Where Will PWP Get Energy for Plug-In Cars?
Utilities, Plug-In Cars: Near Collision?
Electric Firms Say Daytime Charges May Raise Costs
By REBECCA SMITH1
Car makers are preparing to introduce plug-in electric cars in 2010, but their success will depend on players beyond their control: the electric utilities.
The plug-ins are a new generation of hybrid cars that can run 10 to 40 miles on electric batteries before they have to tap their gasoline engines. This gives them, on a tank of gas, a driving range of as much as 600 miles without recharges to potentially thousands of miles with recharges.
![[Photo]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-AP406A_PLUGI_20080501214649.jpg)
The Edison SmartConnect meter, above, knows when an electric car's battery is charged. Utilities would prefer charging at night.
To recharge the battery, drivers will plug it into a standard electric wall outlet at a cost of a dollar or two. As a result, the car companies are betting that the plug-ins will succeed where previous electric cars have failed, lifting their industry from the doldrums and slashing oil consumption.
But the cars will need ready access to inexpensive, plentiful electricity. That means the new vehicles "will make utilities more important than the oil companies" to many drivers, says General Motors Corp. spokesman Robert Peterson. If utilities discourage the cars' proliferation by charging more for their electricity, the push toward plug-in cars could falter.
So far, most utilities view the cars with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. If drivers charge their batteries at night, when demand is low and the utilities have generating capacity to spare, utilities will increase their electricity sales and make more efficient use of their existing power plants. But if most drivers recharge their cars during the day, when demand is twice as high, utilities could have to make or buy extra electricity when it is most costly. They could even be forced to build new power plants.
A study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory agreed that the number of plug-in vehicles in use and when they recharge could profoundly influence power-generating costs. Under some scenarios, electricity costs would drop, but under others, they could more than double.
![[Plug-in car]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-AP407_PLUGIN_20080501214643.jpg)
Worries about capacity aren't the only source of anxiety and friction. Congress is considering greenhouse-gas legislation that would effectively tax carbon-dioxide emissions. Utilities worry that their power-plant emissions could rise if they have to produce a lot more electricity to power plug-in cars. They argue that if they help cut oil use by furnishing electricity to cars, they should get credit for it. Currently, though, there is no mechanism in the major bills to reward the utilities.
Nonetheless, in some states, utilities have already begun investing in technology that will leverage the benefits of plug-in vehicles: "smart" utility meters that will allow both utilities and customers to track power use by purpose and time of day. The meters will permit utilities to move toward variable rates for electricity, charging more during peak demand in the daytime, and less at night. The plan is to steer plug-in owners toward charging their cars at night. Done right, the meters could be important enabling technology, as important to the plug-in vehicle as the elevator was to the skyscraper or the shopping cart to the supermarket.
"The plug-in hybrid has a tremendous future," says Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission. "Off-peak rates are a key component."
Hoping to influence consumer behavior, some utilities are already creating special rates for plug-in cars. Sempra Energy's San Diego Gas & Electric Co., for example, has created a nighttime rate for plug-in cars that is half that of its daytime rate.
Edison International, the parent of Southern California Edison, believes the next couple of years will be pivotal. "We're on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough that could reshape both industries," says Chairman John Bryson. "But it has to be done right."
So far, California is shaping up as the market that is best prepared for plug-in vehicles. With 17 million light vehicles in use today, it is both the biggest U.S. auto market and the biggest gasoline market. It has also adopted aggressive targets for carbon-dioxide reduction, and it is spending more money than any other state on advanced utility meters.
The state's three big investor-owned utilities -- PG&E Corp's Pacific Gas & Electric Co., San Diego G&E and Southern California Edison -- are installing $5 billion worth of advanced utility meters, and they expect to have blanketed the state by 2012. One meter vendor, Cellnet + Hunt, estimates 30 million smart meters will be installed in U.S. homes in the next three or four years, about one-quarter of the potential market.
In Michigan, state officials are encouraging utilities and car makers to coordinate their efforts as they roll out new technologies. Detroit's utility, a unit of DTE Energy Co., plans to start testing smart meters soon, and it is considering equipping all customers with the meters by 2013.
![[Views of the Chevrolet Volt plug-in concept car from General Motors.]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-AP408_PLUGIN_20080501214644.jpg)
Views of the Chevrolet Volt plug-in concept car from General Motors.
Later this year, Southern California Edison will see how smart meters work in conjunction with actual plug-in cars. The utility is partnering with Ford Motor Co. to get prototypes of the Ford Escape plug-in in field tests in Southern California. The cars will be paired with drivers who have access to smart utility meters.
"We want to know how the whole story works, how things fit together," says Mike Tamor, executive technical leader for Ford's plug-in vehicle team in Detroit. "We want to know how much fuel is saved and how people feel about plugging into the grid."
The plug-in car's potential to slash fuel use is dramatic. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that existing U.S. power plants could meet the electricity needs of 73% of the nation's light vehicles if the vehicles were replaced by plug-ins that recharged at night. Such a huge shift could cut oil consumption by 6.2 million barrels a day, eliminating 52% of current imports.
Another study, by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that electricity consumption would rise only about 8% if 60% of light vehicles in the U.S. were replaced by plug-in vehicles by 2050. That would also cut U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions by 450 million metric tons annually, equivalent to scrapping 82 million cars.
Carbon-dioxide emissions would probably fall even if coal-fired plants made the electricity, some studies have found, because they burn coal more efficiently than automobiles burn gasoline. What we're learning, says Ed Kjaer, director of electric transportation at Southern California Edison, is that "the grid is a mighty powerful tool."
Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevy Volt, the plug-in car that General Motors Corp. is developing, says great changes are needed. Globally, there are 800 million vehicles in use today and the number is expected to grow by 300 million vehicles to 1.1 billion by 2020. "They can't all be petroleum-based," he says. "We believe in electricity. It's everywhere, and you can make it from a variety of fuels."
Obama as a New Version of the Invisible Man
The Illusion that is Barack Obama
Fred Siegel
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists.
He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. (They had been married for years already.)
All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes it different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.
Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.
The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotiv of his political career. In New York, politicians (Al Sharpton excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government.
But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.
Blacks adapted to the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with then mayor Richard Daley Sr - impervious to the universalism of the civil rights movement in its glory - offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted.
In Chicago, racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city's political class admirably.
For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit's (the mob's) jewellery-heist ring. And we've had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley ... That's the Chicago way."
At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.
Why, you may ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey.
When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson - a man, as with Obama, more famous for speeches than for accomplishments - his party's gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he needed to "perfume the ticket".
Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones's district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: "Some call it pork; I call it steak."
Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back clean Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the Outfit. The gubernatorial candidate he backed, Rod Blagojevich, is under federal investigation, in part because of his relationship with Tony Rezko, the man who helped Obama buy his house.
The Chicago way has delivered politically for Obama even this year. Ninety per cent of his popular-vote lead over Hillary Clinton comes from Illinois, and two-thirds of that 90 per cent comes just from Cook County.
Some of this advantage came from the efforts of Obama's political ally, the flame-throwing reverend James Meeks, a political force in his own right. Meeks, who mocks black moderates as "niggers", is an Illinois state senator, the pastor of a mega-church and a strong supporter of Jackson's powerful political operation, which has put its vote-pulling muscle squarely behind the Obama campaign. It was only with Obama's remark about bitter, white, working-class, small-town voters that we saw his difficulties appealing beyond the machine's reach. He won his US Senate race in 2004 not only because his opponents self-destructed but also because of the machine's ability to deliver votes.
In Pennsylvania, he has lacked such assistance and the campaigning has not gone nearly so well. First, Obama pretended to be a tenpin bowler and scored a 37. Then, appearing before a supposedly closed San Francisco audience, he complained that small-town Pennsylvanians "cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations". This is the man who belongs to a church built on bitterness, rancour and conspiratorial fear. During the Wright affair, Obama not only repeatedly lied about what he knew and when but violated the spirit of the civil rights movement in its mid-1960s glory.
