#atxcouncil, ProjectConnect: The Ultimate Cautionary Example

Exit 96th st. and Second Ave

"Understanding is a wellspring of life to him who has it.
But the correction of fools is folly."
Proverbs 16:22

We just finished reading "The Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City," by Philip Mark Plotch.  We're not going to do a full book review (although there's a very good one here), because most of the conclusions are obvious.  Nevertheless, for those interested in that level of detail, we strongly recommend Plotch's book.

We snapped the above photo during our recent trip to New York City. We had to see it. Because we never thought it would happen in our lifetime.

Obviously, we’ve all heard horror stories of construction projects taking years, if not decades, longer than anticipated to complete. Ten years. Twenty years. If you’ve been following the subject long enough, you’ve seen the examples.

But how about 113 years?!?

Because that’s how long it took New York City’s second avenue subway line to materialize after being originally proposed.

From the moment the system opened in 1903, a second avenue line was planned. Unfortunately, due to a combination of economic fluctuations, political incompetence, and the general arc of history, it never got done. Finally, in 2017 (ie. Just four years ago), a very truncated version finally came online.

The ‘completed’ version added a mere three stops, from what was originally envisioned as a Bronx to Brooklyn line. This despite the fact that project costs ballooned from an anticipated $300 million to over $4.6 Billion. Thus, did the second avenue subway become one of the most expensive per mile infrastructure projects in American history.

What does this mean for Austin?!?

Austin voters will are being asked to approve a gargantuan tax increase to fund the city council’s light rail proposal. Rail proponents claim their project will cost $7.1 Billion and that construction will take around a decade.

Given council’s long standing lack of credibility, there’s every reason to be skeptical of the numbers they’re selling. Still, it’s impossible to know what the final totals will be. All you know for sure is that the numbers are likely to be much higher.

The Second avenue subway, however, is a real world example where “the numbers are likely to be much higher” means fifteen times the cost and a full century behind schedule.

Bottom Line: We really would be well served to avoid making this obvious and predictable mistake.

Huh?!?

"As a dog returns to his own vomit,
So a fool repeats his folly."
Proverbs 26:11

Umm...ok:

RELEASE: Members of the Cast of Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Larry David, to Reunite to Help Turn Texas Blue

"We’re building the movement necessary to be victorious in 14 days." -- @HinojosaTX

More:https://t.co/ODytKVLHoP pic.twitter.com/2UjdLvSHyj

— Texas Democrats (@texasdemocrats) October 20, 2020

How...strange.

We will confess a certain degree of mixed feelings. Texas politics in general, and the Texas legislature specifically, is ripe for Seinfeld style satire. Done properly, it's potentially brilliant. Heaven knows, we already privately refer to a certain legislator as Kenny Bania.

But let's not kid ourselves: It won't be done properly. And this isn't about ridiculing the legislature. This is about Democrats trying to create buzz through Hollywood because they don't have anything substantive to say.

In that vein, it's completely tone deaf.

It doesn't take a genius to see that Seinfeld has a certain...geographic appeal. And the "geographic appeal" in question is certainly not Texas. While it's certainly the case that this author is a fan of the location in question, we're not exactly turning to them for political advice.

Put differently: Do you think anyone in New York City would care about what Hank Hill thinks?!?

Speaking of Hank Hill, it wouldn't have even been that difficult to do something similar with a Texas theme. King of the Hill. Matthew McConaughey. Heck, Bobby Francis O'Rourke did actual campaign events with Willie Nelson.

But, instead, Texas Democrats are going with George and Elaine from Seinfeld.

OK.

Bottom Line: We'll see how much it ultimately matters, but it's certainly a missed opportunity.

Notorious Pay to Play practitioner endorses Billionaire

"One who increases his possessions by usury and extortion
Gathers it for him who will pity the poor."
Proverbs 28:8

Lolz:

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner endorsed Michael Bloomberg for president, Bloomberg’s campaign announced Thursday morning.

The backing of the mayor of the fourth largest city in America is Bloomberg’s most high profile Texas endorsement yet. It also gives Bloomberg another nod from a prominent black elected official as the billionaire grapples with pushback over his use of “stop and frisk” policies while he was mayor of New York City.

“As mayor, Mike embraced New York’s diversity and made smart investments that brought better infrastructure and greater opportunity to all five boroughs,” Turner, a Democrat, said in a statement released by the campaign. “We need a president who knows how cities run. It’s why I’m proud to endorse Mike for president, and I look forward to sending him to Washington in November.”

This is the point, dear reader, when the value of someone familiar with the inner workings of politics in BOTH New York City and Texas shows itself.

Because, if you know how each of this figures has operated for years, none of this is surprising.

First up, Turner:

Houston's Four Seasons hotel has a pretty pricey breakfast, but the big money on February 16, 2016, had nothing to do with the $19 egg breakfast. Emails from Houston City Hall show Mayor Sylvester Turner was at the Four Seasons that morning with the then-CEO of Kelsey-Seybold, the health clinic's marketing director and their city lobbyist for a breakfast meeting at 8 in the morning.

By 9 a.m., the meeting was over and an email from the lobbyist to the mayor's secretary says it "went very well."

