August 27, 2003

The Myth of the Housing Bubble

From Minnesota Public Radio, via Marketplace.org:

Builders broke ground on more homes in July than any time in the past 17 years. Some say that the bubble will soon burst and bring prices back to earth - not so fast, says commentator Susanne Trimbath. We have endlessly stoked demand, says Trimbath, but many buyers quickly discover demand exceeds supply because of fees and insurance that add thousands to a homebuilder’s costs. So, now, developers build houses to spec to avoid paying for it all up front. Problem is homebuilders couldn’t build homes fast enough, so they stopped selling in advance.

August 26, 2003

Power to the People

The Knoxville News Sentinel reports on a new political poll that shows most Knoxvillians don't want their property taxes raised next year - but most expect property taxes will be raised anyway. Another poll finds most Knoxvillians don't want their tax dollars to subsidize building a new hotel near the taxpayer-funded, money-losing Knoxville Convention Center. What does this mean? It means that the government of the people, by the people and for the people concept is no longer working in Knoxville. It means Knoxville needs a Taxpayers Bill of Rights, a tool designed to give voters more voice in such important decisions. [Hat tip: South Knox Bubba, who also has previous coverage of the hotel funding poll here.]

August 23, 2003

Saddam and al Qaeda: The Evidence Piles Up

Stephen F. Hayes reports there is emerging a growing body of solid evidence of the links between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorist organization. Yet as the Democrats continue to claim there is no evidence of a Saddam-al Qaeda link, the Bush administration is remaining surprisingly quiet. Is that the sound of a saw being quietly sharpened as Democrats crawl farther out on a limb? You be the judge.

TOP U.S. OFFICIALS linked Iraq and al Qaeda in newspaper op-eds, on talk shows, and in speeches. But the most detailed of their allegations came in an October 7, 2002, letter from CIA director George Tenet to Senate Intelligence chairman Bob Graham and in Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

The Tenet letter declassified CIA reporting on weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to al Qaeda. Two sentences on WMD garnered most media attention, but the intelligence chief's comments on al Qaeda deserved notice. "We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qa'ida going back a decade," Tenet wrote. "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression. Since Operation Enduring Freedom [in Afghanistan], we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have credible reporting that al Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." In sum, the letter said, "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military actions."

That this assessment came from the CIA - with its history of institutional skepticism about the links - was significant.

August 22, 2003

Shoulda Blogged It

The Nashville City Paper has recently concluded publishing Journal of a Thoughtful Fool, a 21-part series of journal articles written by Whitney Kemper, a 55-year-old Nashville man, as he hiked the entire length of the 2,172.6-mile Appalachian Trail. It's a very nice series, with good writing, interesting articles, and catchy headlines like Tents, myths and scientific fallacies, The Appalachian Trail is like East Nashville, and Is sex possible on the Appalachian Trail?. But why didn't Kemper blog the trip? Instead of weekly installments, the City Paper and Kemper could have provided daily updates, illustrated with lots of digital photos.

That's the future of this kind of journalism. If you get the City Paper printed on thin slices of dead trees you might want to clip and save the Journal of a Thoughtful Fool - so you can show your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren how they did things in the old days.

UPDATE: The City Paper could've done it this way.

Ten Days of Silence

Ten days have passed since the Bredesen administration announced the state ended fiscal year 2002-03 with a revenue surplus, thanks to better-than-expected growth of revenue from the sales tax. The following newspapers have not yet reported the news, according to a Google news search:

The Tennessean
Nashville City Paper
Memphis Commercial-Appeal
Knoxville News Sentinel
The Jackson Sun
Chattanooga Times-Free Press
Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle
Cleveland Daily Banner
Kingsport Times-News
The (Murfreesboro) Daily News Journal

Is it only "news" if it supports the pro-income tax stance that most of those papers have? Or are they just staffed by lazy and/or incompetent reporters and editors? Inquiring minds want to know...

August 19, 2003

Putting Limits on the Taxin'

Robert Hawley sent along a link to this story in Sunday's Washington Post about some "tax activists" in two counties in Maryland who are pushing for a referendum to cap property taxes and, in one county, to roll back a recent increase in the county income tax. Yes, they have a county income tax there. Can you imagine such a thing? The WaPo story is dripping with bias against such tax-limitation efforts, portraying the anti-tax activists as "angry" and fiscally irresponsible while devoting numerous paragraphs to the views of government officials who warn of dark consequences if the referendums get on the ballot and are approved by voters. But it also has this encouraging news about grassroots activism against ever-rising taxes...