When, as a young man, I was on the periphery of the movement, there was an unwritten rule that if people told racist jokes or speakers engaged in defamatory rhetoric, you needed to register your immediate disapproval by confronting the speaker or ostentatiously walking out.
Wright's "black theology" is essentially a Christianised version of Malcolm X's ideology of hate.
But for 20 years, Obama, who had planned to run for mayor of Chicago, kept silent about the close, if at times competitive, relationship between Wright, whose 8000-member mega-church gave him his political base, and Farrakhan. His ambition overrode his moral integrity.
As part of his "black value system", Wright attacked whites for their "middle classism", materialism, and "greed in a world of need". Obama sounded similar notes in his recent address at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, in which he laid the blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis on those who had "embraced an ethic of greed, corner cutting and inside dealing".
But that's exactly what Obama did in buying his luxurious house. Given the choice of purchasing a less expensive home or getting into bed with his fundraiser-cum-slumlord-cum-fixer Rezko, Obama chose the latter. Then again, the oppressed of Trinity United Church of Christ are building Wright a $US1.6 million ($1.7million), 960sqm home complete with four-car garage, whirlpool and butler's pantry. This house, which backs on to a golf course, is to sit in Tinley Park, a gated community in southwest Chicago that is 93 per cent white.
The Obamas' charitable giving is consistent with Wright's talking Left while living Right. Obama and his wife are quite well off. They had an estimated income of $US1.2 million from 2000 to 2004. But the man who preaches compassion and mutuality gave all of 1 per cent of that income to charity during those years. Most of that went to Wright's church.
There is a similar chasm when it comes to Obama's claim to post-partisanship. His achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are largely proleptic. But words are not deeds and, although Obama has few concrete achievements to his name, his voting record hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left v Right.
In the Illinois Senate, he made a specialty of voting present, but after his first two years in the US Senate, National Journal's analysis of rollcall votes found that he was more liberal than 86 per cent of his colleagues. His voting record has only moved further Left since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gives him a 97.5 per cent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Clinton, who occasionally votes with the Republicans, ranks 16th.
Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party's majority leader, Harry Reid.
Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics. The day after his surprise loss in New Hampshire, and in anticipation of the South Carolina primary, with its heavily black electorate, South Side congressman Jesse Jackson Jr - Obama's national co-chairman - appeared on MSNBC to argue, in a prepared statement, that Clinton's teary moment on the campaign trail reflected her deep-seated racism.
"Those tears," said Jackson, "have to be analysed ... They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina, where 45 per cent of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest ... We saw tears in response to her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not hurricane Katrina, not other issues."
In other words, whites who are at odds with, or who haven't delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.
Liberals love Obama's talk of taking on powerful financial interests. But here , too, he is rather slippery. In his Cooper Union speech, he denounced in no uncertain terms the "special interests" of people on Wall Street (who are well represented among his campaign donors).
He, of course, had an opportunity to push for repealing the privileged tax treatment of private equity firms when that question was before Charles Grassley's Senate subcommittee - but he simply made a pro-forma statement in favour of doing so and disappeared.
Nationally, as in Chicago, Obama the self-styled reformer never crosses swords with any of his putative foes. To pick another example, he has attacked "predatory" sub-prime lenders while taking roughly $US1.3 million in contributions from companies in that line of business.
Obama is the internationalist opposed to free trade. He is the friend of race-baiters who thinks Don Imus deserved to be fired. He is the proponent of courage in the face of powerful interests who lacked the courage to break with Wright (until Wednesday). He is the man who would lead our efforts against terrorism yet was friendly with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant 1960s terrorist. He is the post-racialist supporter of affirmative action. He is the enemy of Big Oil who takes money from executives at Exxon-Mobil, Shell and British Petroleum.
Obama has, in a sense, represented a new version of the invisible man, a candidate whose colour obscures his failings.
But so far, the wild discrepancy between Obama's words and his deeds, and between his enormous ambitions and his minimal accomplishments, doesn't seem to have fazed his core supporters, who apparently suffer from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Like cultists who rededicate themselves when the cult's prophecies have been falsified, his fans redouble their delusions in the face of his obvious hypocrisy.
That is because Obama, in the imagination of many of his fans in the public and the press, is both a deduction from what was - the failures of the Bush administration and the scandals of the Clintons - and an expression of what should be.
The ideal, the aspiration, is so rhetorically appealing that it has been assumed to be true. They remind one of Woodrow Wilson's answer when asked if his plan for a League of Nations was practicable: "If it won't work, it must be made to work."
Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal. He teaches at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
The Politically Correct Reason Not to Vote for Obama
Especially if you live in Pasadena
Shhhhh! He's a smoker
Read here: http://www.slate.com/id/2157523/
Pasadena Weekly Debunked on Rent Control (Duh, Pasadena doesn't have rent control)
FoothillCitiesBlog
By Centinel | May 8, 2008
Joe Piasecki tugs at the heartstrings at the beginning of his piece about Prop. 98 and I had to count to ten to avoid banging my head against the wall:
Not far from the 61 new luxury condominiums built recently behind the historic Friend Paper Co. building in Old Pasadena, a tiny homeless woman sleeps inside a tattered, empty suitcase.
All that sticks out is an arm, a shoulder and her head, which she covers with a blue floral cloth ? whether out of shame or fear of being identified she wouldn't say, ignoring questions.
Next to her is a dirt mound where Ambassador College's former east campus was demolished to make way for even more high-end housing. The Westgate Pasadena Project will give rise to an impressive mix of 820 condos, townhomes and apartments, but not all of these will be out of reach to people who might otherwise end up like the woman living in a suitcase.
In order to comply with Pasadena's inclusionary zoning ordinance, developer Sares-Regis is setting aside 85 apartments as affordable housing for low-income residents and paying additional city fees toward generating even more subsidized homes. The Friend Paper Co. project chose to pay more than $1.2 million into the city's affordable housing creation trust fund in lieu of selling nine condos below market rate, according to Kermit Mahan, who works in the city's housing division.
But whether any of that housing reaches local people who need it, say affordable housing activists, depends on the results of the June 3 state primary election.
Proposition 98 aims to restrict government's ability to use eminent domain to seize property, but would also make all forms of rent control ? including the city's inclusionary zoning ordinance ? illegal in California and threaten other renter protections, they warn.
The contrast of a luxury development being built beside a homeless woman's camp is a striking one. In fact, I saw that selfsame woman when I was driving past the area yesterday and remarked to my wife on the lady's lamentable condition. However, I did not respond to her plight by thinking, "Without rent control, she would be homeless." Why? Because we have rent control, and she's still homeless.
More importantly, Piasecki is dodging the real issue in this article: does rent control work? I don't mean that as some evil capitalist; I mean that as advocate of the poor, as someone who has spent a lot of hours in soup kitchens, and as someone who, in my younger days, definitely worried about the cost of an apartment in Pasadena (though things weren't as expensive as they are now). I mean: is rent control the best way to help poorer people have a place to live?
It's not a theoretical question. We should be able to quantify how much money the city charges in fees to subsidize "affordable housing," how many "affordable housing units" are made available, and what the average income is of the folks living in those units. Then, we should compare that to the effects that rent control has on the rest of the market: how much more do non-rent controlled apartments cost as a result of rent control? We should be able to compare those numbers side by side and say either, "Wow, rent control is amazing and really helps poor people" or "Hmm, rent control actually helps a really small number of people, and raises prices for everyone else."
