Lone Star Democracy Builders Association

I got the end-of-year email from Mark Strama, my local state representative, and I found out that the state of Texas now has a new website where you can learn about how the state's budget is allocated. There's a nice Flash rollover showing a general pie chart of the budget, and you can navigate from here into a more complex web application to find out about all of the little allocations. For example, in 2007, the state paid over $390 to winners of the lottery, or the 2008 FY includes $7724 for the International Accordion Festival (something I fully support!).

I'd be curious to see this expanded to also show a breakdown of the state's revenue sources. I expect most of the revenue to come from sales and business taxes, but there also should be some big chunks from the Federal government. It's a nice start to make our process more transparent.

Posted by Ben at 7:16 AM in Economy | Permalink

An Unreasonable Woman is Diane Wilson's autobiography about her fight to protect the Texas shrimp bays from hazardous pollution from the Formosa company. As a relative newbie to Texas (I'll have been here 10 years this summer), I wasn't aware of the environmental struggles that happened in the mid-80s.

Continue reading "Review: An Unreasonable Woman" »

Posted by GlennM at 9:51 AM in Book Reviews & Corporations & Economy & Inspiration | Permalink

I've just signed up do to a screening of the new Wal-Mart documentary at my house in north Austin on Sunday, November 13th at 6PM. You can RSVP for the screening at this website, or you can look for other screenings in Austin or around the country at this page.

I got to meet some of the filmmakers at Democracy Fest back in June. They are the ones who did Outfoxed back in 2004, an expose of the bias at the Fox News Channel. They've got a smart campaign to release this film, with different themes for each day of the release week. The effort to both make the film and get it publicity has been huge and widespread; they've been talking to customers, employees, suppliers, management, politicians, health care workers, and churches to get stories about how Wal-Mart affects the communities in which it's located. I have high hopes that the final product will be thought provoking and a useful contribution to the debates on issues like living wages, universal health care, and globalization.

Posted by Ben at 3:27 PM in Action & Economy | Permalink

On my trip to California this week, I managed to read a library copy of Paul Krugman's 2003 book "The Great Unraveling", a collection of his columns for the New York Times and other publications. Paul's is a professor of economics who has become more prominent in the national scene for his straight talk about the problems of the Bush administration.

I enjoyed the book, but by the end, I felt like I'd heard the same message fifty times. This is mainly due to most of the content being short three page essays, with a lot of common establishing material. The columns are grouped by topic, with each chapter presenting a selection of writing in chronological order. This sometimes was quite interesting; the series of columns on the California energy crisis started with speculation that the shortage was a result of market manipulation, then continued with confirmation of that theory over the next two entries. On other issues, like the president's social security plan, it just felt like the same point being made.

Krugman is quite approachable. There's economics in this book, but nothing too complex for someone literate in the business page. If you know a conservative whose primary interest is business, there's plenty of ammunition here to show him or her that Bush's economic policies have been really bad news. The best part of the book is the introduction,

The best part of the book was the introduction, titled "A Revolutionary Power", where Krugman uses research material collected by Henry Kissinger (!!!) in the 1950s about revolutionary France to show similarities in the modern right-wing movement, especially in how they deny reality and disdain our government's tradition.

Alas, the book ends with the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, so we don't get any of Paul's commentary on the economic costs of the war or any notes on the 2004 campaign or the defeat of Bush's Social Security plan. In all, it was a worthwhile, but depressing read. Over and over, the book shows just how entrenched the Bush's cronyism is, and how they keep making decisions that benefit personal friends, selling them to America using whatever argument seems convenient.

Posted by Ben at 4:45 PM in Book Reviews & Economy | Permalink

While folding laundry, I was watching the end of a presentation Senator Clinton was doing back on July 10th at the Aspen Ideas Summit on C-SPAN. A woman in the audience asked her about budget discipline, about what choices she would make to reduce government spending. Clinton didn't answer the question directly, but instead started talking about how her husband's policies provided a balanced budget and how rules in Congress under Democratic leadership prevented the introduction of new programs without a method to fund them included in the proposals. However, she then went on the attack, pointing out the lack of discipline and the major increases of spending under Bush, and then she ended with an interesting choice of rhetoric: the issues of the last few years have primarily been moral issues that have political effects, however, them more important problems that we need to face are political questions that have moral implications.