The day went well for the Mayor's campaign, too. City records show on that very day the mayor's campaign reported $81,350 in donations from more than 120 Kelsey-Seybold doctors and executives. The campaign could've received the checks anytime between when Turner was sworn in and when he ate with the Kelsey team. When 13 Investigates looked the donor's names up in city databases, we found 87 percent of them had never given to a city political candidate ever before.

Michael Wynne, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney described the donations as "very, very unusual." Wynne is a former federal prosecutor who handled cases dealing with campaign donations. He now works to defend people accused of breaking those laws. He's not supporting anyone in Houston's mayoral race.

After reviewing the donations, Wynne told 13 Investigates, "In this instance, the number of people who had never been involved in the political circus whatsoever, all of a sudden decide to get involved. I think it's something that demands a little more scrutiny."

Meanwhile, Bloomberg:

The foundation of Bloomberg’s imperial mayoralty is, obviously, money. He’s used his vast personal fortune—$17.5 billion at last Forbes estimate—relentlessly and creatively to reverse the standard political dynamic: Instead of the special interests’ buying off the politicians, the city’s top politician has bought off the special interests. Money has allowed him to create the Bloomberg Party, whose clubhouse is the business elite and whose field troops are enlisted issue by issue. Bloomberg employs large segments of the city’s political class, directly and indirectly, and his philanthropy, often done in secret, gives him a very large circle of friends. Opposing him can be an exceedingly lonely occupation.

....

Bloomberg has certainly deepened the financial bond—or dependency—through the strategic use of his checkbook. His charitable contributions have increased exponentially from when he first decided to run for mayor. In 1999, he gave away $47 million; last year, the figure was $235 million. Some of the money is funneled through the Carnegie Corporation, as supposedly anonymous gifts. Last year, 542 New York charities and nonprofits received $60 million of such gifts.

Money is a stealth weapon in Bloomberg’s political arsenal. And, as fund-raiser-in-chief, the mayor can leverage his own giving by tapping his well-heeled associates. “The mayor has an enormous influence in charity, and he does so much of it anonymously,” Rubenstein says. “I talk to some of the institutions who are clients and I say, ‘Why don’t you appeal to the mayor for money?’ They say, ‘What do you mean, appeal? He’s been funding us for years!’ I just had that discussion a couple of days ago with one of my museum clients.”

Bloomberg has also ramped up his purely political spending. Some of it is surreptitious: In 2008, three of Bloomberg’s closest friends and business associates suddenly wrote checks for $50,000 to the Working Families Party. The money was then steered to State Senate candidate Daniel Squadron, who’d won Bloomberg’s endorsement in a race to unseat a longtime incumbent

This is a classic case of baksheesh.

Bottom Line: This morning's announcement should surprise nobody who's followed the respective careers of Sylvester Turner and Michael Bloomberg.

-------

Note: That being said, it would be pretty funny is somebody asked Bloomberg and Turner about the Astros cheating scandal.

Texas Monthly's DERP SQUAD Apparently Unaware that Taxes Impact Cost of Living

"But the former governors who were before me laid burdens on the people, and took from them bread and wine, besides forty shekels of silver. Yes, even their servants bore rule over the people, but I did not do so, because of the fear of God."
Nehemiah 5:15

It's not a secret that this author grew up in New York City.  Or that cost of living issues played a significant role in why we moved to Texas.  Thus this Texas Monthly piece a few weeks back caught our interest:

This is, obviously, a self-evidently moronic statement to anyone who's spent more than fifteen minutes in either city.

Nevertheless, we were curious about what statistical sleight-of-hand they'd used to come up with such a preposterous conclusion.

Our friends at Economics21.org looked deeper:

The CBC report includes property taxes in the cost of housing for homeowners and expresses housing and transit costs as a percentage of before-tax rather than after-tax median income. Therefore, the CBC’s methodology will overstate the burden of housing costs in areas where property taxes are an unusually large portion of overall tax revenue. As it turns out, Texas is exactly such a place.

Property taxes in Texas are high. In Harris County, which includes most of the Houston metropolitan area, the effective tax rate is 2.31%—in the top five percent of all counties in the United States and about three times the average effective rate of 0.8% in New York City proper. (New York’s convoluted system of property assessment gives many wealthy homeowners even bigger breaks on property taxes: Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, owns two $2 million townhouses on which he pays property taxes of 0.2%.)

Texans, however, enjoy much lower taxes than New Yorkers in other domains. The state has no income tax, for example, whereas state income taxes in New York range from 4% to 8.82%. According to the Tax Foundation, in 2010, property taxes accounted for 45.2% of total state and local tax receipts in Texas but just 32.4% in New York state (most of which has higher property tax rates than the city). New Yorkers also pay for most of the costs of their public transit through tax subsidies, which come out of residents’ taxes but isn’t counted as a transportation expense in the CBC report.

Derp.

Also this:

Even after these questionable methodological choices, the CBC still finds that living in Houston costs less in absolute dollars. But as a percentage of income, New York, which has a higher average household income, is cheaper. This is true, but the lesson that Texas Monthly draws by implication—that workers moving from New York to Houston would see their incomes drop by more than enough to offset the lower cost of living—rests on a false inference that ignores the differences between the two regions’ economies.