An economist would tell you, in a heartbeat, that the latter is true. Price controls have long been debunked by theorists of all persuasions. As Wikipedia, source of all knowledge of everything tells us:
Most economists believe that a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing available.[5] This view is based on analysis of empirical evidence as well as the understanding generated by theoretical models.[6] Even such liberal economists as Paul Krugman have cited rent regulation as a case of "economic stupidity" which despite its good intentions leads to the creation of less housing, raises prices, and increases urban blight.[7]
To reiterate: I have no reason to dislike rent control other than the fact that I like the idea of people being able to get housing at the most affordable price they can. If rent control is hurting folks on the margin, as I suspect it is, then we need to come up with other solutions to the problems that it purports to solve (i.e. rapacious slumlords, etc.). The fact is, we need to grapple with the facts of rent control, not the good intentions that are behind it. Good intentions do no equal a good idea. And Piasecki is failing as a journalist by limiting the story to rhetorical extremism that ideologues use rather than a discussion of the merits of a piece of public policy.
Go here to read comments at Foothill Cities Blog:
http://thefcblog.com/2008/05/08/the-affordable-housing-bunny-hops-into-pasadena/
Also see:
The Mayor and the Small Landowner: A Parable of Inclusionary Housing
http://www.theonerepublic.com/archives/Columns/Lusvardi/20060320LusvardiMayor.html
Inclusionary Housing is a Pea Shell Game
http://www.theonerepublic.com/archives/Columns/Lusvardi/20050706LusvardiPea.html
Inclusionary Housing is Sociological Suicide
http://www.theonerepublic.com/archives/Columns/Lusvardi/20070815LusvardiSuicide.html
Why Pasadena Is Lucky It Failed with Municipal Wi-Fi
The City of Pasadena's failed attempt at outsourcing the development of a Wi-Fi network to Earthlink may have been fortuitous. A new technology, already deployed overseas, called WiMax to be developed by Spring-Nextel and the Clearwire Corporation will have the Internet download speeds of a cable connection but the reach of a cell phone network.
Where Will PWP Get Energy for Plug-In Cars?
Utilities, Plug-In Cars: Near Collision?
Electric Firms Say Daytime Charges May Raise Costs
By REBECCA SMITH1
Car makers are preparing to introduce plug-in electric cars in 2010, but their success will depend on players beyond their control: the electric utilities.
The plug-ins are a new generation of hybrid cars that can run 10 to 40 miles on electric batteries before they have to tap their gasoline engines. This gives them, on a tank of gas, a driving range of as much as 600 miles without recharges to potentially thousands of miles with recharges.
The Edison SmartConnect meter, above, knows when an electric car's battery is charged. Utilities would prefer charging at night.
To recharge the battery, drivers will plug it into a standard electric wall outlet at a cost of a dollar or two. As a result, the car companies are betting that the plug-ins will succeed where previous electric cars have failed, lifting their industry from the doldrums and slashing oil consumption.
But the cars will need ready access to inexpensive, plentiful electricity. That means the new vehicles "will make utilities more important than the oil companies" to many drivers, says General Motors Corp. spokesman Robert Peterson. If utilities discourage the cars' proliferation by charging more for their electricity, the push toward plug-in cars could falter.
So far, most utilities view the cars with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. If drivers charge their batteries at night, when demand is low and the utilities have generating capacity to spare, utilities will increase their electricity sales and make more efficient use of their existing power plants. But if most drivers recharge their cars during the day, when demand is twice as high, utilities could have to make or buy extra electricity when it is most costly. They could even be forced to build new power plants.
A study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory agreed that the number of plug-in vehicles in use and when they recharge could profoundly influence power-generating costs. Under some scenarios, electricity costs would drop, but under others, they could more than double.
Worries about capacity aren't the only source of anxiety and friction. Congress is considering greenhouse-gas legislation that would effectively tax carbon-dioxide emissions. Utilities worry that their power-plant emissions could rise if they have to produce a lot more electricity to power plug-in cars. They argue that if they help cut oil use by furnishing electricity to cars, they should get credit for it. Currently, though, there is no mechanism in the major bills to reward the utilities.
Nonetheless, in some states, utilities have already begun investing in technology that will leverage the benefits of plug-in vehicles: "smart" utility meters that will allow both utilities and customers to track power use by purpose and time of day. The meters will permit utilities to move toward variable rates for electricity, charging more during peak demand in the daytime, and less at night. The plan is to steer plug-in owners toward charging their cars at night. Done right, the meters could be important enabling technology, as important to the plug-in vehicle as the elevator was to the skyscraper or the shopping cart to the supermarket.
"The plug-in hybrid has a tremendous future," says Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission. "Off-peak rates are a key component."
Hoping to influence consumer behavior, some utilities are already creating special rates for plug-in cars. Sempra Energy's San Diego Gas & Electric Co., for example, has created a nighttime rate for plug-in cars that is half that of its daytime rate.
Edison International, the parent of Southern California Edison, believes the next couple of years will be pivotal. "We're on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough that could reshape both industries," says Chairman John Bryson. "But it has to be done right."
So far, California is shaping up as the market that is best prepared for plug-in vehicles. With 17 million light vehicles in use today, it is both the biggest U.S. auto market and the biggest gasoline market. It has also adopted aggressive targets for carbon-dioxide reduction, and it is spending more money than any other state on advanced utility meters.
The state's three big investor-owned utilities -- PG&E Corp's Pacific Gas & Electric Co., San Diego G&E and Southern California Edison -- are installing $5 billion worth of advanced utility meters, and they expect to have blanketed the state by 2012. One meter vendor, Cellnet + Hunt, estimates 30 million smart meters will be installed in U.S. homes in the next three or four years, about one-quarter of the potential market.
In Michigan, state officials are encouraging utilities and car makers to coordinate their efforts as they roll out new technologies. Detroit's utility, a unit of DTE Energy Co., plans to start testing smart meters soon, and it is considering equipping all customers with the meters by 2013.
Views of the Chevrolet Volt plug-in concept car from General Motors.
Later this year, Southern California Edison will see how smart meters work in conjunction with actual plug-in cars. The utility is partnering with Ford Motor Co. to get prototypes of the Ford Escape plug-in in field tests in Southern California. The cars will be paired with drivers who have access to smart utility meters.
"We want to know how the whole story works, how things fit together," says Mike Tamor, executive technical leader for Ford's plug-in vehicle team in Detroit. "We want to know how much fuel is saved and how people feel about plugging into the grid."
The plug-in car's potential to slash fuel use is dramatic. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that existing U.S. power plants could meet the electricity needs of 73% of the nation's light vehicles if the vehicles were replaced by plug-ins that recharged at night. Such a huge shift could cut oil consumption by 6.2 million barrels a day, eliminating 52% of current imports.
Another study, by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that electricity consumption would rise only about 8% if 60% of light vehicles in the U.S. were replaced by plug-in vehicles by 2050. That would also cut U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions by 450 million metric tons annually, equivalent to scrapping 82 million cars.
Carbon-dioxide emissions would probably fall even if coal-fired plants made the electricity, some studies have found, because they burn coal more efficiently than automobiles burn gasoline. What we're learning, says Ed Kjaer, director of electric transportation at Southern California Edison, is that "the grid is a mighty powerful tool."
Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevy Volt, the plug-in car that General Motors Corp. is developing, says great changes are needed. Globally, there are 800 million vehicles in use today and the number is expected to grow by 300 million vehicles to 1.1 billion by 2020. "They can't all be petroleum-based," he says. "We believe in electricity. It's everywhere, and you can make it from a variety of fuels."
Obama as a New Version of the Invisible Man
The Illusion that is Barack Obama
Fred Siegel
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists.
He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. (They had been married for years already.)
All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes it different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.
Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.
The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotiv of his political career. In New York, politicians (Al Sharpton excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government.
But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.
Blacks adapted to the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with then mayor Richard Daley Sr - impervious to the universalism of the civil rights movement in its glory - offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted.
In Chicago, racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city's political class admirably.
For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit's (the mob's) jewellery-heist ring. And we've had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley ... That's the Chicago way."
At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.
Why, you may ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey.
