Open your wallets
If you think government budget shortfalls are bad now, wait and see what will happen if various advocacy groups, judges and bureaucrats get their way. For starters there’s the Oklahoma Education Association funding proposal, set to go before voters next year, which would increase the education budget by $850 million a year. The cost of a verdict in a lawsuit against the Department of Human Services is unknown if the state loses. But it would be in multi-million-dollar category. Also consider the U.S. Justice Department’s scathing criticism of the Oklahoma County jail and how that may ultimately lead to major spending to correct deficiencies. Most of the above doesn’t involve one-time spending. It involves recurring expenses in perpetuity. One thing’s certain: A handful of trial lawyers will be making a lot of money, so personal income tax receipts should be going up as well.
www.williteverstop.com
Never too early to start a political campaign, right? With the 2010 general election still 22 months in the future, electioneering has begun. Several candidates are on board to run for governor and lieutenant governor. No doubt some term-limited legislative seats are also drawing early interest. For the political novice, running for office can start with a trip down a qwerty keyboard instead of calling an experienced consultant. The Web site electionmall.com (slogan: “Where every day is a campaign”) offers a range of services and advice, from robocalls to blast faxes, to how to raise money without actually pressing the flesh with voters. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was hailed as a breakthrough in harnessing high-tech methods to get voters and cash. New GOP Chairman Michael Steele has vowed to do likewise. With a never-ending campaign season, services such as electionmall.com seem to be a truly recession-proof industry.
Hold the pork
Stimulus package? Who needs pork when you can schedule an election that pumps nearly $19 million into Oklahoma’s economy? A Tulsa World analysis of 2008 election spending reveals a massive amount of cash coming from lawyers and lobbyists (some of it to fight tort reform), a nearly equal amount coming from the oil and gas industry and sizeable chunks coming from health care professional and Indian tribes. The World says the spending figure is a conservative estimate and further digging will swell the numbers. Twenty cents of every dollar contributed came from lawyers, lobbyists or the petroleum industry. Lawyers and lobbyists alone coughed up nearly $2 million. The oil and gas industry was right behind them. Do we need more elections to generate economic activity? Perish the thought! By the way, trial lawyer spending to stop tort reform was a bad investment: Republicans still took over the Legislature.
Cars still rule
High gasoline prices last year contributed to a 4 percent decline in vehicle miles traveled, but public transit didn’t capture all of the traffic that was lost to the roads. Sam Staley, Reason Foundation’s director of urban growth, testified before Congress recently and urged lawmakers “to prioritize transportation solutions that increase our mobility and decrease traffic congestion,” according to the libertarian foundation. Staley asked Congress to keep public transit in perspective when designing a stimulus package. Public transit is responsible for a tiny share of mobility in this country; increasing transit ridership significantly would require “a dramatic and largely involuntary relocation of people and families into housing they do not want,” Reason says. People still like to commute by car. One factor is time: On average, public transit riders spend about 36 minutes traveling to work while private automobile travelers commute about 21 minutes.”
The age of foolishness
This is a tale of two Arkansas River cities and we’ll get to the moral immediately rather than saving it for last: Let sleeping rocks lie! The capital of Arkansas, named for a rock, wants to showcase the piece of sandstone that once served as a river dock. The Wall Street Journal reports that over the years the rock was whittled away, hidden by weeds and mud and covered by graffiti. Planned is a $650,000 restoration project to give the rock its due. The problem is there might not be much left to see after excavation. Upriver from Little Rock is Tulsa, which unearthed its own buried treasure 18 months ago. A 1957 automobile, encased in a time capsule for 50 years, was pulled out of the ground amid much fanfare but the Plymouth (the car, not the Rock) was a veritable rust bucket. Whether in the best of times or the worst of times, nature doesn’t give the dickens about things of value to people.