The New York metropolitan area has a high average income because it is unusually filled with skilled professionals who could earn high incomes anywhere; meanwhile, the region’s high housing prices have driven lower-income workers to leave. The Houston region, on the other hand, has a proportionally larger working-class population. This difference is reflected partially in educational attainment figures: 38.7 percent of NYC residents aged 25 and above had a BA or higher, compared to just 31.8 in Houston. Therefore, if a worker earning an average salary in New York left for Houston, he would quite likely earn well above Houston’s average income.

The perils of the CBC’s income adjustments are exemplified by the fact that the San Jose area, where small bungalows sell for a million dollars or more, had the third lowest housing expenses relative to income. This is largely because San Jose is filled with extremely high-earning technology workers: the average household income in the region is above $124,000. But if you’re not a computer programmer, you would be foolish to think that you could save money on housing costs by moving to San Jose.

Double Derp.

[Note: The Econ 21 piece has links to their data that are worth exploring.  Unfortunately, we can't directly copy them due to formatting issues.  We strongly recommend reading the whole thing, and clicking through some of the links, here.]

In other words, Texas Monthly's claim was accurate...except for every single detail.

Bottom Line: Houston certainly has some things New York City lacks.  Cheating-ass baseball teams first and foremost.  A higher cost of living, however, is not one of those things.

A trip to Yankee Stadium, and a renewed appreciation for Chris Del Conte

"When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice;
But when a wicked man rules, the people groan."
Proverbs 29:2

For anyone who follows this author on social media, it's not exactly a secret where we were or what we were doing during our week not publishing.

During our NYC trip, attending five separate games at Yankee stadium, we were repeatedly struck by a thought: How much the Yankee Stadium gameday experience reminds of Texas...2 to 3 years ago.

They didn't do anything "wrong," per se, but it still left us feeling nickeled, dimed, and underappreciated.

Of course, it wasn't that long ago you could say the same thing about Texas.  Then Chris Del Conte arrived, with a renewed commitment to fans and the gameday experience.  The results were instant.  A year and a half later, the fan base is more stoked than they've been in ages!!!

In 2005/2006, before we moved, the Yankees were the hottest ticket in town.  Today, despite having a better team, people are kinda "meh."  The difference is the attitude of the people in charge.

However, with an attitude adjustment and the right personnel, fan perception can change very quickly.

Bottom Line: Fans actually spend more money when they're not being nickled and dimed.  Texas eventually realized that.  Will the Yankees?!?

Chip Roy will LOSE if he campaigns against "Hollywood and Manhattan elites"

"that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting,"
Ephesians 4:14

It's not a secret that Wendy Davis is probably running against Chip Roy; unfortunately, Chip's opening salvo is depressing beyond words:



This is an idiotic strategy that is doomed to fail.

NOBODY.  CARES.

Or at least: No swing voter or soft partisan in CD-21 cares.  CD-21 is Austin, San Antonio, and the Hill Country.  Swing voters/Soft partisans in CD-21 are the type of people who travel to places like New York City and Southern California.  They might not like the policies of those places, but they will roll their eyes at this sort of nonsense.

Campaigning against "Hollywood" is intellectually-lazy claptrap.  It's a dying playbook.  We strongly suspect that, in Austin, San Antonio, and the Hill Country, it's already dead.  If anything, it will produce negative returns.

Bottom Line: This is the stupidest political attack since Ted Cruz's campaign went after hair dye....

#atxcouncil: Guy who attempted to BAN BBQ "BBQ Shames" Another City....

"The hypocrite with his mouth destroys his neighbor,
But through knowledge the righteous will be delivered."
Proverbs 11:9

Seriously?!?



Obviously, Brooklyn attempting to compete with Texas over BBQ was dumb.  That would be like Texas attempting to compete with Brooklyn over Pizza.  Just not happening.

But, allow us to suggest that Mayor Adler might not be the best messenger to deliver that message.

Austin City Council Agenda, April 2, 2015:

You can learn more about that particularly "glorious" incident in the Austin City Council's recent history here.

Bottom Line: We don't begrudge any Texas politician who wants to have fun at Brooklyn's expense over this BBQ kerfuffle...except the four members of the Austin City Council who co-sponsored the 'ban BBQ' resolution less than three years ago.

#atxcouncil: #TroxRox two wins while Adler suffers multiple setbacks....

"Therefore keep the words of this covenant, and do them, that you may prosper in all that you do."
Deuteronomy 29:9

OK, before we go any further, we have to discuss last thursday's council meeting.  Ellen Troxclair passed two items UNANIMOUSLY.  Mayor Adler, meanwhile, saw his latest complicated real estate scheme receive an...unenthusiastic reaction.

Troxclair's first success was an item to increase employment opportunities for the homeless population by partnering with local non-profits.  It would pay panhandlers to do currently unmet maintenance work for the city instead of begging in the street.  This is similar to a very successful early welfare reform measure that Rudy Giuliani implemented in New York City.  We had yet to arrive when this item was considered, but by all accounts it went well.  You can learn more about the program here.

Item #60 was Troxclair's item to redirect a portion of hotel occupancy taxes away from corporate welfare and towards maintenance of city parks.  This was a small, tangible, step for council to take in using existing funds to cover core services without asking the taxpayers for more.  We testified as such:



But here's where things get interesting: Kathie Tovo was a co-sponsor!  Beyond that, Save our Springs also testified in favor!  For this website to testify on the same side of an issue as Kathie Tovo and Save our Springs just proves that if you live long enough, anything is possible.