When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson - a man, as with Obama, more famous for speeches than for accomplishments - his party's gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he needed to "perfume the ticket".
Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones's district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: "Some call it pork; I call it steak."
Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back clean Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the Outfit. The gubernatorial candidate he backed, Rod Blagojevich, is under federal investigation, in part because of his relationship with Tony Rezko, the man who helped Obama buy his house.
The Chicago way has delivered politically for Obama even this year. Ninety per cent of his popular-vote lead over Hillary Clinton comes from Illinois, and two-thirds of that 90 per cent comes just from Cook County.
Some of this advantage came from the efforts of Obama's political ally, the flame-throwing reverend James Meeks, a political force in his own right. Meeks, who mocks black moderates as "niggers", is an Illinois state senator, the pastor of a mega-church and a strong supporter of Jackson's powerful political operation, which has put its vote-pulling muscle squarely behind the Obama campaign. It was only with Obama's remark about bitter, white, working-class, small-town voters that we saw his difficulties appealing beyond the machine's reach. He won his US Senate race in 2004 not only because his opponents self-destructed but also because of the machine's ability to deliver votes.
In Pennsylvania, he has lacked such assistance and the campaigning has not gone nearly so well. First, Obama pretended to be a tenpin bowler and scored a 37. Then, appearing before a supposedly closed San Francisco audience, he complained that small-town Pennsylvanians "cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations". This is the man who belongs to a church built on bitterness, rancour and conspiratorial fear. During the Wright affair, Obama not only repeatedly lied about what he knew and when but violated the spirit of the civil rights movement in its mid-1960s glory.
When, as a young man, I was on the periphery of the movement, there was an unwritten rule that if people told racist jokes or speakers engaged in defamatory rhetoric, you needed to register your immediate disapproval by confronting the speaker or ostentatiously walking out.
Wright's "black theology" is essentially a Christianised version of Malcolm X's ideology of hate.
But for 20 years, Obama, who had planned to run for mayor of Chicago, kept silent about the close, if at times competitive, relationship between Wright, whose 8000-member mega-church gave him his political base, and Farrakhan. His ambition overrode his moral integrity.
As part of his "black value system", Wright attacked whites for their "middle classism", materialism, and "greed in a world of need". Obama sounded similar notes in his recent address at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, in which he laid the blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis on those who had "embraced an ethic of greed, corner cutting and inside dealing".
But that's exactly what Obama did in buying his luxurious house. Given the choice of purchasing a less expensive home or getting into bed with his fundraiser-cum-slumlord-cum-fixer Rezko, Obama chose the latter. Then again, the oppressed of Trinity United Church of Christ are building Wright a $US1.6 million ($1.7million), 960sqm home complete with four-car garage, whirlpool and butler's pantry. This house, which backs on to a golf course, is to sit in Tinley Park, a gated community in southwest Chicago that is 93 per cent white.
The Obamas' charitable giving is consistent with Wright's talking Left while living Right. Obama and his wife are quite well off. They had an estimated income of $US1.2 million from 2000 to 2004. But the man who preaches compassion and mutuality gave all of 1 per cent of that income to charity during those years. Most of that went to Wright's church.
There is a similar chasm when it comes to Obama's claim to post-partisanship. His achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are largely proleptic. But words are not deeds and, although Obama has few concrete achievements to his name, his voting record hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left v Right.
In the Illinois Senate, he made a specialty of voting present, but after his first two years in the US Senate, National Journal's analysis of rollcall votes found that he was more liberal than 86 per cent of his colleagues. His voting record has only moved further Left since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gives him a 97.5 per cent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Clinton, who occasionally votes with the Republicans, ranks 16th.
Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party's majority leader, Harry Reid.
Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics. The day after his surprise loss in New Hampshire, and in anticipation of the South Carolina primary, with its heavily black electorate, South Side congressman Jesse Jackson Jr - Obama's national co-chairman - appeared on MSNBC to argue, in a prepared statement, that Clinton's teary moment on the campaign trail reflected her deep-seated racism.
"Those tears," said Jackson, "have to be analysed ... They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina, where 45 per cent of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest ... We saw tears in response to her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not hurricane Katrina, not other issues."
In other words, whites who are at odds with, or who haven't delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.
Liberals love Obama's talk of taking on powerful financial interests. But here , too, he is rather slippery. In his Cooper Union speech, he denounced in no uncertain terms the "special interests" of people on Wall Street (who are well represented among his campaign donors).
He, of course, had an opportunity to push for repealing the privileged tax treatment of private equity firms when that question was before Charles Grassley's Senate subcommittee - but he simply made a pro-forma statement in favour of doing so and disappeared.
Nationally, as in Chicago, Obama the self-styled reformer never crosses swords with any of his putative foes. To pick another example, he has attacked "predatory" sub-prime lenders while taking roughly $US1.3 million in contributions from companies in that line of business.
Obama is the internationalist opposed to free trade. He is the friend of race-baiters who thinks Don Imus deserved to be fired. He is the proponent of courage in the face of powerful interests who lacked the courage to break with Wright (until Wednesday). He is the man who would lead our efforts against terrorism yet was friendly with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant 1960s terrorist. He is the post-racialist supporter of affirmative action. He is the enemy of Big Oil who takes money from executives at Exxon-Mobil, Shell and British Petroleum.
Obama has, in a sense, represented a new version of the invisible man, a candidate whose colour obscures his failings.
But so far, the wild discrepancy between Obama's words and his deeds, and between his enormous ambitions and his minimal accomplishments, doesn't seem to have fazed his core supporters, who apparently suffer from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Like cultists who rededicate themselves when the cult's prophecies have been falsified, his fans redouble their delusions in the face of his obvious hypocrisy.
That is because Obama, in the imagination of many of his fans in the public and the press, is both a deduction from what was - the failures of the Bush administration and the scandals of the Clintons - and an expression of what should be.
The ideal, the aspiration, is so rhetorically appealing that it has been assumed to be true. They remind one of Woodrow Wilson's answer when asked if his plan for a League of Nations was practicable: "If it won't work, it must be made to work."
Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal. He teaches at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
The Politically Correct Reason Not to Vote for Obama
Especially if you live in Pasadena
Shhhhh! He's a smoker
Read here: http://www.slate.com/id/2157523/
Pasadena Weekly Debunked on Rent Control (Duh, Pasadena doesn't have rent control)
FoothillCitiesBlogUtilities, Plug-In Cars: Near Collision?
Electric Firms Say Daytime Charges May Raise Costs
By REBECCA SMITH1
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists.
He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. (They had been married for years already.)
All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes it different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.
Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.
The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotiv of his political career. In New York, politicians (Al Sharpton excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government.
But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.
Blacks adapted to the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with then mayor Richard Daley Sr - impervious to the universalism of the civil rights movement in its glory - offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted.
In Chicago, racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city's political class admirably.
For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit's (the mob's) jewellery-heist ring. And we've had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley ... That's the Chicago way."
At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.
Why, you may ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey.
When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson - a man, as with Obama, more famous for speeches than for accomplishments - his party's gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he needed to "perfume the ticket".
Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones's district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: "Some call it pork; I call it steak."
Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back clean Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the Outfit. The gubernatorial candidate he backed, Rod Blagojevich, is under federal investigation, in part because of his relationship with Tony Rezko, the man who helped Obama buy his house.
The Chicago way has delivered politically for Obama even this year. Ninety per cent of his popular-vote lead over Hillary Clinton comes from Illinois, and two-thirds of that 90 per cent comes just from Cook County.
Some of this advantage came from the efforts of Obama's political ally, the flame-throwing reverend James Meeks, a political force in his own right. Meeks, who mocks black moderates as "niggers", is an Illinois state senator, the pastor of a mega-church and a strong supporter of Jackson's powerful political operation, which has put its vote-pulling muscle squarely behind the Obama campaign. It was only with Obama's remark about bitter, white, working-class, small-town voters that we saw his difficulties appealing beyond the machine's reach. He won his US Senate race in 2004 not only because his opponents self-destructed but also because of the machine's ability to deliver votes.
