Author: Administrator

Missing from Chicago’s Transportation Platform

Eight area advocacy organizations have issued “Chicago’s Sustainable Transportation Platform,”  recommending public policies for a better transportation system. Since I’m a paying member of at least two of the eight, and on the mailing list of a well-funded third, I had hoped that maybe a few sensible things would be included.  You can decide for yourself which of the ideas are sensible (“Design streets that are safe and convenient for all users.”).  Pretty much all of them could be construed as “Create additional jobs and funding opportunities for us and our friends,” but that’s true of most public policy discussions.

I’m mainly concerned about what’s missing, for instance:

  • Obtain transit funding from those who benefit from transit service– the owners of land and other privileges in areas served by transit.
  • Reduce the number of free and subsidized parking spaces provided at public and nonprofit facilities, including libraries, police stations, educational and medical institutions.  Use the resulting revenue to reduce taxes on productive activity.
  • Improve transit governance by requiring the majority of governing boards of CTA, Pace, Metra, and RTA to be regular transit users, and no board member who takes fewer than five transit trips in a month can receive pay for that month.

Other ideas?

Podcasts: appropriate agriculture, inappropriate singularity, Argentina

Podcasts can be a way to learn while doing something else.  I’ve encountered some interesting ones in recent weeks.

Grow rice in Vermont? Why not? Continue reading Podcasts: appropriate agriculture, inappropriate singularity, Argentina

Bank bails itself out

The subhead of this  (1/1/11) Tribune article summarizes well:

$15 million Marquette Bank program offers subsidized home loans to buyers who purchase homes in subdivisions of client builders

You’re a bank.  You made some construction loans (or were they even land acquisition loans?) to residential builders who are now unable to repay. If you repossess the land you surely will have to recognize a loss; maybe your capital ratios will be endangered.  What do you do?

You lend money to buyers on favorable terms, which they use to buy houses in those subdivisions.   You hold the loans in your own portfolio, so they need not conform to recently-tightened underwriting standards. Win-win, at least for the bank and the borrowers.

Speculators pay > $250,000 for Chicago taxi medallions

Chicago Dispatcher reports that the City of Chicago has auctioned another 50 taxi medallions.  Ten of these were reserved for working cabbies and went for $150,599 to $180,101. Of the remaining 40, half were bought by Paul Widmarck for $259,999 each, and the other half by Leonid Sorkin for prices ranging from $252,800 to $254,700.   I assume that the total proceeds, something under $12 million, will be used to help plug the City’s current budget deficit.  I suppose that’s better than giving medallions away, but a policy of collecting annually the rental value of a medallion would provide a continuing income stream to the City and prevent speculation.

The ten owner-operator medallions “are designated, and must remain, Owner/Operator Medallions.”  It will be interesting to see how this is enforced over the years.

The speculative prices over $250,000 compare to past sales which, to my knowledge, have never exceeded $200,000.  Shortly before the sale, Chicago Dispatcher provided a graph of medallion price trends.  Certainly looks like a speculative bubble to me.  But you probably should ignore me.  Had I had been prescient enough to know what would happen to medallion prices, I would have bought a couple dozen (on credit) five years ago.

Income tax rates don’t matter

Lots of discussion lately about income tax rates, pointing out that individuals reporting high incomes once were subject to marginal federal rates in excess of 90%, whereas today that rate never exceeds 35%.  And corporate incomes face federal tax rates of 39.3%, higher than most other countries. Various ignorant or deceptive interests use these figures to make all kinds of arguments, such as that America’s rich are undertaxed, or American corporations are overtaxed.

But the secret, that all lobbyists know, is that income tax rates don’t much matter.  When wealthy Americans were subject to 90% taxes, they didn’t really have to pay them.  Instead, accountants and lawyers and various other shysters put together all kinds of partnerships, trusts, and other mostly imaginary constructs, which were used to legally hide or redefine income into something else.  It was a bother and an expense, but way cheaper than paying taxes.

As for corporations, they have all kinds of manipulations available to reduce their taxes, as I discussed two months ago.  (If individuals figured their taxable income the way that corporations do, we could deduct all our expenses for food, clothing, medical treatment, and practically everything else).  If a few corporations appear to pay taxes in excess of the federal rate, it is due to state income taxes, local real estate taxes, other nonincome taxes, or special circumstances.

What brings all this to mind is this post, which provides two nice examples to illustrate my point.  Read them if you have the patience, but the basic point is that corporations are able to entice many very intelligent, experienced people to devise ways to avoid taxes that legislators intend (or at least pretend to intend) to impose.  They are opposed by many very intelligent, somewhat less experienced (and less well-compensated) people employed by IRS and other agencies, many of whom hope in the future to be employed by the corporations.  The net result of taxing incomes, especially corporate incomes, is that many of the most intelligent and creative people, who might be providing goods or services that people need or want, are instead playing word-games with each other.