As for Adler, he clearly sees this new policy as a threat to his convention center expansion scheme.  He offered an amendment to gut the policy at the beginning of discussion, but following public testimony he withdrew that amendment and offered another to conduct a study alongside the new policy.  Troxclair accepted Adler's second amendment, solidifying Adler's cave.

Speaking of Adler's convention center expansion scheme, that was the subject of Item #101.  This proposal is a hot mess of bad ideas, including tax increases and wildly unfair corporate welfare mechanisms we think should be abolished at the state level.  While the state level question is an issue for another day, we certainly don't think Austin should expand this practice locally.  Then there's the fact that seemingly every city in the country is expanding their convention centers (eg. Vegas is about to put a football stadium in theirs), which renders this project a fools errand in pursuit of an arms race we can never win.

And that's pretty much what we said:



In Adler's second setback of the night, council took no action on the item and postponed consideration until September 28.

They also took testimony on the budget and the tax rate, but we didn't stick around after we finished testifying on Adler's item at 10:30.

Finally, we have to comment on a representative from the hotel industry who took the opposite position we did on the two issues.  That means they testified against using existing funds to cover core services then testified for a tax increase on their own industry.  We're sure that has nothing to do with the big hotel chains protecting themselves from competition.

Bottom Line: Long day, but good one.

#TXLEGE: "Save MUNY" bill refuses to die....

We apologize for the blurry picture, but that's actually a good metaphor for the revival of this bill.

"Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things? Or is your eye evil because I am good?!?"
Matthew 20:15

[Note: The hearing can be viewed here, our testimony is just after the one hour mark.]

It's not often we testify in a committee hearing on the same side of an issue as Greg Fenves and the Texas Exes, but such is the nature of an obscure land dispute in West Austin in which the legislature has inexplicably chosen to involve itself.  We had thought this one was dead.  But late yesterday afternoon, the House Land and Resource management committee announced a hearing on short notice.

We outlined the reasons for our opposition to SB 822 when it was heard in the Senate back in March.  The short version is that UT is sitting on an extraordinarily valuable tract of land in West Austin, which UT has occasionally considered selling to residential/mixed use developers.  In a city with a chronic housing shortage, keeping this option on the table seems prudent; unfortunately, that prudence exists alongside some dirty local Austin politics.

At this morning's hearing, UT and their representatives (led by Fenves) testified that it was in the interest of everyone involved to respect the wishes of the original donor.  Furthermore, they testified that this could lead to remittance clauses being inserted into all future gifts, but not just gifts to them.  Thus, there could be unintended consequences in any number of areas where a future legislature might invent a future jurisdictional claim.  But here's the thing [Note: we can't believe we're about to say this]: UT's argument isn't entirely crazy.  Who's to say how a future legislature in 10 or 20 years would interpret this action?!?  Does the legislature really want to create this precedent?!?  Tread carefully....

As to our personal testimony: we gave the same schpiel we give any time the "Save MUNY" issue comes up.  In a city with a chronic housing shortage, it strikes us as absurd to place artificial restrictions on prime real estate that presently hosts a golf course.  If UT wants to sell this particular tract of land to developers...that would be a good thing!

Rep. Ernest Bailes attempted to obfuscate by asking a straw-man question about whether we would apply the same logic to Central Park in New York City.  While Bailes question was a curveball we didn't expect, we replied that midtown Manhattan doesn't have the 6000-square foot lot size requirements that Central Austin has, and that his question was irrelevant as long as that distinction applies.  That being said, having had a few hours to digest Rep. Bailes question, if we were offered the deal of leaving the Muny tract alone in exchange for upzoning the surrounding neighborhood...we would take it.

Making matters worse: Lyle Larson (who's carrying the bill in the House), used his closing argument as an opportunity to throw Wallace Hall under the bus.  Rather than addressing the issues, Larson reminded the committee of his role in the Wallace Hall impeachment and reminded the room "I have been sued by a UT regent."  If there weren't already enough reasons to shoot this bill down on the merits, hearing the bill sponsor cite his role in that disgraceful fiasco makes us oppose it all the more.

Bottom Line: We hope this bill dies....

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Note: During the Senate hearing, we criticized the Texas Exes for their lack of attention to this issue; giving credit where it's due, they had a significant presence at today's hearing.

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Revelation 18:9-24 -- The Fall of Commercial Babylon

The World Mourns Babylon’s Fall
“The kings of the earth who committed fornication and lived luxuriously with her will weep and lament for her, when they see the smoke of her burning, standing at a distance for fear of her torment, saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come.’

“And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise anymore: merchandise of gold and silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen and purple, silk and scarlet, every kind of citron wood, every kind of object of ivory, every kind of object of most precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble; and cinnamon and incense, fragrant oil and frankincense, wine and oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and bodies and souls of men. The fruit that your soul longed for has gone from you, and all the things which are rich and splendid have gone from you, and you shall find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, who became rich by her, will stand at a distance for fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, and saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city that was clothed in fine linen, purple, and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls! For in one hour such great riches came to nothing.’ Every shipmaster, all who travel by ship, sailors, and as many as trade on the sea, stood at a distance and cried out when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, ‘What is like this great city?’