In Pennsylvania, he has lacked such assistance and the campaigning has not gone nearly so well. First, Obama pretended to be a tenpin bowler and scored a 37. Then, appearing before a supposedly closed San Francisco audience, he complained that small-town Pennsylvanians "cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations". This is the man who belongs to a church built on bitterness, rancour and conspiratorial fear. During the Wright affair, Obama not only repeatedly lied about what he knew and when but violated the spirit of the civil rights movement in its mid-1960s glory.
When, as a young man, I was on the periphery of the movement, there was an unwritten rule that if people told racist jokes or speakers engaged in defamatory rhetoric, you needed to register your immediate disapproval by confronting the speaker or ostentatiously walking out.
Wright's "black theology" is essentially a Christianised version of Malcolm X's ideology of hate.
But for 20 years, Obama, who had planned to run for mayor of Chicago, kept silent about the close, if at times competitive, relationship between Wright, whose 8000-member mega-church gave him his political base, and Farrakhan. His ambition overrode his moral integrity.
As part of his "black value system", Wright attacked whites for their "middle classism", materialism, and "greed in a world of need". Obama sounded similar notes in his recent address at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, in which he laid the blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis on those who had "embraced an ethic of greed, corner cutting and inside dealing".
But that's exactly what Obama did in buying his luxurious house. Given the choice of purchasing a less expensive home or getting into bed with his fundraiser-cum-slumlord-cum-fixer Rezko, Obama chose the latter. Then again, the oppressed of Trinity United Church of Christ are building Wright a $US1.6 million ($1.7million), 960sqm home complete with four-car garage, whirlpool and butler's pantry. This house, which backs on to a golf course, is to sit in Tinley Park, a gated community in southwest Chicago that is 93 per cent white.
The Obamas' charitable giving is consistent with Wright's talking Left while living Right. Obama and his wife are quite well off. They had an estimated income of $US1.2 million from 2000 to 2004. But the man who preaches compassion and mutuality gave all of 1 per cent of that income to charity during those years. Most of that went to Wright's church.
There is a similar chasm when it comes to Obama's claim to post-partisanship. His achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are largely proleptic. But words are not deeds and, although Obama has few concrete achievements to his name, his voting record hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left v Right.
In the Illinois Senate, he made a specialty of voting present, but after his first two years in the US Senate, National Journal's analysis of rollcall votes found that he was more liberal than 86 per cent of his colleagues. His voting record has only moved further Left since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gives him a 97.5 per cent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Clinton, who occasionally votes with the Republicans, ranks 16th.
Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party's majority leader, Harry Reid.
Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics. The day after his surprise loss in New Hampshire, and in anticipation of the South Carolina primary, with its heavily black electorate, South Side congressman Jesse Jackson Jr - Obama's national co-chairman - appeared on MSNBC to argue, in a prepared statement, that Clinton's teary moment on the campaign trail reflected her deep-seated racism.
"Those tears," said Jackson, "have to be analysed ... They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina, where 45 per cent of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest ... We saw tears in response to her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not hurricane Katrina, not other issues."
In other words, whites who are at odds with, or who haven't delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.
Liberals love Obama's talk of taking on powerful financial interests. But here , too, he is rather slippery. In his Cooper Union speech, he denounced in no uncertain terms the "special interests" of people on Wall Street (who are well represented among his campaign donors).
He, of course, had an opportunity to push for repealing the privileged tax treatment of private equity firms when that question was before Charles Grassley's Senate subcommittee - but he simply made a pro-forma statement in favour of doing so and disappeared.
Nationally, as in Chicago, Obama the self-styled reformer never crosses swords with any of his putative foes. To pick another example, he has attacked "predatory" sub-prime lenders while taking roughly $US1.3 million in contributions from companies in that line of business.
Obama is the internationalist opposed to free trade. He is the friend of race-baiters who thinks Don Imus deserved to be fired. He is the proponent of courage in the face of powerful interests who lacked the courage to break with Wright (until Wednesday). He is the man who would lead our efforts against terrorism yet was friendly with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant 1960s terrorist. He is the post-racialist supporter of affirmative action. He is the enemy of Big Oil who takes money from executives at Exxon-Mobil, Shell and British Petroleum.
Obama has, in a sense, represented a new version of the invisible man, a candidate whose colour obscures his failings.
But so far, the wild discrepancy between Obama's words and his deeds, and between his enormous ambitions and his minimal accomplishments, doesn't seem to have fazed his core supporters, who apparently suffer from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Like cultists who rededicate themselves when the cult's prophecies have been falsified, his fans redouble their delusions in the face of his obvious hypocrisy.
That is because Obama, in the imagination of many of his fans in the public and the press, is both a deduction from what was - the failures of the Bush administration and the scandals of the Clintons - and an expression of what should be.
The ideal, the aspiration, is so rhetorically appealing that it has been assumed to be true. They remind one of Woodrow Wilson's answer when asked if his plan for a League of Nations was practicable: "If it won't work, it must be made to work."
Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal. He teaches at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
By Centinel | May 8, 2008
Joe Piasecki tugs at the heartstrings at the beginning of his piece about Prop. 98 and I had to count to ten to avoid banging my head against the wall:
Not far from the 61 new luxury condominiums built recently behind the historic Friend Paper Co. building in Old Pasadena, a tiny homeless woman sleeps inside a tattered, empty suitcase.
All that sticks out is an arm, a shoulder and her head, which she covers with a blue floral cloth ? whether out of shame or fear of being identified she wouldn't say, ignoring questions.
Next to her is a dirt mound where Ambassador College's former east campus was demolished to make way for even more high-end housing. The Westgate Pasadena Project will give rise to an impressive mix of 820 condos, townhomes and apartments, but not all of these will be out of reach to people who might otherwise end up like the woman living in a suitcase.
In order to comply with Pasadena's inclusionary zoning ordinance, developer Sares-Regis is setting aside 85 apartments as affordable housing for low-income residents and paying additional city fees toward generating even more subsidized homes. The Friend Paper Co. project chose to pay more than $1.2 million into the city's affordable housing creation trust fund in lieu of selling nine condos below market rate, according to Kermit Mahan, who works in the city's housing division.
But whether any of that housing reaches local people who need it, say affordable housing activists, depends on the results of the June 3 state primary election.
Proposition 98 aims to restrict government's ability to use eminent domain to seize property, but would also make all forms of rent control ? including the city's inclusionary zoning ordinance ? illegal in California and threaten other renter protections, they warn.
The contrast of a luxury development being built beside a homeless woman's camp is a striking one. In fact, I saw that selfsame woman when I was driving past the area yesterday and remarked to my wife on the lady's lamentable condition. However, I did not respond to her plight by thinking, "Without rent control, she would be homeless." Why? Because we have rent control, and she's still homeless.
More importantly, Piasecki is dodging the real issue in this article: does rent control work? I don't mean that as some evil capitalist; I mean that as advocate of the poor, as someone who has spent a lot of hours in soup kitchens, and as someone who, in my younger days, definitely worried about the cost of an apartment in Pasadena (though things weren't as expensive as they are now). I mean: is rent control the best way to help poorer people have a place to live?
It's not a theoretical question. We should be able to quantify how much money the city charges in fees to subsidize "affordable housing," how many "affordable housing units" are made available, and what the average income is of the folks living in those units. Then, we should compare that to the effects that rent control has on the rest of the market: how much more do non-rent controlled apartments cost as a result of rent control? We should be able to compare those numbers side by side and say either, "Wow, rent control is amazing and really helps poor people" or "Hmm, rent control actually helps a really small number of people, and raises prices for everyone else."
