balanced the budget in the spring of 2010?"

An additional possibility is that voters, focused on the economic woes affecting the nation and state were satisfied with the economic performance of the Walker administration.  In this regard, the Governor's team did a brilliant legerdemain with the job numbers, coming out with a new data set drawn from a more complete survey of job creation just before the election that seemed to clearly support that the actual job creation was much more robust than the Bureau of Labor Statistic's monthly survey of job creation.  I discussed this switch in data sets here.

The Barrett campaign missed out on a good opportunity to challenge the Walker administration's contention that all was well with the growth of jobs in Wisconsin in two ways:  First, by taking the new job data being promoted by Walker and explaining  that even under the new set of data, Wisconsin was bringing up the tail end of all the Midwestern states in new jobs created.  This includes running behind Illinois, the state from which the Governor said we would be importing jobs.  Second, to my knowledge the Barrett campaign failed to point out that another key economic indicator the Governor had touted in the spring actually shows that Wisconsin is performing far worse than every state in the country in state GDP growth rate other than Mississippi and Alaska.  I discussed this in March here.

The economic indicator that shows us close to the bottom of the barrel is the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank's Coincident Index, which is scored every month.  It is in essence a State GDP rate of growth model tied to several key indicators of economic activity in each of the states.  Each state has index scores which are not directly correlated to the scores of the other states, but importantly, the rate of growth of a state's index can be directly compared to the rate of growth of other states, so that the relatively economic vibrancy of the states can be compared.  As explained on the Philly Fed web site, the coincident index data can serve to inform new businesses or existing businesses what states have healthy economies that might best serve to support business expansion plans in a new state.  Likewise, the Fed says that the data can inform unemployed or underemployed workers where they might want to relocate to fit into an expanding economy.

Based on the most current Coincident Index issued by the Philly Fed, here are the five fastest growing states in the U.S. during the period from January, 2011 (Walker's inauguration) to May 2012, a seventeen month period of time, and the five states growing their economies at the slowest rates (or in the case of Alaska, actually contracting over the period):



 And here is the lineup of Midwestern states:

 

The growth rate of Wisconsin's economy since Scott Walker became governor is less than one-seventh the growth rate of Ohio's.   It is less than one-sixths of Michigan's.  The slowest growing state in the upper Midwest besides Wisconsin is Minnesota, whose growth rate is over three times our state.  And Illinois, from where Governor Walker predicted jobs would be flowing into our state?  Its rate of growth is almost four times our own.

I suspect we are through hearing about the Coincident Index from the Governor for awhile.

Today at noon we will get the job numbers from the state DWD for June, and it will be interesting to see if this dismal economic track record improves.













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Measuring Adminstrative Efficiency in Wisconsin State Agencies

 Lean flow chart






Governor Walker announced a new executive order yesterday that calls for state agencies to adopt Lean techniques in agency operations.   This seems like a good initiative in principle, and the Governor has provided for some degree of accountability in the executive order, establishing a website that will allow citizens to track the Lean projects undertaken by each of the state agencies.

The goal is to increase efficiency and improve the service products that the state delivers.  The initial initiatives have come out of the DNR, and involve such efforts as reducing the time and staff manpower needed for DNR permits.

The goal of streamlining state government operations and identifying man-hours spent on activities that add little or no value to the agencies' outputs is a great one, and the Governor should be applauded for the effort.  A number of other states have similar Lean initiatives. 

The Governor's office is not subject to the new executive order (EO-66) directive.  The Governor's office needs to set better standards for its own efficiency.  The press release announcing the new LEAN initiative came out today.  The executive order directing the LEAN initiative?   Signed May 2nd.

The 2008 origin to Mitt's Tax Return Problem

 IRS Form 1040




The New York Times has an article in today's paper discussing the VP vetting process underway at Camp Romney.  The most interesting claim in the article isn't about the seemingly thorough effort by Romney's campaign to avoid a VP fiasco like the one that bedeviled John McCain.  The most interesting claim, if accurate, is this:

Mr. Romney’s possible running mates, who have handed over reams of documents to the campaign, have probably opened themselves to  a greater level of scrutiny than the candidate himself, especially on the thorny question of taxes. Mr. Romney has said he will disclose federal tax returns covering two years by Election Day, far fewer than the 23 years’ worth that he handed over to Senator John McCain as a possible vice-presidential pick in 2008.

The two years of returns that Romney intends to release are the 2010 return he has already released and the 2011 return that is still in process.  Neither of which will likely shed any light on his claim that he walked completely away from Bain Capital in 1999.

Mr. Romney presumably had a devout interest in becoming the Vice President candidate on the McCain ticket in 2008.  Why else would he have disclosed over two decades of his tax returns to the McCain campaign?   And presumably after reviewing Romney as a potential candidate, including reviewing his tax returns, a decision was made by McCain to chose Palin over Romney.  Was damaging information in Mitt Romney's tax returns a factor in his not being selected?  We will likely never know, unless Steve Schmidt, the talk-show gadfly ex-campaign advisor to McCain, or someone like him, enlightens us.

But what does it say about Romney that he felt it was appropriate to turn over 23 years of tax returns to the McCain campaign so it could weigh what the returns say about him as a potential vice-president, and now, when he is running for the most important elected office on the planet, he is being much more protective of his privacy.  A rationale inference is that a more fulsome release of his tax returns will be damaging to his chances for election.  While some Republicans have joined in the chorus calling for Romney to release more years of his taxes, McCain has not. Perhaps this was a condition of releasing them to McCain in 2008.  Perhaps McCain feels it is not his place to stoke the fire on the issue.  What McCain has done has been to "personally vouch" that there was nothing in the 23 years of returns that would "disqualify" Romney as a potential candidate:

Everything was fine," McCain told reporters on Capitol Hill. "I can personally vouch for the fact that there was nothing in his tax returns that would in any way be disqualifying for him to be a candidate."

When pressed about whether Romney might be shielding his returns because he paid no taxes, McCain refused to discuss such specifics.

"Please, I am not going to get into that kind of conversation," he said. "All I can tell you, and I can tell you again, is there was nothing disqualifying in his tax returns. And that is a fact."

Apparently the American people can't be trusted to judge for themselves whether there is anything in the returns that would seem "disqualifying" to them.  Instead we are told we must relying on the "vouching" of John McCain.

The attacks on Romney being out of touch with average Americans, an "out-sourcer" at  Bain and someone that has played all sorts of off-shore tax haven angles to maximize his tax savings will continue to resonate until he decides to release many more of his returns.  He really is going to wish he had simply done this early on in the campaign.  The Dems, if they have not already, will start showing clips of his opponents in the primary contests calling for him to do it.

Judge Posner: GOP Goofy

Judge Richard Posner, one of the conservative lions on the Court of Appeals, thinks the Republican party is becoming "goofy."