I would appreciate if someone would explain to me how a land value tax could possibly waste 1/10th of the brainpower absorbed by this useless, destructive system.

Real estate can help pay for transit

Haven’t posted much lately; busy with other things, including trying to clear off my desk.  In the process of which I found some notes of interest

How do you fund transit in the “most liveable city in the world?” Vancouver uses the real estate tax to cover about 35% of its operating shortfall (net of fares).  Fuel tax covers an almost equal amount (See this pdf). One can imagine how well Chicago’s transit system could run if funded this way, assuming also that it was competently planned and managed.

Unfortunately, Vancouver fails to fund capital costs in this way, relying instead on what Canadians call “senior governments,” meaning provincial and federal funds.  Probably that has something to do with the continuing real estate bubble in the area.

I also found notes I took at a conference in July concerning Japanese high speed rail services.  Japan is said to be the only country with privately-owned high speed passenger rail.  How is it funded? Hint: JR-East, one of the big operators of high speed trains, gets 32% of its gross revenue (see this pdf) from real estate it owns, and intends to grow this to 40 by collecting more of the value that good transport gives to real estate.

Is waste paper our major export?

There is a meme floating around the Internet (for example, here):

Do you know what our biggest export is today?  Waste paper.

and

The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.

The former assertion seems based on 2007 data reported here, which indicates (without giving a specific figure) that waste paper fills more shipping containers leaving the U S than any other product.  A big volume, surely, but is it our largest export, either by dollar value or physical volume?

Take a look at the U S Statistical Abstract, 2010 edition, table 1272 (download the pdf for the international trade section here).  Latest data shown is for 2008.  Total value of “pulp and waste paper” exported: $7.744 billion.  This is less than 1% of total exports ($1287.442 trillion).  A few larger figures are Coal ($8.196 billion), Vehicles ($98.871 billion), “Television, VCR, etc” ($24.379 billion).  There are eight different categories of chemicals, five of which each exceed $7.744 billion.  And $115.248 billion of “agricultural commodities,” including Corn ($13.931 billion) and “Vegetables and fruits” ($14.040 billion).

I don’t have data on physical volume, but many of the products I mentioned above typically do not travel in shipping containers.  In fact, one reason for export of waste paper might be that many containers would otherwise have to return empty to Asian ports.

As for the loss of manufacturing jobs, certainly there has been a decline, largely because manufacturing workers have become more productive.  The Statistical Abstract only shows manufacturing data back to 2000, but during the period 2000-2008 the constant-dollar manufacturing GDP increased by over 10%, just slightly more than population growth.

I won’t deny that there are serious problems with the U S economy, and I won’t deny that the net outflow of dollars (largely due to petroleum consumption and “defense” expenditures) is unsustainable.  It would be a good thing to remove obstacles which hinder American labor from producing in America, such as taxes on production and encouragement of nonproductive speculation.  A more balanced flow of trade would likely be a byproduct. The more important result would be higher incomes and a better standard of living for working people.

Free land still available

It’s been over three years since I blogged about free land available to anyone who wants to use it, and now CNBC has an article (more conveniently accessible via Yahoo, but with fewer pictures) about 7 Towns Where Land is Free.  Each place has some requirements, basically that you must build something and you must conform to local codes.  In most places you need not pay for the land but of course you’ll be liable for future taxes.  Even if we go back to the Homestead Act, you had to eventually pay ($1.25/acre) for and use the land you claimed.

Of course, there are probably thousands of towns in America where $1,000 will get you a decent lot, and if you can’t afford $1,000 you may not be able to build anything anyway.

Thinking in terms of Progress & Poverty, such free or cheap lands are, for practical purposes, approximately at the margin of production.  As the towns grow, one could expect the land value to increase; however it is  unlikely that any of these towns will grow substantially any time soon.

Does poverty cause conservatism?

A University of Tennessee study, reported at phys.org among other places, finds that, when incomes are more concentrated, people are more likely to say they oppose governmental redistribution of income.  This decidedly includes low-income people.  Why would low-income people oppose redistribution of income?

It might be because they’re too busy with survival to pay much attention to the question.  Or, having been screwed by the powers-that-be, they assume any redistribution will be away from them, toward those already in control.  Might even be that they are “free-market” types who expect to make a better living in the absence of government interference. I really have no idea.

I’ve only seen the news report, the actual paper seems to be behind a paywall, so there’s a lot of detail left unspecified. Such as whether “redistribution” is defined to include the current pattern of redistribution from those who work to  those who manipulate, what specific surveys were analyzed, and how the matter of sequence (Does public support for redistribution cause redistributive programs to be expanded?) was handled.