Democracy or Disease?

Democracy or Disease?

This is the title of an essay by Aaron Renn, the author of the Urbanophile blog (http://www.urbanophile.com/), although this essay appears instead on New Geography and you can find it here: http://www.newgeography.com/content/001611-the-vote-democracy-or-disease.

The essay is about how California-style government through referendum and initiative has spread to other states, especially in the Midwest. Mr. Renn sees this as a problem. For example, in California the combination of tax cuts and required spending passed by the voters has made it almost impossible for the state to pass a workable budget. One of the most amazing misuses of this system took place in Ohio:

The last and most incredible example is Ohio, where a group of developers wanted to open casinos. Led by Rock Ventures, the investment vehicle of Quicken Loans owner Dan Gilbert of Detroit, the group spent $47 million to draft, put on the ballot, and pass a constitutional amendment permitting casino gambling in Ohio. But this initiative did much, much more than that. It only permitted casinos on four specific properties — properties controlled by the referendum backers — and thus granted them exclusive rights to open casinos. It exempted their casinos from zoning or most other types of local control, authorized them to operate 24 hours a day, and specified a very low license fee of only $50 million per casino to the state. It also permitted them not only to run any game currently allowed by any surrounding state, but also any game those states might approve in the future. It’s undoubtedly one of the most incredible constitutional amendments in the history of the United States.

This strikes me as a terrible idea for the State of Ohio (but a very good one for the people who sponsored the referendum). I’m sure of us all feel that voters should have the final say in how we are governed, but there seems to be a problem with a too convenient system of initiative and referendum.

I know we should all be educated on everything we vote on, but I can’t quit my job to study the candidates and issues full time. I normally know what’s going on in the big races (President, Governor, Senator, Mayor and congressional candidates), but it’s hard to keep up with all the amendments to the Texas constitution, the races for judge (here in Texas we vote on all judges—sometimes as many as thirty races in Dallas County), all the local contests (County Clerk, Constable, City Auditor, etc.). Then we have multiple elections, Federal, State, City and School Board. That’s made more complicated by the fact that while I live in the City of Dallas, I also reside in the Richardson School District—and my kids (who went to private schools anyway) are long since grown. When am I going to find time to keep up with Richardson Schools?

By the way, there is also a Dallas County School Board, which is entirely separate from the Dallas Independent School District School Board. I lived here for a decade before I finally figured out that the job of the Dallas County School Board was mostly to run the school buses.

I read the local newspaper every day; follow the national news; check out a half dozen blogs and most of the local commentary on the web. It’s not that I’m not trying, but there are too many issues and too many candidates for me to follow them all.

In short, I agree with the Urbanophile that we’ve got to find a way to restrict initiative and referendum (and probably all votes) to the kinds of things that are important enough for most of the voters to spend their time learning about. At the same time, I think the voters ought to have the right to step in directly to set things right when necessary. I wish we had initiative and referendum in Texas.

There has to be some middle ground between no right for voters to directly speak on important issues and the opportunity for every rich person with a cause or a scheme to make voters decide whether it’s a good idea.

Maybe initiatives and referenda ought to be limited—perhaps to the three or five issues that have the highest number of signatures on their petition. Maybe there is a better idea out there. I do know that while I want my vote to count, I don’t want to vote on what I don’t understand.

John Greenan

Donations are always appreciated at CityWalk

Ann Yindrick

Oak Cliff

North Oak Cliff: “We’ll Take a Few Homeless People if Preston Hollow Does.”

Part II

Here is the link to the Google Map I put together: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab;=wl

I hope it works because this is the first time I’ve tried to make a Google Map.

Well, it sort of works. If you open the hyperlink, then click on My Maps, and then click on Dallas PSH, then you will get a map of the dozen existing or proposed projects that I am aware of. Out of the twelve projects, four are operating (blue placemarkers), five projects are still under some stage of development (red placemarkers) and three have been abandoned (yellow markers). I have been extremely generous in counting projects as still under development—if they haven’t been completely and irrevocably abandoned, then I’ve counted them.

I haven’t tried to locate projects smaller than 40 units on the map, even when I happen to know about them.

The locations are really pretty well spread around Dallas. One in Vickery Meadows, one in Lake Highlands, two in Oak Cliff, one in Expo Park, two downtown, one in East Dallas, one in the Cedars, one in the design district, and two in South Dallas. With the exception of three outliers, which we will discuss in a moment, every project is in or near to downtown.