“They threw dust on their heads and cried out, weeping and wailing, and saying, ‘Alas, alas, that great city, in which all who had ships on the sea became rich by her wealth! For in one hour she is made desolate.’

“Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you holy apostles and prophets, for God has avenged you on her!”

Finality of Babylon’s Fall
 Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, “Thus with violence the great city Babylon shall be thrown down, and shall not be found anymore. The sound of harpists, musicians, flutists, and trumpeters shall not be heard in you anymore. No craftsman of any craft shall be found in you anymore, and the sound of a millstone shall not be heard in you anymore. The light of a lamp shall not shine in you anymore, and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall not be heard in you anymore. For your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your sorcery all the nations were deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets and saints, and of all who were slain on the earth.”
Revelation 18:9-24

Pastor Danny Forshee.  Great Hills Baptist Church.  August 9, 2015:

Commercial Babylon, Part 2 - Dr. Danny Forshee - August 9, 2015 from Great Hills Baptist Church on Vimeo.

Outline:

1. Remorse (vv. 9-19)
   A. The Leaders (they had committed fornication).
   B. The Merchants.
   C. The Mariners.
   
2. Rejoice (v. 20)- Isaiah 5:20
   - God has avenged His people.
   
3. Retribution (vv. 21-24)
   - John 3:19

Highlights:

• The God who created everything will consecrate everything, and He is in control.

• Greed, opulence, and wealth all come to naught.

• Babylon's gonna make Donald Trump look 'miniscule.'

• There's nothing wrong with having wealth, the problem is worshiping it.

• Sin cannot win and Faith cannot fail...if you love Babylon, you are following a lost cause.

• Lots of Sex Trafficking right here in Austin.

• People loves to get all worked up over the internet outrage du jour, but our society doesn't seem to care about children being torn up in their Mama's womb.

• Since we know that this is truth, what are we going to do about it?!?

• Belivers need both confidence AND compassion.

• God vindicates the blood of His people.

• "The Devil was working on me, until...."

Derek Jeter was temporary; Jesus is Eternal!!!

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal."
Matthew 6:19-20

#FarewellCaptain; "Well, the script is there, the last page is in Derek's Hands":



Michael Kay said it best: "Where fantasy becomes reality."

It's impossible to do justice to my love for Derek Jeter.  He's my favorite.  He always has been and he always will be.  Unfortunately, there's a dirty secret.  Jeter's baseball success was always temporary.

And isn't that just the dirty little secret of life: Success on this side of Heaven, even if you're Derek Jeter, is always temporary.

I never expected Derek Jeter's retirement to put "worldly treasures" in perspective, yet here we are.  I'm stuck with the fact that five world championships out of 19 years eventually came to an end.  Suffice to say, if you'd offered me the deal "Derek Jeter will play 19 seasons and win championships in 1 out of 4 of them" in 1994 I would have taken it.

But still...those 19 years came to an end.

Yet the resurrection is eternal.

Every one of us is separated from God.  Every one of us needs a savior.  Derek Jeter's heroism tonight proves nothing except the fact that the good guys eventually retire.  Yet, eternity continues to concern everyone.  Yankee fans, like all Americans, would be well served to trust in Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior....

Urban Affordability: How "Progressive" governance Kneecaps middle class families

"Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord,
But a just weight is His delight."
Proverbs 11:1

3 fantastic articles on how big government at the local level ALWAYS begets higher cost of living and fewer jobs at lower pay.

First up is City Journal on the cautionary tale that is NYC:

Throughout his speech, de Blasio said little about what he thought was causing the city to get so unaffordable for so many. If he’d been honest with himself, though, he would have to see the very government that he leads—and the expansion of which he enthusiastically supports—as a major contributor to the economic difficulties of the city’s non-wealthy, especially middle-class families. From its arcane regulatory regime to the nosebleed taxes and fees it imposes on firms and individuals—usually amplifying similar measures radiating out from the state government in Albany—New York City government drives up the cost of living and working in the city dramatically, making it harder for ordinary New Yorkers to get ahead. Unfortunately, the mayor’s policy agenda—demanding that businesses grant employees paid sick leave and compelling real-estate developers “to build affordable homes for everyday people,” among other steps—will only make the problem worse.

[Author's Note: Emphasis added]

....

A recent New York Times story, summing up research on urban income differences, noted that income inequality “is closely tied with the availability of affordable housing.” Places where housing becomes very expensive, the report observed, tend to hemorrhage middle-class residents and instead become communities made up primarily of the rich, who can afford stratospheric housing prices, and the poor, who can get government housing subsidies. And New York, according to information from real-estate website Trulia that the Times cited, has the highest housing prices, relative to incomes, of any American city except San Francisco. In New York, the typical middle-class family can afford only about a quarter of available homes, the data suggest.

....

Yet de Blasio neglected to mention a far more significant reason that housing is so pricey in New York: it’s incredibly expensive to build in the city. Perhaps the most comprehensive examination of New York construction costs is a 2005 study by three policy experts from the New York City School of Law, released under the auspices of New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. The report found that the price tag for building a 15-story, multiunit apartment building in New York had become the highest of any city in America (San Francisco was second).

....