An economist would tell you, in a heartbeat, that the latter is true. Price controls have long been debunked by theorists of all persuasions. As Wikipedia, source of all knowledge of everything tells us:
Most economists believe that a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing available.[5] This view is based on analysis of empirical evidence as well as the understanding generated by theoretical models.[6] Even such liberal economists as Paul Krugman have cited rent regulation as a case of "economic stupidity" which despite its good intentions leads to the creation of less housing, raises prices, and increases urban blight.[7]
To reiterate: I have no reason to dislike rent control other than the fact that I like the idea of people being able to get housing at the most affordable price they can. If rent control is hurting folks on the margin, as I suspect it is, then we need to come up with other solutions to the problems that it purports to solve (i.e. rapacious slumlords, etc.). The fact is, we need to grapple with the facts of rent control, not the good intentions that are behind it. Good intentions do no equal a good idea. And Piasecki is failing as a journalist by limiting the story to rhetorical extremism that ideologues use rather than a discussion of the merits of a piece of public policy.
Go here to read comments at Foothill Cities Blog:
http://thefcblog.com/2008/05/08/the-affordable-housing-bunny-hops-into-pasadena/
Also see:
The Mayor and the Small Landowner: A Parable of Inclusionary Housing
http://www.theonerepublic.com/archives/Columns/Lusvardi/20060320LusvardiMayor.html
Inclusionary Housing is a Pea Shell Game
http://www.theonerepublic.com/archives/Columns/Lusvardi/20050706LusvardiPea.html
Inclusionary Housing is Sociological Suicide
http://www.theonerepublic.com/archives/Columns/Lusvardi/20070815LusvardiSuicide.html
Why Pasadena Is Lucky It Failed with Municipal Wi-Fi
The City of Pasadena's failed attempt at outsourcing the development of a Wi-Fi network to Earthlink may have been fortuitous. A new technology, already deployed overseas, called WiMax to be developed by Spring-Nextel and the Clearwire Corporation will have the Internet download speeds of a cable connection but the reach of a cell phone network.
Here's a rough comparison:
Wi-Fi Wi-Max
Range: 100-300 feet 4 to 6 miles
Avg. Download Speeds 1 megabit Up to 5 megabits
Radio wave spectrum 800-1200 megahertz 700 megahertz
So instead of 1,100 mini-antennas all over Pasadena on light poles, a few antennas may be able to cover the entire city. This is good news for those who (falsely) believe that exposure to miniscule amounts of radio waves are a health hazard. And it may mean the Star News would eventually be run by Google.
Read more about Wi-Max here:
http://www.physorg.com/news129462906.html
Read about City Wi-Fi proposal here:
http://www.cityofpasadena.net/planning/environmental/WiFi/Final_wifi_IS.pdf
The Pasadena Weekly Misleads About Prop 98
The lies - here:
http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/the_end_of_affordable_housing/5948/
The facts about Prop 98 according to a court - here:
http://www.limittaxes.org/site/DocServer/Yes_on_98_News_Release_20080307.pdf?docID=761
California's Energy Colonialism
by MAX SCHULZ
May 3, 2008; Wall Street Journal
"When you look at the globe, California is a little spot on that globe," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently at Yale University's Climate Change Conference. "But when it comes to our power of influence, it is the equivalent of a whole continent."
Perhaps. As an exercise of this influence, Mr. Schwarzenegger has attempted to push climate-change policy forward, signing the Global Warming Solutions Act. It commits the state to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels - roughly 25% below today's - and all but eliminating them by 2050.
![[California's Energy Colonialism]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-BJ721_oj_sch_20080502183946.jpg)
Corbis
The Rancho Seco nuclear power plant could generate 900 megwatts of electricity. It was shut down and converted to solar power, and today generates four megawatts.
May 3, 2008; Wall Street Journal
"California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta," he said in his state of the state address last year. "Not only can we lead California into the future; we can show the nation and the world how to get there."
His words are in keeping with the state's self-perception. Politicians, business titans, academics and environmental activists proudly point to four decades of environmentally conscious public policy - while maintaining a dynamic economy, arguably the eighth-largest on the planet, with a gross state product of more than $1.6 trillion.
In truth, the state's energy leadership is a mirage. Decades of environmental policies have made it heavily dependent on other states for power; generated crippling costs; and left the state vulnerable to periodic electricity shortages. Its economic growth has occurred not because of, but despite, those policies.
Since the early 1970s, California has instituted new efficiency standards for appliances and the construction of new buildings. It mandated aggressive conservation programs and required a certain percentage of the state's electricity to come from renewable sources like wind and solar, which it has subsidized. It implemented far-reaching regulations on emissions from car tailpipes and from stationary sources like factories. And it has moved to shut down the state's nuclear facilities.
For a time, it worked. Since the mid-1970s, California's economy has grown while per-capita energy consumption stayed flat - an astounding fact, considering that such consumption has increased by roughly 50% elsewhere in the country over the same period.
But consider the story of the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station. Opened in 1975, it was capable of generating over 900 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power upward of 900,000 homes. Fourteen years after powering up, the nuclear reactor shut down, thanks to fierce antinuclear opposition. Eventually, the facility was converted to solar power, and today generates a measly four MW of electricity. After millions of dollars in subsidies and other support, the entire state has less than 250 MW of solar capacity.
Rancho Seco helps explain California's energy crisis in 2000 and 2001, when numerous rolling blackouts and power outages caused billions of dollars in damages. The degree to which rapacious power-company executives and traders were responsible for the shortages remains open to debate. Not open to debate is that California had insufficient power to meet demand, with a frayed and overloaded infrastructure for moving electrons.
California's flat per-capita energy consumption has not saved it from blackouts, either, since its population had been soaring. From 1979 to 1999, the number of residents jumped from about 23 million people to 33 million. Today, the figure is closer to 38 million, and it could top 45 million by 2020.
The blunt secret is this: California now imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for having too few power plants. Up to 20% of the state's power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Montana. Another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas.
"California practices a sort of energy colonialism," says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.-area investment group. "They leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution."
California's proud claim to have kept per-capita energy consumption flat while growing its economy is less impressive than it seems. The state has some of the highest energy prices in the country - nearly twice the national average - largely because of regulations and government mandates to use expensive renewable sources of power. As a result, heavy manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries have been fleeing the Golden State in droves.
The unreliable power grid is starting to rattle some Silicon Valley heavyweights. Intel CEO Craig Barrett, for instance, vowed in 2001 not to build a chip-making facility in California until power supplies became more reliable. This October, Intel opened a $3 billion factory near Phoenix for mass production of its new 45-nanometer microprocessors. Google has chosen to build the massive server farms that will fuel its expansion anywhere but in California.
And yet, despite a desperate need for more power, opposition to energy projects remains prevalent. State law prohibits the construction of new nuclear plants, and legislative efforts last summer to repeal it went nowhere. Last spring state regulators vetoed a proposal to build a liquefied natural gas terminal 14 miles off the Malibu coast.
Even renewable-energy projects meet resistance. Texas, of all places, is the nation's leader in wind-power generation. High costs, excessive regulation and environmentalist litigation have hampered California's efforts. Texas has just built lots of turbines.
None of this has stopped leaders from setting wildly unrealistic goals for safeguarding the environment, from electric cars to wind-energy production. The latest goal is to drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
The details of how the Global Warming Solutions Act is actually implemented don't have to be revealed until next January. Even the California Energy Commission hints that the targets might be unreachable. But they'll certainly cost a lot to find out. Analysis from the Electric Power Research Institute pegs the Act's cost to the California economy at anywhere from $100 billion to $511 billion.
Californians may feel good about their environmental consciousness. But someone needs to build power plants and oil refineries to fuel their economy. Someone needs to manufacture the cars they drive, the airplanes they fly, the chemicals and resins and paints and plastics that make their lives comfortable.
Those things require energy, and lots of it. All the wisdom of Athens and all the power of Sparta won't change that fact.