That makes sense because permanent supportive housing usually works best in dense inner city areas. Most people coming out of homelessness have limited means and no automobile. People need to be in walkable areas if possible and conveniently located for mass transit. That usually means in or near downtown.

The three exceptions are all developments where a property was available at little or no cost. Two are properties already owned by the Dallas Housing Authority and the third is the Jules Muchert Army Reserve Base, which was supposed to be used for a homeless project under federal law (a long story, but it wasn’t).

But, sorry North Oak Cliff, nobody has proposed a project for Preston Hollow. The minute somebody donates five acres of land there to me, I’ll start work on it though.

John Greenan

North Oak Cliff

North Oak Cliff: “We’ll Take a Few Homeless People if Preston Hollow Does.”

Part I

Once again another proposal to create permanent, supportive housing has run into a buzz saw of opposition from the local neighbors. Check out the comments to Roy Appleton’s blog for the Dallas Morning News here: http://oakcliffblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/06/homeless-housing-plan-foes-tak.html#slcgm_comments_anchor. The proposed location for permanent supportive housing this time is Cliff Manor, a property owned by the Dallas Housing Authority.

(appearing here in a photo taken for Channel 11)

Along with all the usual arguments (it’ll hurt land values; what about crime?; the children!; we’ve already done our share; etc.), a new favorite argument seems to be appearing: ”We’ll allow permanent supportive housing, but only if everyone else does as well.” It seems that no matter where someone proposes to locate a permanent supportive housing project that the neighborhood feels they are getting more than their share of projects.

I became curious whether that might not be true, there are several groups working on permanent supportive housing projects and we don’t really coordinate. Everybody develops their project independently for the most part. So I began putting together a Google Map of all the existing, proposed and abandoned permanent supportive housing projects that I knew about.

I hope to have it ready for tomorrow’s blog, and if it looks useful to other people, then perhaps it could be maintained as a tool for all of us to use.

John Greenan

A Proposed New Holiday

A Proposed New Holiday

On March 28, 2010, Dan L. Duncan died at age 77. Mr. Duncan did many admirable things in his life. He was a self-made billionaire, raised a family, gave $100 million to Baylor to fund a cancer center in Houston and seems to have been well regarded in Houston where he lived and died.

So it is rather unfortunate that Mr. Duncan will probably be best remembered for an entirely accidental event—he was the first (and so far only) American Billionaire to die without incurring one single cent in estate taxes. We aren’t talking about someone who just scraped into the billionaire category. Mr. Duncan’s wealth was estimated at $9 billion by Forbes Magazine, making him the 74th wealthiest person in the world and the wealthiest in Houston.

That $9 billion dollars will pass intact to his heirs—four children and four grand children. This is a first in American history. When America’s first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, died in the 1930s, his estate was taxed at a 70% rate. Since then the estate tax has gone up and down, different thresholds to be subject to the tax have existed, but no billionaire has ever escaped it entirely, and unless another billionaire dies this year, no other billionaire may ever again escape the estate tax.

This rare occasion was caused by the Bush Administration’s gradual repeal of the estate tax. Philosophically opposed to what was characterized as the “death tax”, the estate tax was repealed in full in 2010 after a series of gradual deductions, but in one of those amazing Washington budget deals, the entire Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year. If Mr. Duncan has survived into 2011, then his estate would have been taxed at 55%, or $4.95 billion.

For the heirs of billionaires, this is a very good year to inherit. While there is no indication whatsoever that Mr. Duncan’s death was due to anything but natural causes, if I were a very rich person, especially one who didn’t get along very well with my relatives, then I would be careful as the end of the year approaches. There is an incredible financial incentive to die this year.

Finally, I think would only be appropriate to celebrate this unique event by some sort of holiday. Maybe Congress could make March 28 “No Death Tax Day” giving anybody who dies on that one day an exemption from Estate Taxes.

John Greenan

Words of Wisdom

All who call on God in true faith; earnestly from the heart, will certainly be heard, and will receive what they have asked and desired.