Needless to say, the expense pushes up rental rates in the city’s unregulated apartments. A 2010 study by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development estimated that covering the cost of financing, building, and operating a new apartment building in New York City, including taxes, required a minimum rent for its units of $2,100 per month. To live comfortably with such rent, a family would need an income of at least $86,000. Further, developers become understandably unwilling to construct apartment buildings where they can’t be assured of such rent premiums. The high construction costs result not only in inflated rents in new buildings, therefore, but in an overall shortage of housing, which drives up the price of already-constructed unregulated units.

And it’s New York’s tentacular state and local government that helps make it so wildly expensive to build. The NYU study found a host of government policies that drive construction prices higher. For starters, city agencies responsible for overseeing and regulating building were often openly hostile to new construction, the study discovered. “The Buildings Department is still one of the major drivers of the high cost of housing in New York City, rather than an agency dedicated to reducing expense and facilitating development,” the report observed. Even experienced builders, the study found, now typically employed well-paid “expediters” to move their projects through the city’s foot-dragging approval process, adding an average cost of about $200,000 per building.

Taxes and fees tied specifically to development—many of them rare in other cities—are another factor in Gotham’s sky-high building costs. For example, New York levies a transfer tax on land when a developer buys a plot, and then a mortgage-recording tax when a builder borrows to finance his project. And the builder faces significant sales taxes on construction materials, too. For a hypothetical New York apartment building, going up on a plot of land bought for, say, $5 million, real-estate, mortgage, and sales taxes would add $1.6 million to the development price tag.

New York’s local and state elected officials also write laws and codes that curry favor with various special interests with a financial stake in development, raising prices higher still. Litigation-friendly New York State makes it easy to sue builders and developers, for instance, which benefits construction-worker unions and trial lawyers, two powerful Albany lobbies, but makes insurance on the construction of an apartment building as much as 8 percent to 10 percent of total costs—twice the national average. The Scaffold Law may be the most striking example of this kind of legislation. Unique in the country, it mandates that a developer or contractor is completely liable if an employee gets injured on a job site, even if worker negligence played a role. Even workers found to be drunk on the job have won big judgments.

Another costly government barrier to building is the city’s excessive fondness for historic preservation. Initiated in the mid-1960s as a way of protecting truly exceptional structures—a fallout from the unfortunate demolition of the original Penn Station—the city’s landmarking process has morphed over time into a way for local activists and progressive politicians to stymie development of any new construction in neighborhoods often all but devoid of historic value. Nowadays, notes Harvard economist and City Journal contributing editor Edward Glaeser, nearly 16 percent of buildable land in Manhattan resides in historic-preservation districts, and about half of it is largely off-limits to development. (See “Preservation Follies,” Spring 2010.) In a city desperately needing housing construction, the preservation districts lost an average of 46 units of housing per tract during the 1990s, according to Glaeser’s research. Not surprisingly, the cost of housing in these districts has risen substantially faster than in other areas of the city.

The authors of the NYU study calculate that easing or eliminating the impediments that they identified could reduce housing construction expenses by 19 percent to 25 percent—a massive savings. Further, they add, these figures “likely underestimate the full impact of the recommendations because they do not take into account the supply effects of the proposals to make additional land available for residential use.” If enacted, the changes could cause rents to fall by as much as 26 percent, the authors projected.

....

“My name is Matiur,” a landlord who owns a rent-regulated building with six apartments in Queens testified to the rent board last year. “I moved to the United States from Bangladesh 36 years ago and have owned my building since 1997. Unfortunately, low rents [including one apartment that rents for just $280 a month] make it impossible for me to maintain my building.” Landlords worry about the city’s rising taxes on multiunit residences—increases that outpace rents. Since 2003, property-tax collections in the city have soared from $9.9 billion to $19.8 billion, thanks to rising assessments and a major tax increase engineered by the Bloomberg administration. As landlord Michael Vinocur said at a rent hearing last year, “My taxes are 80 percent higher now than five years ago, and my rent revenues have gone up less than 20 percent.”

....

New York puts additional pressure on residents and businesses through its extraordinarily high taxes, which ripple throughout the economy and raise prices for everyone, “everyday people” included.

....

New York imposes other strains on non-wealthy residents in the form of additional heavy business taxes and fees and intrusive business regulations. These measures curb job growth—above all, in middle-income occupations—and make it tough for new firms in the city to survive, let alone flourish and provide their owners with an entrepreneurial route to the middle class. The IBO study found that New York levies business taxes at nearly double the average found in other big cities—$1.06 per $100 in taxable income, compared with 55 cents per $100.

....

Companies remain willing to keep their highest-paid executives in New York because those workers thrive in a global business capital, and low-income jobs for unskilled workers follow because the city still needs service workers—those employed by restaurants, retailers, and hotels—to provide basic amenities. But companies derive little payoff from keeping middle-income jobs in pricey New York when technology allows them to situate these positions in less expensive locales....Average pay in Manhattan for a financial-services job is now $246,000 annually; in New Jersey, the securities industry is more of an upper-middle-income business, with average pay at $97,600 annually.