Ballot questions to limit taxes became popular in the 1970s, when voters in Prince George's and in California approved controversial caps on property-tax rates. Similar referendums surfaced across the country - including in several counties in Maryland - in the early 1990s, but the pace has since slowed in many states. Today, as more local officials look to raise revenue to bail out recession-strapped budgets, government experts predict the backlash will be another sustained push for voter-imposed tax limits.

"It is spiking back up, from what we can tell," said M. Dane Waters, president of the Initiative and Referendum Institute, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks ballot referendums. "The trend seems to be as the local governments start trying to get more money, some citizens say, 'We want to stop that.' "

Montgomery and Howard are two of the 13 Maryland counties that raised taxes this year. Nationwide, about 25 percent of cities planned to raise property taxes this year, according to a February survey by the National League of Cities. The increases are causing an uptick in the number of ballot initiatives seeking voter-imposed tax limits, including efforts in Wisconsin, Georgia and Tennessee. Waters said voters approve about half of tax referendums that make it onto the ballot.

"In our estimation, this could very well mark the third phase of the modern tax revolt," said Peter Sepp, a vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, who said the first two phases were California's Proposition 13 in 1978 and the anti-tax efforts of the early 1990s. "We are seeing this effort spring up on a county-by-county, city-by-city basis."

FYI: Sepp and the I&R Institute are among the many sources of information I relied on in writing this white paper about the Taxpayers Bill of Rights in Colorado and why a similar constitutional amendment would ensure fiscal discipline in Tennessee's state budget.

August 14, 2003

State Sales Tax vs. State Income Tax

Chip Taylor comments on Rich Hailey's post below regarding Oregon's massive revenue shortfall vs. Tennessee's small revenue surplus - and what it says about Oregon's reliance on an income tax vs. Tennessee's reliance on a sales tax. And he notes a study, by none other than University of Tennessee economist Dr. Bill Fox, that says a sales tax is better during a sluggish economy than an income tax.

Huh? That's NOT what Fox was saying in Tennessee during the four-year debate over the proposed creation of a state income tax. Then, he was saying an income tax would be better for Tennessee. Perhaps he meant better for the University of Tennessee - which stood to gain a substantial increase in funding for, among other things, faculty pay, if an income tax passed.

Taylor summarizes a paper, authored by Fox, titled Three Characteristics of the Tax Structures have Contributed to the Current State Fiscal Crises:

Fox presents tax revenue elasticities for various types of state taxes for the nation as a whole. During the 1990s, personal income tax elasticity was 1.12, meaning that tax revenues grew faster than the base, personal income. Sales tax elasticity, on the other hand, was 0.96, which means that sales tax revenue grew slightly slower than personal income. In other words, a state that relied more on sales tax and less on personal income tax wasn't as likely to see the booming revenue growth experienced by a state that relied more on personal income tax and less on sales tax.

But, when the economy went into recession, the drop off in revenue wasn't likely to be as steep either. For example, Fox notes that from 2001 to 2002, personal income tax revenues fell by 10.2%; sales tax revenues by 0.9%.

The difference in taxes seems likely to affect fiscal policy decisions, too. States with slower growing revenue during the boom were probably less likely to increase spending by starting new and expensive programs. States that saw a boom in state revenue were more likely to find new ways to spend it. Those decisions served to magnify the pain of falling revenues.

So, yeah, I bet the differences in Oregon's and Tennessee's tax structures do have a lot to do with how they are recovering from the recession.

In short, the lesson of Oregon and Tennessee - backed up by Fox's calculations - is this:

1. During boom economies, sales taxes generate restrained revenue growth that prevents state governments from going hog wild on the spending, while income taxes generate surging revenues that encourage profligacy.
2. During sluggish economies, states that rely on income taxes get hammered from both sides, seeing massive revenue declines that can't possibly continue to fund their prior profligacy. States that rely on sales taxes face no such squeeze.

Of course, another way to fiscal discipline is to enforce it with something like Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights, as I explain in this paper. A Taxpayers Bill of Rights, by limiting government to the amount of additional revenue it can keep and spend each year, prevents government from engaging in rapid expansion during boom years, thus lowering the base budget that must be funded in future lean years when revenue growth declines. Colorado is proof it works.

Also see this post from almost exactly one year ago.

