LincolnKennedy

So it is a symbol that the national economy is depressed and tax revenue is down? Or is it a symbol of how people are willing to ignore the actual relationship between the streetcar project and the City's operational budget? For better or for worse, and whether we like it or not, people will continue to insist that symbols that have no connection to actual facts are more important than the facts themselves.

^Are they ripping up the whole park to make the garage, or just half of it?

^And people think I'm a prick on this forum. This is what Cincinnati City Council has done. Not sure if they've sent any letters. Is Cleveland RTA the preferred stand-in for the state? Passed December 8, 2010: 201001612 Res. No. 0067-2010 RESOLUTION, dated 11/16/2010 submitted by Vice Mayor Qualls, EXPRESSING the support of Council for the 3C rail project, urging Governor-elect Kasich to continue the project, and also urging other officials to take necessary action to ensure the development of the 3C rail corridor.

So is the Joint Powers Authority for 3C a non-starter, or is there movement on that front?

^Yep, that's going to do it. I can't believe no one has thought of that.

Kasich is the one is comparing this to roads, since that is what he wants to spend the money on instead of passenger rail. A better comparison (at least for passenger purposes; the freight component of the plan continues to be ignored by anti-rail cult cultists) is between this plan and the public money expended on smaller airports which is about all Ohio has right now. When you consider that this train has the power to link Cin-Day-Col-Cle cities + others in between, + drastically reduce times between Day-Col-Cle airports thereby making them more affordable to fly in and out of, and reducing prices, Kasich and the anti-rail cult cultists look even stupider. Do families not take the Greyhound between these cities? Do you not need other transportation after an inter-city bus ride? Does the state not have the authority to grant and remove the express powers of municipal corporations? Can the state not de-regulate whatever local regulations currently exist with regard to taxis in these cities? Is not de-regulation and free enterprise supposedly a principle of the so-called conservatives? Is there any suggestion that Kasich is going to encourage such options? Is this an attempt a joke? Do you really think repetition of the same sentences and phrases creates facts and data out of thin air? Is there objective evidence to actually suggest this is the case?

1) He said he was going to cancel 3C. True. 2) Unless you have some polling data showing that a majority of voters in the election who voted for Kasich voted for him because they thought he would kill 3C (and that alone- someone who voted for Kasich because they thought he would "stop spending" is clearly disappointed with him, since he still wanted to spend the $400 million), this second statement is completely unsubstantiated. 3) Well, it certainly won't save us any money in the short run, since it will be spent here or in another state. The money is already allocated. Of course the plan itself details the return on investment. $400 million spent on existing roads would conceivably bring no new return on investment, since they would already be built (though the opportunity cost of avoiding maintenance would conceivably decrease current economic returns from the road, so we can't really say that there wouldn't be a return from using it for maintenance). If he wanted to spend the money on new roads, then it would have resulted in long term costs as well. Regardless, it is pretty funny that the first act of the new Republican Governor of Ohio will be to send more federal money and more jobs to Sun Belt states. I know so-called conservatives honestly believe that federal investment is always bad, but do any of them really believe that so many people would be living in the South and West if the feds had not (and this is just one in a long list of things) built all those dams to supply power and water to those places? Guess what, now they are getting high speed rail. We're helping to pay for it, just as we always have, and thanks to John Kasich, we get nothing for it. Florida's got a new Republican governor. He's apparently not stupid enough to refuse federal investments.

Talking about debt per capita: In 2009, Iceland had debt of 850% of GDP: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904?printable=true&currentPage=all Now, they are coming out of recession: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/business/global/08icecon.html?_r=1 The benefits of having your own currency. From the article: "Like Ireland and Greece, Iceland has taken a large dose of austerity measures to rebuild its economy. Unlike Ireland and Greece, however, Iceland allowed private banks to fail, and its currency, the krona, has declined by about 46 percent against the dollar since the start of 2008. “Excluding the financial system, the real economy is doing well,” Arsaell Valfells, a professor of business and finance at the University of Iceland, said in telephone interview. Retail spending was still shrinking, he said, but the export sector, consisting mainly of fish, aluminum and tourism, was improving. “We’ve basically gone back to 2003 in terms of the level of standard of living,” he said. The worst has been felt by younger people who borrowed at the height of the bubble and are now having to reduce their debt, he said. “But they’ll come through this,” he added. Iceland’s experience, he said, offered a lesson for the euro zone as it grappled with its own crisis: “This is the proper process. If you go through a bubble economy and you need to correct it, the answer is not to convert private debt into public debt. Rather it is to restructure the debt to the level of the assets.”

