Paul Krugman is tired…

And can you blame him? See it a little bigger here.

Questions for the mayor of Marion

Wait a second ... isn’t NPR supposed to be the liberal alternative to all the hatespeak on the radio? At least a little bit liberal?

You wouldn’t know it from the astonishingly uncritical piece on Wayne Seybold, the mayor of Marion, Indiana (birthplace of James Dean and site of the last confirmed lynching of black people in the North). In a piece that appears online as “Progress And Promise For A Town Once In Crisis,” Noah Adams praises Seybold for the various steps he has taken to improve the local economy.

These include bringing Starbucks and Kohl’s into town, offering tax breaks and “land and buildings almost free” to corporations, privatizing garbage collection, and selling or giving away some of the city’s 22 parks.

Here are some of the questions Noah Adams didn’t ask.

1. Where do you think the money goes when people buy their coffee at a local coffeeshop? Where do you think it goes when they buy their coffee at Starbucks? What do you think more Starbucks stores will do to the owners of coffeeshops?

2. You are quoted as saying you think “brand names help bring factories.” What gives you that idea?

3. How many people lost their jobs when you privatized garbage collection? What happened to their families? Are you really saving enough money to compensate for the cost of increased unemployment and social services?

4. Why do you think “we don’t need 22 parks” and that it’s better to have only “five big parks ... that people drive to.” Does everybody have a car in Marion? Should you have to get in a car when it’s time to walk the dog, or to take your child to a playground? Can children drive to the park?

The parks, it turns out, are one topic that NPR listeners are all over. One of them quotes the mayor as saying, “Years ago you had to have a different park in every neighborhood because people walked. But it’s a different world today”—then mentions the mayor’s gain of 35 pounds since his days as a figure skater.

Andrew Tobias on the national debt

Paul Krugman has been beating this drum again and again and again ... but sometimes you need a fresh perspective on the same point of view.

Andrew Tobias provides this in his latest column. Here’s an excerpt.

I don’t usually use farm analogies, but here’s one.  Let’s say the previous farmer left his equipment out in the rain and snow for decades so it froze, cracked, and rusted . . . even as he borrowed like mad to finance an unnecessary range war and lavish gifts to his richest friends, all the while neglecting the need for crop rotation.  Over the years, he ran up big losses and an enormous debt.  Okay?  Now you’ve just been handed the deed to the farm.  The underlying assets are outstanding – fertile soil and a talented local labor force.  So what do you do?  To right things, do you (a) fire the one mechanic who can actually keep one of the tractors running; stop buying feed for the chickens (you raise chickens); and eschew the additional debt you’d have to take on to buy seeds and plant the summer crop?  Or do you (b) stop giving your richest friends lavish gifts, make peace with the cowmen, and borrow enough to plant the crop and get the farm running efficiently?

Shortchanged on wages and Social Security

The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer.

There are many ways to parse what’s going on, and previous posts have touched on unemployment (more than once), financial deregulation (more than once), misperceptions about who has the money, credit card abuses, and a misunderstanding of risk.

The idea that Social Security is not going to be there for the next generation of retirees is gradually hardening into conventional wisdom and a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the implication that the desire to keep it is a symptom of greed and self-indulgence on the part of baby boomers. Get Radical: Raise Social Security, an op-ed in the New York Times by labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, offers a different take.

Retirees today are shortchanged on Social Security because they have been shortchanged on wages for their entire working lives. The labor economist Richard B. Freeman points out that the hourly earnings of workers dropped by 8 percent from 1973 to 2005 while productivity shot up 55 percent or more. The United States is one of the few developed countries where workers are routinely cheated of a share in higher productivity.

And where has the money from the extra productivity gone? It’s gone right to the top, to the top few percent. If wages had been paid fairly based on productivity, there would have been enough money subject to the payroll tax to avoid even a modest shortfall.

Jane Jacobs’ building

Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities is known, among other things, for its description of the street ballet she observed from her home on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. In a few pages, she describes the comings and goings of various people on various errands, and illustrates the diversity you find in a healthy local community.

While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of morning: Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English his mother cannot speak.

Later on she makes a similar point about the diverse enterprises that can thrive in older and cheaper buildings, but could never afford the cost of doing business in new ones.

The floor of the building in which this book is being written is occupied also by a health club with a gym, a firm of ecclesiastical decorators, an insurgent Democratic party reform club, a Liberal party political club, a music society, an accordionists’ association, a retired importer who sells maté by mail, a man who sells paper and who also takes care of shipping the maté, a dental laboratory, a studio for watercolor lessons, and a maker of costumer jewelry. Among the tenants who were here and gone shortly before I came in, were a man who rented out tuxedos, a union local and a Haitian dance troupe. There is no place for the likes of us in new construction. And the last thing we need is new construction. What we need, and a lot of others need, is old construction in a lively district, which some among us can help make livelier.

The building above, by the way, is in Greenwich Village but is not (unless by chance) the one she wrote about. The picture is borrowed from Discount Hotel Deals.