August 12, 2003

Iraq and al Qaeda

Sparkey over at Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing has a great post on growing evidence of the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. It comes from a report released August 8 by the White House entitled 100 Days of Progress In Iraq. Sparkey says the report was "little noticed by the U.S. News media." Oh they noticed it, alright, Sparkey. It just didn't fit their "Iraq is a disastrous quagmire" meme, so they ignored it.

August 11, 2003

Collaborative Journalism

Donald Sensing is not just a former artillery officer and a current Methodist reverend - he's an online journalist, too! At least according to this piece in the Online Journalism Review.

Writes J.D. Lasica:

Over the past few years, the outlines of a new form of journalism have begun to emerge. Call it participatory journalism or one of its kindred names - open-source journalism, personal media, grassroots reporting - but everyone from individuals to online newspapers has begun to take notice.

"It's about readers participating in the editorial process, and it's long overdue," says Dan Gillmor, a blogger and technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, who is writing a book on the subject called "Making the News." "People at the edges of the network are getting a chance to become more involved in traditional journalism by using many of the same tools of the trade. This is tomorrow's journalism, with professionals and gifted amateurs as partners."

As for what OJR calls "participatory journalism," it should sound familiar to you. After all, I wrote about something I called "collaborative peer-reviewed journalism," a/k/a blogging, right here at HobbsOnline back in May. And March. Nice to see OJR is catching on. ;-)

August 6, 2003

A Blogosphere Code of Ethics?

Attorney and blogger Justene Adamec thinks the blogosphere needs a code of ethics. I'm not sure I agree - blogging is, at heart, an independent activity that must be kept free of top-down regulation in order to flourish, and a flourishing blogosphere is, I think, a very modern version of what the authors of the First Amendment intended: a free and open exchange of ideas.

That said, I think Justene's first suggested blogosphere ethical rule, When you talk about news, link to it, is a good one.

The advantage to blogs is that the readers can read the original piece and make their own decision, is a good one because it uses blogging tools to their best advantage. Linking to the story you're commenting on says to your readers I'm glad you want to know my opinion, and I trust you to make up your own mind after reading my post and the story I'm commenting on. Let me know if you think I got it wrong.

Extensive linking also enforces a level of honesty - smart bloggers won't consistently misrepresent facts in news stories they link to. Come to think of it, newspapers ought to link to source documents more often, too. For the same reason. And because if they don't, and if they misrepresent something, you can be sure the blogosphere will rapidly catch and expose the error. It's already happening - remember how the British newspaper The Guardian had to admit it had misrepresented a Paul Wolfowitz quote after the various bloggers pointed out the discrepancy between the paper's version and the actual transcript of the interview, which was available online.

That's the blogosphere for you: making it harder and harder to lie.

Of course, one caveat to the suggested rule is this: links often perish. Stories you link to today might not be archived online by the publication whose website you link to - or may be put behind a subscription-only firewall after a few days or weeks of being available online for free. I'd suggest bloggers make sure to not just link to news they are commenting on, but quote from it the key parts, which is allowable under "Fair Use" copyright rules.

In The Future, All Reporters Will Blog

Or, at least, they should - it's just a better tool for reporting, for interacting with readers, and for tapping into new sources of information and providing readers with a better finished product. Increasingly, some in newspaper management seem to agree.

Editor & Publisher has a very good Q&A with Ken Sands, the managing editor of online and new media at the The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. Sands discusses how weblogs - "blogs" - will increasingly be a feature of newspapers' websites, and why that's a good thing.

I do believe the "amateur" warbloggers showed us professional journalists the power of numbers on the web. That is, if an army of "reporters" scour the web to "aggregate" the news, why can't we use our local readers to help us aggregate the news of our communities? How about an army of local bloggers?

The best of their work might even show up in print! At the very least, by tapping into readers as sources, we will be in better touch with our communities and will get better stories.

At The Spokesman-Review, we think of a "blog" as a template, really, for publishing on the web in various forms. The template allows frequent posting in reverse-chronological order with the ability to link. Sounds pretty simple, and it is very flexible. Our entire war coverage on the web, for example, was handled with a blog template.

In the past couple of weeks, I've given presentations on interactivity at two metro dailies. The staffs of both papers were excited about the potential for blogs, and both immediately began making plans for their own. I feel a little bit like the Pied Piper of blogging. I think that in the future, you will see that either: 1. Everyone starts blogging; or, 2. They will blog but call it something else.

August 5, 2003

Domestic Terrorism Update

Glenn Reynolds is asking good questions about domestic terrorist groups. And, yes, that's what the Earth Liberation Front and other environmental extremists who resort to violence are.