^Is this really the lesson we should glean from the crisis? Let's recall: -Bubble in housing sector due to availability of cheap credit, which was financed through supposedly AAA securities sold to institutional investors. (Toss in some crazy reinsurance risk managment to that powder keg, the credit default swaps). -Complexity of the underlying mortgages (things like new, higher rates after 5 years) and inability to refi causes defaults, which then causes the MBS's to become unable to be accurately valued, which causes the credit default swap payments to come due). Bear Stearns goes broke, forced sale/bailout to JP Morgan/Chase -Re-insurers go broke (AIG, etc.) causing Lehman Bros. to go bankrupt. All other investment banks at risk of going broke. -Credit market seizes up. GM, Chrysler, State of California, other who rely on short term loans from major banks to provide day-to-day working capital because their income comes in at fixed points during the year can't pay their bills. -Producers cut back because of lack of funding, unemployment insues, expected sales fall further (fewer buyers due to unemployment), more layoffs, then massive unemployment. I'm not sure where "living above your means" comes into this. I suppose the original mortgagees were, but of course they were provided that money by bankers who expected to make a profit, and supposedly conducted an analysis of the borrowers assets before they provided a loan. Or are the large institutional players, the pension funds (both American and European) and charities and non-profits who were the end buyers of the MBS's that allowed for the money to flow to the mortgagees in the first place "living above their means"? Or was it the banks that tried to make profits selling MBS's, buying MBS's insuring those MBS's and reinsuring their MBS's all at the same time? Either way, now that Ireland is going broke, and Spain is likely to be next, it's going to be pretty ridiculous when people who claim government that was in massive deficit or "living above its means" is now paying for it, since both Ireland and Spain were running surpluses before the fiscal crisis.

^There is no there right there. You've made a bunch of assertions. With the exception of barreling highways directly into downtown areas, U.S. highway building was probably better than that in Europe. Most post-war European systems nationalized their railways- this naturally led to using rail as the primary means to move people around. Since the U.S. didn't nationalize their railways, our rail is being used for freight far more efficiently than in Europe. That's one of the reasons 3C is such a good investment- because it is both a freight system investment and a passenger rail investment in an area dense enough to take advantage of the investment, even though there is plenty of underutilized property within that area.

^Originally expected to cost the U.S. Government $356 billion, the most recent final net estimate of the cost, as of October 5, 2010, will be close to $30 billion, including expected returns from interest in AIG. This is significantly less than the taxpayers' cost of the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. The cost of that crisis amounted to 3.2% of GDP during the Reagan/Bush era, while the GDP percentage of the current crisis' cost is estimated at less than 1%. While it was once feared the government would be holding companies like GM, AIG and Citigroup for several years, those companies are preparing to buy back the Treasury's stake and emerge from TARP within a year. Of the $245 billion invested in U.S. banks, over $169 billion has been paid back, including $13.7 billion in dividends, interest and other income, along with $4 billion in warrant proceeds as of April 2010. AIG is considered "on track" to pay back $51 billion from divestitures of two units and another $32 billion in securities. In March 2010, GM repaid more than $2 billion to the U.S. and Canadian governments and on April 21 GM announced the entire loan portion of the U.S. and Canadian governments' investments had been paid back in full, with interest, for a total of $8.1 billion. This was, however, subject to contention because it was argued that the automaker simply shuffled federal bailout funds to pay back taxpayers.

Bruce Bartlett, former domestic policy advisor to President Reagan and treasury official under Bush the Elder, has a pretty pithy description of how most folks tend to view the strength of our currency: "They are also incapable of seeing the exchange value of the dollar except in macho terms, which demands that the dollar be strong at all times. That makes about as much sense as saying the price of oil or any other commodity should always be strong. That's obviously nuts, but the dollar is no different. It must be allowed to adjust freely for changes in supply and demand or the result will be imbalances--too much will be imported if the dollar is overvalued, too little exports, thus increasing American's international indebtedness. Indeed, it was right wing saint Milton Friedman who taught economists the truth of this mechanism." The article: http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/2056/mike-pence-not-ready-prime-time?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CapitalGainsAndGames+%28Capital+Gains+and+Games+-+Wall+Street%2C+Washington%2C+and+Everything+in+Between%29 China is keeping their currency devalued in an attempt to export unemployment to others. The U.S. isn't exporting inflation to anyone.