It’s also incredibly cumbersome to start a business in New York City. A recent study by the finance site WalletHub.com ranked New York a discouraging 126th out of America’s 150 largest cities in the ease of launching a firm. A recent World Bank report noted that a would-be entrepreneur needs to obtain six permits, on average, to start a new venture in the United States (compared with just one in business-friendly New Zealand). But according to NYC Business Express, he’d need ten—six local and four from the state—to open, say, a simple office-supply business in the city. A study by the Kauffman Foundation and Thumbtack.com gave New York City a D for welcoming entrepreneurs.

All these impositions and requirements snuff out growth and opportunity. The NYC Jobs Blueprint study released by the Partnership for New York City last September estimated that it costs 50 percent more to build a business in Gotham than in the U.S. in general. One consequence, the study pointed out, is that New York businesses aren’t “scaling up”—that is, they’re not growing larger at an encouraging rate. Between 2003 and 2010, New York City saw no rise in the number of firms with 50 or more employees. Another worrisome sign: the city experienced a net loss during that time span of so-called tradable companies—firms in industries with the capacity to do business outside the five boroughs, and hence possessing the largest growth potential. “Because companies in a high-growth mode need all available resources to invest in people, New York is less attractive as a job expansion location than lower cost alternatives,” the study observed.

....

Putting still another strain on ordinary citizens, New York’s government pushes up the prices at establishments that do business directly with consumers, such as retailers and restaurants. For decades, the city’s politicians have tended to meddle in these industries for their own political aims, often keeping out disfavored firms and squelching competition....A 2009 study by the Bloomberg administration estimated that New York needed 100 more supermarkets to serve its residents adequately and was losing $1 billion in sales a year as shoppers left the city to buy food.

New York’s political class has similarly thwarted the efforts of America’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, to open a branch in the city. Elected officials, many backed by labor organizations, have justified denying permits to the firm by charging that it exploits working people and ruins neighborhood prosperity. “Wal-Mart has blazed a path of economic and social destruction in towns throughout the U.S,” then-congressman Anthony Weiner told the New York Times in 2005. New Yorkers, however, think far more highly of the retailer. In 2012, the company says, basing its finding on credit-card receipts, city residents spent a staggering $215 million at its New York metropolitan area stores outside the city. And surveys show that New Yorkers overwhelmingly want the stores, with their low prices and broad selection.

The higher prices that inevitably result from these restrictions on commerce are a substantial burden to ordinary New Yorkers, who can’t regularly leave to shop in the suburbs.

....

All these factors—the expensive housing, fat tax bills, and high prices—have a direct and powerful effect on people’s daily lives. In a 2008 City Journal article, Glaeser calculated that, after including the costs of housing, taxes, and transportation, the average Houston family wound up with 50 percent more income to spend than the average New York family. The difference in real dollars: about $32,000 in spendable money for the typical Houston family, compared with just $21,000 for the New York family. (See “Houston, New York Has a Problem,” Summer 2008.) In a similar study of median incomes adjusted for cost of living in 50 metro areas, City Journal contributing editor Joel Kotkin and the Praxis Strategy Group’s Mark Schill determined that Houston workers enjoyed the nation’s highest effective pay: the annual average Houston salary of $67,279 was worth $75,256 when adjusted for the city’s lower-than-average cost of living. By contrast, in New York, the average annual salary of a worker, $77,640 on an unadjusted basis, shrank to $50,169 when corrected for the city’s high costs—above all, housing and taxes (see Figure 4). That left New York a poor 41st among metro areas in average annual effective pay.

 Next we have Max Borders:

Some people think cool cities are just expensive. And advocates of smart growth think the cool draws people and the growth has to be “managed.” Those who live there are happy to tolerate the planners for all sorts of reasons, but signaling one’s ideological bona fides is surely high among them. There is also the (generally unstated) desire to curb the growth—that is, to keep out the newbies before they ruin everything. Your favorite dive bar could become a chain restaurant, god forbid. And many well-heeled urbanites will go without cars and cram themselves into all manner of tiny dwellings to indulge environmental self-congratulation.

Smart growth thus becomes a catch-all: a cluster concept for socially engineering your way to bourgeois bohemia and treating everything in town as the property of an enlightened elite (which every self-respecting progressive goes along with lest she be considered unenlightened, or worse, not a member of said elite).

If they’re being honest with themselves, however, denizens of such places have to admit there is not only a growing gap between rich and poor in these towns, but a disappearing middle class. Much of this gap in San Francisco, for example, comes from the fact that some of the largest companies in the world are headquartered there, even among folks who self-identify as progressives. That’s a lot of rich people.

....

U cities

I shamelessly borrow the term “U city” from entrepreneur Gary Hoover, who is used to doing business in developing countries where a lot of the major cities are U cities. Here’s the idea: When you have a strong middle class, the population—when mapped on a curve—looks more or less like an inverted U (X is the number of people, Y is the level of income.) But the inverted U can get flipped to a regular U when, for example, the middle class starts to leave, the rich come and stay, and the poor are trapped by incentives. U cities predominate in the third world, primarily due to rampant cronyism—which limits possibilities for a middle class to emerge. In the United States cronyism is a factor, too. But so also are urban planning and growth management policies.

Smart growth

To understand how wealth disparities worsen in cities like these, we have to look at clusters of policies that go under the name "smart growth." They aren’t the only policies that create U cities, but these three areas drive the U city pattern, so they’re a good place to start the conversation:

• strict zoning regulations and building codes 

• rent control and low-income housing subsidies 

• rail investments preferred over roads

These three points alone suffice to set any city on the path to being a U city. (Austin, where I live, is trending that way.)