Mr. Schulz is director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Energy Policy and the Environment. This op-ed is adapted from the Spring 2008 issue of City Journal.
Increased PUSD School Funding Will Not Result in Better Educational Outcomes for Students
The age of educational romanticism
by Charles Murray
On requiring every child to be above average
This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools ?its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise.
Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement.
Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers' unions.
In public discourse, the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion. Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can. Whether analyzed by the news media, school superintendents, or politicians, the problems facing low-performing students are always that they have come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or have gone to bad schools, or grown up in peer cultures that do not value educational achievement. The problem is never that they just aren't smart enough.
The apotheosis of educational romanticism occurred on January 8, 2002, when a Republican president of the United States, surrounded by approving legislators from both parties, signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which had this as the Statement of Purpose for its key title:
The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.
I added the italics. All means exactly that: everybody, right down to the bottom level of ability. The language of the 2002 law made no provision for any exclusions. The Act requires that this goal be met "not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001-2002 school year."
We are not talking about a political speech or a campaign promise. The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average. I do not exaggerate. When No Child Left Behind began in 2002, the nation already possessed operational definitions of proficient in the math and reading tests administered under the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, pronounced "nape"). NAEP is seen as the gold standard in educational testing. Only about 30 percent of American students were proficient in either reading or math by NAEP's definitions when No Child Left Behind began. In other words, by NAEP's standard, all students are not just to be brought to the average that existed when No Child Left Behind was enacted. All of them are to reach the level of students at the seventieth percentile.
Many laws are too optimistic, but the No Child Left Behind Act transcended optimism. It set a goal that was devoid of any contact with reality. How did we get to that point?
I begin by briefly making the case that educational romanticism is in fact out of touch with reality. I will call on some specific bodies of scholarly evidence, but nothing I say will come as a surprise to parents of children who are more than a few years into elementary school. Exceptions exist, but the overwhelmingly common parental experience is that even in preschool our children began to exhibit profiles of abilities. When we observed a strength we tried to build on it, and when we observed a weakness we tried to remediate it or find someone who could. But whatever profiles we observed when our children were still quite young could only be tweaked. Our children with dyslexia, for example, could be taught strategies for coping, but reading never became easy for them. If specific learning disabilities were not involved, then nothing much changed no matter how hard we tried. School performance might have risen or fallen because of other things going on in their lives?emotional problems, peer pressures in either direction, or distractions because of a family crisis, for example?but the underlying profiles of abilities that our children took into elementary school didn't look much different when they got to middle school and high school.
That common experience of parents conforms to everything that is known scientifically about the nature of intellectual ability. A lively debate continues about the malleability of intellectual ability in infants and toddlers, but few make ambitious claims for the malleability of intellectual ability after children enter elementary school. There are no examples of intensive in-school programs that permanently raise intellectual ability during the K-12 years (minor and temporary practice effects are the most that have been demonstrated).
No one disputes the empirical predictiveness of tests of intellectual ability?IQ tests?for large groups. If a classroom of first-graders is given a full-scale IQ test that requires no literacy and no mathematics, the correlation of those scores with scores on reading and math tests at age seventeen is going to be high. Such correlations will be equally high whether the class consists of rich children or poor, black or white, male or female. They will be high no matter how hard the teachers have worked. Scores on tests of reading and math track with intellectual ability, no matter what.
That brings us to an indispensable tenet of educational romanticism: The public schools are so bad that large gains in student performance are possible even within the constraints of intellectual ability. A large and unrefuted body of evidence says that this indispensable tenet is incorrect. Differences among schools do not have much effect on test scores in reading and mathematics. This finding is not well known by the general public (parents could spend less time fretting over their children's school if it were), and needs some explanation.
When Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it included a mandate for a nationwide study to assess the effects of inequality of educational opportunity on student achievement. The study, led by the sociologist James Coleman, was one of the most ambitious in the history of social science. The sample consisted of 645,000 students. Data were collected not only about the students' personal school histories, but also about their parents' socioeconomic backgrounds, their neighborhoods, the curricula and facilities of their schools, and the qualifications of the teachers within those schools.
Before Coleman's team set to work, everybody expected that the study would document a relationship between the quality of schools and the academic achievement of the students in those schools. To everyone's shock, the Coleman Report instead found that the quality of schools explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Family background was by far the most important factor in determining student achievement. The Coleman Report came under intense fire, but re- analyses of the Coleman data and the collection of new data in the decades since it appeared support its finding that the quality of public schools doesn't make much difference in student achievement.
In thinking about the explanation for this counter-intuitive result, it is important not to confuse your idea of a bad public school with the worst-of-the-worst inner-city schools that are the subject of horror stories. When schools are as bad as they are in the inner-city neighborhoods of Detroit, Washington, and a few other large cities, they certainly have a depressing effect on student achievement. Getting students out of those schools should be a top policy priority. But only a few percent of the nation's students attend such schools. In what might be called a "normally bad" public school, a lot of the slack has been taken out of the room for improvement. The normally bad school maintains a reasonably orderly learning environment and offers a standard range of courses taught with standard textbooks. Most of the teachers aren't terrible; they're just mediocre. Those raw materials give students most of the education they are going to absorb regardless of where they go to school. Excellent schools with excellent teachers will augment their learning, and are a better experience for children in many other ways as well. But an excellent school's effects on mean test scores for the student body as a whole will not be dramatic. Readers who attended normally bad K-12 schools and then went to selective colleges are likely to understand why: Your classmates who had gone to Phillips Exeter had taken much better courses than your school offered, and you may have envied their good luck, but you had read a lot on your own, you weren't that far behind, and you caught up quickly.
To sum up, a massive body of evidence says that reading and mathematics achievement have strong ties to underlying intellectual ability, that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school, and that the quality of schooling within the normal range of schools does not have much effect on student achievement. To put it another way, we have every reason to think?and already did when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed?that the notion of making all children proficient in math and reading is ridiculous. Such a feat is not possible even for an experimental school with unlimited funding, let alone for public schools operating in the real world. By NAEP's definition of proficiency, we probably cannot make even half of the students proficient.
Democrats and the Killing Fields
May 1, 2008; Page A17
Most people have never heard of Operation Frequent Wind, which ended on April 30, 1975, 33 years ago. But every American has seen pictures of it: the Marine helicopters evacuating the last U.S. personnel from the embassy in Saigon, hours before communist tanks rolled into the city. Thousands of desperate Vietnamese gathered at the embassy gate and begged to be taken with them. Others committed suicide.
Those scenes are a chilling reminder of what happens when a great power decides to cut and run. Two of the three presidential candidates are proposing to do just that in Iraq. We need to remember what happened the last time we gave up on an unpopular foreign policy, not only in humanitarian terms but in terms of American power and prestige.
Actually, the U.S. had won the war in Vietnam on the battlefield, just as the surge has done today in Iraq. Over Easter 1972, South Vietnamese forces, backed by U.S. airpower, crushed the last communist offensive, killing nearly 100,000 North Vietnamese troops.
The North was forced to sign peace accords in Paris recognizing the Republic of South Vietnam. The last 2,500 U.S. support troops went home. What they left was a fragile but sustainable peace, and an elected government in Saigon that was growing stronger every month.
But with 160,000 North Vietnamese soldiers still in South Vietnam, keeping the South free was going to require continued U.S. help, especially air support and military equipment if the North ever attacked again.
Democrats and American public opinion, however, had had enough. Much like Iraq today, the vast majority of South Vietnam had been pacified. Its government was taking on difficult but essential political changes, including land reform. The Democratic-controlled Congress, however, did not want to hear about success. They assumed failure in Vietnam would complete their rout of the hated Richard Nixon, who was already out of office thanks to Watergate, and position them for victory in the 1976 presidential election.
Meanwhile, the American public had been conditioned by the media to see Vietnam as a failed policy, and taught that America had gotten itself in the middle of a "civil war" which the Vietnamese had to sort out themselves. Once the last American troops left Vietnam, public opinion would never tolerate re-entry into a war widely seen as a blunder and endless quagmire.