Don't disagree, though I think your comments about bullies is the governing one. It's not so much about 3C for them as it is that they are in charge and they get to do what they want... and they want to kill this project but use the money how they see fit. It's comical really. Spending is wasteful... except on the things we want to spend money on. It's a complete joke. I honestly fear the Republicans will end up being in power for a while, so I think the only way this gets done is, as has been mentioned in this thread previously, some coalition of the 3C + D cities, and maybe other counties along the route. Some legal entity needs to be able to receive the federal money without interference from the state, and it needs to be driving its authority from political entities run by Dems so that it doesn't get canceled or sidelined on a regular basis.

But it balances things out by making our exports more attractive to purchasers overseas. That is precisely why Germany and China don't want to see the dollar have a relative decrease in value, because they don't want our exports, particularly our manufactured goods, from becoming more competitive, because their systems are in large measure ones that strive at full employment above all things. There's nothing inherently harmful about the dollar's relative devaluation- a loss on one side of the devaluing results in a gain on the other side. Obviously there are risks inherent in inflation, but there are likewise risks in long term unemployment. The real problem for the U.S. economy is all the private household debt that is out there. Things that will encourage employment to give consumers more opportunity to pay down their private debt is what shoud be the first order of business to combat the recession and improve the economy.

You don't have the time? You post constantly. That was the reason I said "30 years". Try to keep up. Things are sitting idle in the real world because people are out of work and institutions aren't investing because demand is weak and there (was/maybe still is) a strong desire for safe financial investments. The fact that resources are currently sitting idle isn't some argument for not doing the bailout. This is absolutely beyond the pale and I hope it attracts moderator attention... ah, who am I kidding, I don't care if you talk shit. But beyond that, what was a clear statement on my part, that national debt has nothing to do with national honor, was twisted by you to say that "I put very little store in concepts such as national honor." That's clearly not what I said, and I stand by my statement that a nation's or an individual's indebtedness has nothing to do with honor. Yeah, you've been predicting an imminent rise in interest rates for some time now. How accurate has that been? Consumption is the problem right now son. You seriously misunderstand capitalism when you don't believe anything can be done to the demand side.

Are you saying that by making a technological improvement that makes downtown Dayton 30 minutes from both downtown Cincinnati and Columbus instead of the previous hour, that the value thus created doesn't redound to say, private property owners in downtown Dayton? BuckeyeB has an understanding of how growth economics works. He's worth listening to. It's not terribly complicated.

No. The paper I was thinking of actually says that there is a 1.5% difference. Nevertheless, the difference is not inchoate, it is real. http://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/End-of-Great-Recession.pdf Have at it. This is your chance to walk the talk! Or those from the 19th century, by your definition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gutfreund By the way, what difference did Reagan's policies have on real GDP growth rates vs. those under the socialist fantasies of the mid-20th century? There's no point in letting resources sit idly and people have their careers begin at a permanently diminished level simply because some bankers didn't know what they were doing, or didn't care. Likewise there's no point in letting resources sit by idly and people have their careers start at a permanently diminished level simply because those whose careers have already started get some sort of pleasure out of seeing people go through pain and unemployment. This is about finance, not about national honor. It doesn't make one feel very honorable to lose your job through no fault of your own. There's nothing dishonorable about debt either- its the engine that drives capitalism and the innovation you are praising! Those who say they love the market better than the rest of are usually the first to forget that it allocates resources, not plenary and partial indulgences.