I really like the symmetry here, although I think the idea is a bit subtle for a non-political-junkie audience. She's referring to wedge issues the Republicans have used like same-sex unions and reproductive rights -- they have great evocative power with some audiences, but their resolution doesn't deal with the bigger economic and social issues of a society, ones that directly effect the way we all live our lives. She's trying to associate our own values with the economic questions of our day; tax cuts and spending decisions have a moral component, and as people who value communities, infrastructure, and opportunity, we should find a way to get people to balance what affects them immediately with what affects society in the medium-term and long-term.

Posted by Ben at 1:07 AM in Economy | Permalink

Someone asked about CAFTA in the last meeting. Hightower's talked about it in his newsletter, but I haven't been able to find an online link. So, here's a summary that I found from a group in North Carolina.

Generally, progressives don't like CAFTA because:
* Perot's "Giant Sucking Sound" of lost jobs would get even louder. It's a race to the bottom across all borders.
* Companies could sue us if they believe our regulations are hurting their profits. Sounds impossible? It's already happened under NAFTA. Folks shouldn't be scared of black helicopters invading us. Instead, they should be petrified of squadron's of corporate lawyers.

Posted by GlennM at 12:17 PM in Economy | Permalink

Robert Reich has an editorial in the NYTimes about why we should like (some) regulations instead of blaming WallMart.

Not totally "value-based" yet, but heading in the right direction.

Continue reading "Pro-regulation editorial" »

Posted by GlennM at 6:21 PM in Corporations & Economy | Permalink

There's a long (9 web pages) article in the last NYT Sunday Magazine about social security.

Summary: crisis, what crisis?

Continue reading "NYT Social Security article" »

Posted by GlennM at 9:54 PM in Economy | Permalink

An interesting data point: only in four counties in the USA can someone making the federal minimum wage afford a one-bedroom apartment. Ideally, it would have been good to see the figure over time, and have similar stats for other countries.

Report: U.S. Rentals Unaffordable to Poor
By Genaro C. Armas
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Most Americans who rely on just a full-time job earning the federal minimum wage cannot afford the rent and utilities on a one- or two-bedroom apartment, an advocacy group on low-income housing reported Monday.

For a two-bedroom rental alone, the typical worker must earn at least $15.37 an hour - nearly three times the federal minimum wage, the National Low Income Housing Coalition said in its annual "Out of Reach " report.

That figure assumes that a family spends no more than 30 percent of its gross income on rent and utilities - anything more is generally considered unaffordable by the government.

Yet many poor Americans are paying more than they can afford because wage increases haven't kept up with increases in rent and utilities, said Danilo Pelletiere, the coalition's research director.

The median hourly wage in the United States is about $14, and more than one-quarter of the population earns less than $10 an hour, the report said.

"A lot of people continue to be squeezed out," said Judy Levey, executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky. "Housing here is relatively inexpensive, but because the wages are so low, people can't afford housing,"

The report quoted federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data that showed hourly wages rising about 2.6 percent over the past year, slower than the 2.9 percent rise in rents recorded in the Consumer Price Index.

In addition, Pelletiere said, government spending on Section 8 rental vouchers, which helps 2 million Americans - mainly poor - pay rent hasn't kept up with demand.

The study analyzed data from the Census Bureau and the Housing and Urban Development Department to derive the hourly wage figures.

In only four of the nation's 3,066 counties could a full-time worker making the federal minimum wage afford a typical one-bedroom apartment, the coalition said. Three were in Illinois: Clay, Crawford and Wayne counties; the other was Washington County, Fla.

California topped all states in the hourly wage needed to afford a two-bedroom apartment, at $21.24, followed by Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland and New York.

States with more residents in rural areas were generally the most affordable, although no state's housing wage was lower than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, which has not changed since 1997.

West Virginia was the lowest at $9.31 an hour for a two-bedroom rental, followed by North Dakota, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama.

Pelletiere said the coalition's data for 2004 could not be compared with previous years because of changes in the way that HUD calculated "Fair Market Rents," which is the cost of rent and most utilities for a typical apartment. The fair rent varies widely by metropolitan area.

Overall, though, utility costs appear to be rising at a faster rate than rents, Pelletiere said. Add in stagnant wages and the housing situation for the nation's poor "has gotten worse over the last year," he said.

Posted by GlennM at 10:35 PM in Economy | Permalink