Here's a link to a group that's trying to stop the eco-terrorists. Among the wacko domestic terrorists they are trying to stop: Former ELF spokesidiot Craig Rosebraugh and his new terrorist support group, Arissa, which he formed because, you know, ELF wasn't violent enough.

Arissa, incidentally, calls the U.S. government "an entity that has plagued the domestic and international arena throughout modern history with unprecedented murder, destruction and injustice." It also calls the U.S. government "one of the greatest terrorist organizations in planetary history" - and sells disgusting T-shirts (an image of one is to the left) for $15 to finance its terror-support network.

Arissa has recently published a CD of a Rosebraugh speech in which he extols the virtue and value of "direct action" up to and including political violence and assassination in the furtherance of Arissa's radical agenda. Portland's Independent Media Center site is pushing the CD.

UPDATE: A reader pointed me to this Feb. 2002 Congressional Statement on The Threat of Eco-Terrorism, given by a senior FBI official before a House subcommittee.

Take the Money and Run

In the last year or so, Andrew Sullivan's readers have given him around $120,000 to keep blogging. So he's taking the entire month of August off. In the last year or so, my readers have given me about $400. I'm not taking the month off. And I promise, if you give me $120,000, or even $12,000 - or even $1,200! - I won't 'thank' you by taking a month-long blogging break. I also promise to not write obsessively about gay marriage and the Catholic church, no matter how much or how little you donate.

HobbsOnline ... just more committed than Andrew Sullivan's blog.

August 1, 2003

A Taxing Theology

The Tennessean has coverage of the presentation of University of Alabama law professor Susan Pace Hamill [Background here] before the Tennessee Tax Structure Study Commission. Read the paper's story and you'll notice a few things.

The first is the moral certainty of Ms. Hamill, the "expert" who testified before the Tennessee Tax Structure Study Commission. She's absolutely certain the Bible tells us what a just and moral tax structure is, though all I find in my Bible about taxes is a command to pay them: Render unto Caesar....

Second, note that although she is certain Tennessee's tax structure is unjust, she does not say what would be a "just" tax structure. Third, the expert believes that a specific religious viewpoint should guide public policy - yet the paper doesn't decry her attempt to mix church and state. And fourth. the paper - which has long argued on its editorial pages that Tennessee's tax structure is unfair to the poor - provides no balance to the story, no opposing point of view to the "expert's" view, a view the paper happens to agree with.

Now, I happen to agree with the "expert" that seeking a just tax structure is a moral issue. The problem is, we don't all agree on what a just and fair tax structure is. Some think a sales tax that everyone pays, regardless of income, is fair - because everyone benefits from government, and because if you make less than I do, you'll pay less than I do, but we'll both pay the same percentage tax on our purchases. Some - I'm among them - think a flat-rate income tax would be fair - the guy making $100,000 a year would pay 10 times more taxes than the guy making $10,000 a year but each would pay the same percentage of each dollar. Others think a progressive income tax, which taxes higher incomes at higher rates than lower incomes, is fair.

But Ms. Hamill can't cite Bible chapter and verse for any of those tax structures. There is no "Thou shalt have a progressive income tax," no "Thou shalt not tax groceries," and no "Flat taxes are fairest, thus sayeth the Lord," in the Bible. There are commands to not oppress the poor, but to say that a certain tax structure amounts to "oppression," as Ms. Hamill does, is a stretch. Meanwhile, there are also Biblical warnings against sloth, yet tax-funded government welfare checks encourage it. And there are Biblical admonitions to work hard - yet a progressive income tax punishes hard work if it results in material success.

It is a stretch, also, to say that Christians must fulfill their Christian duty to help the poor by supporting higher taxes to fund more government programs, but that's another argument Ms. Hamill is making these days. It is true that Christians have an obligation to be charitable and help the poor. Doing so through one's church or personally allows the Christian to keep this command while giving glory to God. Being forced to be "charitable" via paying higher taxes to fund the latest government program allows government politicians and bureaucrats to get the glory. Government will never print a brochure to give to welfare recipients saying "this welfare check made possible by Christian charity."

Ms. Hamill may be an "expert" in tax law, but when it comes to tax morality she's just another amateur theologian bending the Bible to say what she wants it to say, twisting its words to fit her political agenda.

The Tennessean, which rails against mixing church and state when a conservative Christian tries to use the Bible to defend a certain political stance, is more than happy to let her get away with it unchallenged. If you happen to believe The Tennessean allows its bias and political agendas to infect and distort its news coverage, this story could be your Exhibit A.