It is moral to prevent people from losing their jobs and industries from vanishing from the U.S. It is immoral for those things to disappear simply because of the irresponsible acts of some bankers. We let GM and all of their suppliers fall by the wayside in order to spite bankers who, even if their bank disappears, still get to keep all their salary and bonuses from the bubble period? In addition, U.S. credit (via what people are paying for Treasuries) is the best in the world. There is no other entity in the world people trust more with their investments, if you care about what the market is saying. The difference between 16% unemployment and 10% is hardly inchoate. But this happened- Bear Stearns, Countrywide, National City, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Bros. are gone, and their assets sold. The large non-bank actors who were less exposed have either paid back their loans or like Citibank and AIG, are still partly owned by the Fed/Treasury. This is partly what happened, as well as the old players who got cut rate deals for the assets of the now-defunct players. The anti-bailout crowd doesn't have much of a theory about why letting the banks fail punishes those who caused the panic, since they get to keep all the money they made during the bubble that brought on the panic. They imply that the taxpayers now hold all this debt, but since the only way the government makes money is through the economic activity of the taxpayers (their basis for arguing for low taxes), and the taxpayers aren't economically active if they aren't working, they don't ever talk about how unemployment was supposed to be avoided if all these companies went under. The government brings in far more revenue when only 10% of its citizens are unemployed instead of 16%, and is therefore less indebted. The business failures and unemployment that followed the panic weren't or wouldn't be natural because the circumstances that proceeded the panic weren't natural. Only within the last 30 years have investment banks become corporations rather than partnerships, for example.

"COST: The 3C train is estimated to cost $17M per year in operating support—less than 1% of Ohio’s $2.85B annual transportation budget. By comparison, ODOT spends $12M each year mowing the grass along Ohio’s Interstate highways." This is a great stat.

I doubt most people would agree with either of the contentions in that statement. That is completely false. The drop out rate has fallen over the years, largely because people can't get a good factory job without a high-school diploma. You can't even enlist without a GED. The majority of kids in all states attend public schools, and the majority of people who attend public schools express satisfaction with their school. As if having parents who have enough money to pay for private schools isn't arbitrary, or as if the lotteries people have to be present for to get into charter schools aren't arbitrary. The only difference is that one could end the present arbitrary political boundary factor by simply having equal across the board state funding and no link between districts and their tax base, whereas your suggestions are premised on the notion of arbitrary inequality. That's because you don't believe in the social goal of universal primary education. A siren's song that's been around for over 100 years in most U.S. states. The rest of the world is starting to catch up, which is why you only begin to see the U.S. "falling behind" on comparative national scores. I'm all for getting rid of the dead weight in this state as well. You think the bottom of the ocean has room for one more bankruptcy lawyer? :laugh:

I really think you are ignoring the historical record here. I strongly suspect that the locally incorporated communities began the drive to universal education, then states took over so that poor kids in countryside could have access as well. I'm not sure how you can ethically compel people to put their kids in school and then not provide the school. And you've still not really addressed why it's okay for private schools to be subsidized by a state issued voucher but not not schools that ostensibly have a certain amount of affection in a community or at least a convenience/time-saving factor. How on earth does ending state public education even out inequalities? It seems pretty misguided to sacrifice the education of numerous children simply to futilely attempt to destroy the right of citizens to incorporate/peaceably assemble/join a union whatever you want to call it. Bottom line is that there is no country in the world that has universal education without the state providing it. Vouchers are just the grade school equivalents of student loans- a backdoor way to fund private schools with public money.

^Then on what basis are you wanting to combine public schools? You're basically saying that you don't want the state to subsidize independent special-purpose governments (public corporations) but rather the sate subsidize private corporations. Zero subsidization beyond the subsidy is still a subsidy for the cost of the voucher. So your policy favors private corporations over public corporations, with the net effect of eliminating universal primary and high school education. That's terrible. I don't even understand the potential social utility of doing this.

Didn't they say the same thing about David Wells when he left?

What they really need is an American Indian restaurant- squash, venison, passenger pigeon.

^While I understand what you are saying, those numbers seem relatively arbitrary, and they fly in the face of the historic right of people to incorporate. Not terribly Burkean, if you follow. Better to define the rules a little better to do what you are saying. Nut up and have the state take formal control for funding education instead of these school districts. You'd still want a certain manner of local or diffuse control when it comes to curricula or something, at the very least to avoid a Texas School Board inmates running the asylum situation, but direct state funding allows you to eliminate more districts since they won't be funded by local property taxes. Second you could give municipal corporations more powers and consequently more responsibilities. You could eliminate small local governments in a county be saying something like- if the combined total bill of a basket of services (water, garbage collection, etc.) is such and such percentage higher than those of all the others in your county, or the primary city, or whatever, a straight up majority vote for annexation between the two is allowed. There are actually plenty of opportunities for what would normally be considered conservative or indirect authority policies in this state (and in the federal government for that matter). But the Republican party isn't concerned with anything except tax cuts and beating Democrats in elections, so you aren't going to see anything interesting coming from these guys.