Nick Sowell

Living Below Your Means

Living Below Your Means
I read an article today entitled 5 billionaires who live below their means. The five wealthy people who were briefly profiled (see http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/SaveMoney/5-billionaires-living-below-their-means.aspx) included some of the people you might expect like Warren Buffet, along with some people that you probably haven’t heard of like Carlos Slim Helu who is the richest person in Mexico and possibly the richest person in the world.
The group shared some commonalities. They seem to have made their own money, rather than have inherited it. Many of them are old enough to remember tough economic times. Most strikingly to me, however, the common characteristic seemed to be that they lived modestly not because they were depriving themselves, but because they had all they wanted.
This attitude was exemplified by Warren Buffet:
“When asked why he doesn’t own a yacht, he responded, “Most toys are just a pain in the neck.”

These are serious people and their pursuits are serious (unlike the celebrities we see on television and the tabloids). Now that he’s reached his 80s, how is T. Boone Pickens having fun? He is trying to solve the energy crisis.

That’s an attitude I appreciate. The most satisfaction in life (outside of your family) is going to come from what you can achieve. Andrew Carnegie started as a factory worker, built U.S. Steel—and did own a yacht—but he spent much more money building over 2,500 libraries. You can’t do that if you are spending all your money on private jets and vacation.

Now I doubt any of you that are reading this are billionaires (and if you are, please send me a check!), but I think we can all learn a lesson and we should all think about the opportunities that living below our means could afford us. It would mean we could afford to help a relative who needed it; afford to take a lower paying but more satisfying job; afford to start a new business; take time off to travel, educate ourselves or volunteer.

If you spend all you can, buy all you can and borrow all that you can—like too many of us do—then you remove yourself from a world of possibilities. In many ways that means that no matter how much you have, you are poor.

John Greenan

Thoughts For The Day

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C.S. Lewis

To be satisfied with little, is the greatest wisdom; and he that increaseth his riches, inreaseth his cares; but a contended mind is a hidden treasure, and trouble findeth it not.
Akhenaton

Nick Sowell

The Weekend

I was shocked with hot hot it was this past weekend! We just jumped right into summer with temps around 103% this past weekend, which is why I made this last weekend an in-door movie watching weekend. Was able to catch up on a lot of good movies, if you would like to know, the new “Robin Hood” and “Iron Man 2″ movies are great action-packed films that really got my heart pumping. Also, I’ve been put in charge of posting all new blogs while Naquanna is out of the office for the week, a new and interesting job I have had to learn quickly as computers are not my friend.

Nick Sowell

Bill Maher on Global Warming

January 21, 2009
8:00 am	to	8:00 pm

Bill Maher on Global Warming

I’m usually pretty “meh” on Bill Maher. There is something about his “I’m smarter than you” style of satire that puts me off. But his recent essay on Global Warming hits one of my buttons:

That’s the problem with our obsession with always seeing two sides of every issue equally — especially when one side has a lot of money. It means we have to pretend there are always two truths, and the side that doesn’t know anything has something to say. On this side of the debate: Every scientist in the world. On the other: Mr. Potato Head.

You can read the rest of the essay here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-al-gore-must-com_b_601381.html.

I think one of the reasons that progress comes so slowly is that we (and by “we” I mean all of us in the human race) can’t seem to give up on old arguments. As Maher puts it, “For progress to happen, certain things have to become not an issue anymore, so we can go on to the next issue.”

It isn’t that we don’t progress at all. The Flat Earth Society still exists (http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/), but I don’t think they’re serious. In 1992, the Catholic Church finally apologized to Galileo for his conviction in 1633 of heresy for holding that the Earth orbited the Sun, rather than the converse. Interestingly enough, the work that got Galileo into trouble, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was actually approved for publication by the Inquisition. The book was supposed to present a balanced view of the arguments favoring a heliocentric and geocentric universe. Galileo got in trouble because his arguments for a heliocentric universe were so much stronger. See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair.

So the problem began almost at the very beginnings of modern science. The whole basis of science is that all theories are not equally valid and, in fact, while always keeping in mind the possibility that new facts might alter our view, once a theory becomes generally accepted by the scientific community, then it is a fact on which we can base our life.

We can reach India either by traveling east or by traveling west because the Earth is round, not flat. We can send astronauts into orbit because the Earth orbits the Sun, not vice versa. These are facts, not debating points.

It’s important to remember that what is true isn’t determined by who can best argue the point. If you don’t believe me, get into an argument with one of the professional debaters at the Flat Earth Society. You’ll likely come away either believing the Earth is flat or with a new appreciation of the difference between facts and arguments.

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