Works both ways
Turnabout is fair play. In response to a lawmaker’s ill-advised proposal to crack down on homeschoolers, Russell E. Spiars of Zionsville, Ind., suggests that a pro-homeschool legislator author a bill to let homeschool parents crack down on public schools. A pending bill would require parents to alert local school districts of their homeschool plans and offer academic progress reports. Spiars, in a letter to The Oklahoman, says, “I have observed many kids from both homeschools and government schools, and it is apparent to me that the most effective means of improving educational achievement would be to give homeschooling officials oversight over government schools.” Of course there’s not enough homeschool parents to go around, but it’s apparent that public schools need more oversight than homeschooling parents. Indiana has fairly lax homeschooling regulations, but it’s not as free of government interference as is Oklahoma. The proposed bill would change that.
Doesn’t hurt to ask
Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett says the city is in much better shape than many around the country, but that won’t stop City Hall from seeking federal stimulus money. Same goes for Tulsa. The U.S. Conference of Mayors invited municipalities to put in requests for any money Congress sees fit to send their way. Oklahoma City’s request was modest relative to Tulsa’s - $501 million vs. $944 million. That Tulsa wants nearly a $1 billion of Uncle Sam’s money strikes us as bit overreaching, but you can’t fault a city for asking. In his 2009 State of the City speech, Cornett noted that “with the rest of the world dealing with such severe economic issues, it is only fair for us to acknowledge that our envious position should be valued and protected. And at City Hall we are asking those in charge of our city government’s finances to maintain the same conservative principles that got us here.” We wish those in charge of the federal government’s finances had asked for the same thing.
Doesn’t hurt to ask
Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett says the city is in much better shape than many around the country, but that won’t stop City Hall from seeking federal stimulus money. Same goes for Tulsa. The U.S. Conference of Mayors invited municipalities to put in requests for any money Congress sees fit to send their way. Oklahoma City’s request was modest relative to Tulsa’s - $501 million vs. $944 million. That Tulsa wants nearly a $1 billion of Uncle Sam’s money strikes us as bit overreaching, but you can’t fault a city for asking. In his 2009 State of the City speech, Cornett noted that “with the rest of the world dealing with such severe economic issues, it is only fair for us to acknowledge that our envious position should be valued and protected. And at City Hall we are asking those in charge of our city government’s finances to maintain the same conservative principles that got us here.” We wish those in charge of the federal government’s finances had asked for the same thing.
Mercedes loading zone
What do Steve Jobs, Julia Roberts and Paris Hilton have in common? They drive expensive cars and have been caught parking in handicap spaces without a permit. The familiar blue handicap parking designation with its symbol of a wheelchair can be seen in every public parking lot, but some celebs seem not to notice them. Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc., was caught docking his $130,000 sports car in a handicap slot so often than one wag pasted a Mercedes logo over the wheelchair picture. The Oklahoman reported this week that 12,000 citations for illegal parking in handicap slots were issued in the past two years in Oklahoma City alone. We doubt that many of them were celebrities. Or politicians. Speaking of which, Anthony Steen, a Conservative member of the British Parliament, when caught illegally parking, defended himself by saying, “I should not have parked there and I am sorry for that but there was nowhere else I could go.” This is an old dodge: Many folks believe there are too many handicap slots and most of them are empty most of the time.
Harvest moan
Citizens are reveling in the price for a commodity they can’t do without – gasoline – just as they were grumbling about a price they could do nothing about a few months ago. For farmers and ranchers, commodity prices are a matter of survival. They can do little to control commodity prices and must live with the fact that larger harvests depress prices and lower harvests raise them – just when they have less of a crop to sell. Weather is the “commodity” that no one can control. Oklahoma harvests were generally mediocre last year, the Tulsa World reports, and farmers were often unable to take advantage of higher prices for some crops because of weather. The state’s cotton, corn and hay crops were down in 2008, but wheat, soybeans and peanuts had improved harvests from 2007. Think filling your gas tank was rough last summer? Try making a living when your petroleum-based inputs such as diesel and fertilizer are sky high and the skies are lowering with storm clouds right before harvest.