In early 1975 the communists launched a massive attack. President Gerald Ford asked for $1 billion in supplemental funds to help the South Vietnamese, and Congress refused. They had already pulled the plug on the U.S.-supported government of Lon Nol in Cambodia. Ford had no choice but to order the evacuation of remaining U.S. personnel.
After nearly two decades of devastating war and 58,000 American combat deaths, the U.S. left Southeast Asia. As the last helicopter lifted off from Saigon, the New York Times's Sydney Schanberg wrote an article with the title, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." And the Times's columnist Anthony Lewis asked, "what future could possibly be more terrible than the reality" of a war that had cost so much in lives and treasure?
With the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge taking over, the world was about to find out.
At least 65,000 Vietnamese were murdered or shot after "liberation" - the equivalent in terms of Vietnam's population at the time, of killing three-quarters of a million people in today's U.S. The new communist regime ordered somewhere between one- third to one-half of South Vietnam's population to pass through its "re-education" camps, where perhaps as many as 250,000 died of disease, starvation, or were worked to death (the last inmates were not released until 1986).
That number does not include the thousands of "boat people" who tried to flee the totalitarian nightmare of communist Vietnam, and perished at sea.
Cambodia's fate was even worse. At least one and a half million innocent Cambodians were butchered or starved to death in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and re-education camps, put to death by a fanatical regime that believed that anyone who wore eyeglasses must have "bourgeois intellectual tendencies" and be shot.
The scale of moral collapse and suffering went beyond Indochina. The pullout had a ripple effect on U.S. power and prestige, just as the proponents of the so-called "domino theory" had warned. American foreign policy, crippled by remorse and self-doubt, stood helplessly as others rushed into the power vacuum.
Marxist-Leninist regimes emerged not only in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but in Ethiopia and Guinea Bissau (1974), Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola (1975), Afghanistan (1978), and Grenada and Nicaragua (1979). Soviet troops were welcomed in Fidel Castro's Cuba for the first time since the 1962 missile crisis. Cuban troops traveled freely to Africa to prop up Marxist regimes there.
In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to establish his brutal theocratic rule over Iran, confident that America, having learned "the lessons of Vietnam," would never intervene.
The judgment of history, as Raymond Aron once remarked, is without pity. History will judge how America and its leaders handle global responsibility in Iraq and the Middle East in the next decade.
As Winston Churchill said of the appeasement of Hitler at Munich, in 1975 Americans were "weighed in the balance and found wanting." We have a responsibility to the Iraqis - and to the memory of those we left behind - not to let that happen again.
Dead Drunk In DC
Adrian Vance via Guido Meindl
Ethanol is touted as the leading alternative fuel. The use of which will be "good for the American farmer" and "Fuel we can grow at home." But, what are the facts?
To make one gallon of alcohol fuel we need to mix seven gallons of corn mash with yeast. Depending on temperature the fermentation will be complete in about a week and contain about 15% alcohol and at the point where alcohol poisons yeast's ability to convert sugars to alcohol. During this time we have to keep the mixture warm and that takes energy from burning something. There are variables, but heating will take several thousand kilocalories per seven gallons however we do it.
The alcohol is separated from water by distillation. If the mixture is at room temperature, 20 degrees Celsius, it is heated to 78 degrees Celsius to vaporize alcohol. For seven liters of mash we need at least 406 kilocalories. Then we need another 13,545 kilocalories to vaporize alcohol for a total of 13,951 kilocalories for one gallon of product.
Burning one gallon of alcohol produces about 15,000 kilocalories. The process yields less energy than we have put into it to ferment and distill the fuel assuming 100% efficiency and not including the energy used in planting, watering, fertilizing, harvesting, grinding corn, pumping water and making mash as that varies greatly.
There is no method where alcohol fuel is self-sustaining. We will always put more fuel energy into it than we receive. From where is that to come? Oil, coal, nuclear? This question was not asked by government scientists when the numb noggins were designing this fiasco. Even more stunning is the fact that our entire corn crop could only supply 1/8th of our motor fuel needs while destroying the livestock feeding and corn food products industries.
Ethanol was a bad idea from the beginning, but no government scientist dared to speak up about it because US Senator Grassley thought it was a good idea. Senator Grassley has never been accused of being bent over double with smarts. And, federal white coats have no spines. Why does any country ever fear America ? Maybe Reverand Wright was right.
Petroleum will long be our best usable energy. It is readily available in some of the world if we have the resolve to fight for it. In the future we will have the best sources of it in our offshore, Alaskan and Gulf of Mexico drillings to say nothing of our tar sands oil shales and 900 years worth of coal. The chemistry for converting coal was perfected in Germany during WWII and now improved on by the Renteck corporation. We can be on top again if we stop listening to the stupid people in Washington , DC .
State Revenues Up - PUSD Doesn't Need Parcel Tax and Bonds
Revenues up 33% in 5 years but spending up 44%
Another Reason to Vote for Prop 98 True Eminent Domain Reform - To Stop Redevelopment's Siphoning Funds from Public SchoolsOrange County Register editorial, 5/5/08
Taxpayers increasingly are told that state government is going broke, and vital services must be drastically slashed unless new taxes are imposed.
Here's the truth: Even with tax revenue falling below projections, even in an economic downturn, state government will have more money to spend next year than it has this year - about a billion dollars more, according to Mike Villines, Republican Assembly Leader.
Remember that when the hue and cry hits a crescendo in Sacramento. Remember that when teachers unions claim public school children will suffer. Remember that when Democrats dramatically parade poor and sickly people in the Capitol, wringing their hands about losing crucial services.
It bears repeating: Sacramento will have more money to spend next year than it had this year.
This is vital because Democratic legislators insist taxpayers must make greater sacrifices, even though every dollar counts more than ever for most Californians as the economy hovers just above recession. This is imperative to remember because Californians already are telling pollsters they want to protect public schools andare willing to increase taxes on the rich.
A poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, released last week, found the economy to be Californians' top concern - 36 percent of those polled. By comparison, 12 percent ranked education and schools as their top concern. Nevertheless, we can expect Sacramento Democrats to whip up support for tax increases by emphasizing concern for schools and downplay Californians' greater economic concerns.
We believe the public is smart enough to see through the scare tactics, and to realize tax increases would be only a further drag on the economy.
But Sacramento's tax-and-spend lobby no doubt will seek to divide and conquer by proposing taxes on less-popular segments of society, such as the always reliable scapegoat, "the rich." Indeed, PPIC found more than two-thirds of those polled already willing to impose an income tax increase on "the wealthiest state residents."
Taxes on less-wealthy people divert money that might otherwise be saved or spent on essentials, like $4-a-gallon gasoline. But taxes on the wealthiest Californians are more likely to create former Californians. These people are the most mobile, and they can afford to leave.
"When California faced a Mount Everest-sized $14 billion deficit in 2003, one of the major causes for the red ink was the stampede of millionaire households from the state," economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore have written. "Out of the 25,000 or so seven-figure-income families, more than 5,000 left in the early 2000s, and the loss of their tax payments accounted for about half the budget hole."
Any tax increase is disingenuous because it's unneeded. As Mr. Villines told the Register Editorial Board on Thursday, continuing to spend at the current level is entirely possible because "we've got the money."
The only reason to increase taxes, Mr. Villines said, would be to continue to expand government programs. Assembly Republicans propose to fund schools with more money than they received this year, without raising taxes, by making cuts in other state programs.
We find this far more palatable - and fairer - than imposing new taxes to feed a bloated state government that Mr. Villines says already has increased its revenue 32 percent in four years.
Mary Dee Romney
Excerpted from PUSDGreatSchools@Google.com
It is not currently possible for the PUSD to collect enough revenue to function as a "basic aid" district.