[A]dd in strict zoning regulations and building codes. In a relatively free housing market, the cost of creating new housing supply is generally far lower. So, for example, city planners don’t have to approve a townhome or building for mixed use, declare it residential only, or whatever—if it can be built at all. Not so in areas with byzantine building codes and zoning. In these areas the stock of housing is limited and restricted to certain areas of the city. Of course, this makes housing far more expensive. Now, that’s okay for wealthier people. Indeed, they’re content with paying more. Once they’re there, they really like the idea that not so many more people are moving into the area. If you’re a middle-class earner, this makes life considerably more difficult as housing is far less affordable.

....

By now the progressive town fathers have likely picked up on the fact that this is happening. So they expand or maintain policies like rent control and subsidized housing for the poor. Poor people who’ve been there for a while cling to their rent-controlled or subsidized housing—as is reasonable to do given the incentives (but which sadly represents another “poverty trap” for the poor.) Of course, basic economics tells us that rent control exacerbates the problems of a limited housing supply, as developers have far fewer incentives to build properties and tenants have great incentives to stay put. The rental market is therefore less dynamic and the price controls distort the housing market even more—further limiting the availability of affordable housing. Non-rental properties may get built. But as we say, their supply is artificially limited, too, so these are reserved for tech execs.

....

For conscientious social signalers in progressive cities, the only thing that’s going to pull them out of their Priuses is rail transit. The trouble is, light rail is really, really (really) expensive. In fact, on average, rail transit is four times more expensive than driving per passenger mile, according to Cato transportation analyst Randall O’Toole.

Not only is light rail profoundly wasteful in cost-efficiency terms, it means resources that could have gone to increasing road capacity or building bus networks are lost (not that buses benefit town cronies). People who idealize walkable cities are simply kidding themselves, as most people drive their cars anyway and grumble about the awful commuting times—which new rail line thruways end up making worse.

Now, let’s not forget that rail is an expensive proposition. To give you an example of just how expensive it is, consider that the average U.S. light rail rider only pays in his/her fare about 10 percent of the total cost of the ride. Boosters rarely bring up costs, and cost overruns always plague such projects once voters take the bait. The people who do use rail don’t see or feel the budgetary nightmares their (in most cases, mostly empty) train cars create.

That’s because a lot of the costs get shifted onto people who will never see or take light rail in their lives—people who live in cities without rail, or people who live in rural areas. So much of the tax burden for these rolling pyramids falls disproportionately on the poor and middle class. After all, funding for such projects—even if they benefit rich, urban progressives—comes from sales and property taxes (which are not progressive taxes).

....

Now what about inverted-U cities? We could call these “fried-egg” cities, but that’s not terribly sexy. I prefer “galaxy cities” for obvious reasons. The idea behind galaxy cities is that, all things equal, you’ll not only get a fat bell of a middle class on the graph, but you’ll also get a galactic distribution of housing options if you look from above. Some call this sprawl, because more affordable housing extends outward from a denser core, phasing out at the periphery after the suburbs and exurbs. Not-so-obvious reasons for the galaxy metaphor include dynamics that have been unpacked in the work of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a group that studies all sorts of phenomena in complex systems.

....

Future cities

Galaxy cities of the future will be far smarter than any city that adopts smart growth, as galaxy cities will do the following:

Eliminate unreasonable zoning restrictions and costly building codes. Some believe that cities without zoning laws and building codes will have collapsing structures and factories moving in next to residential housing. It would take us too far afield to explain why free prices and a robust system of common law would help settle conflicts that might arise from the absence of zoning and municipal codes. Suffice it to say that with prices undistorted, property rights well established, and municipal courts using tort principles to settle disputes, cities will continue to find equilibria that will make galaxy cities far more hospitable to people across the income spectrum (especially the middle class). And if, god forbid, poor or middle-class people have to live in the same zone as a warehouse, at least they’ll be able to afford it.

Get rid of rent control and, instead, voucherize housing for the poor. Assuming full privatization of housing is not politically viable, then cities should simply get rid of government housing projects and rent control. Instead, the municipal government can offer housing vouchers for the poor based on an income scale specific to that city’s cost of living.

Think of any given citizen as needing to go to any given point in the city. Instead of going from point A to point G—with only points B, C, D, E, F in between—galaxy cities will build travel networks that assume people want to get from point A to point n (read: “any point among millions”) as quickly, efficiently, and safely as possible. To accommodate galaxy-city travelers, they will create distributed networks and vascular systems. And until there are flying cars, these systems will be built around cars. There are a number of great ways to build car-centric systems:

• Remove regulations against ride-sharing technologies, such as Uber and Lyft; 

• Prepare for the coming age of driverless cars (We have the technology!); 

• Convert as many intersections as possible to traffic circles; 

• Optimize traffic lights using computer modeling; 

• Use congestion pricing and hot lanes, where possible; 

• Liberalize and privatize all bus and van services; 

• End municipal transport and taxi cartels; 

• Let resources follow cars rather than hoping cars (or people) follow resources; 

• Respect the urban ecosystem as it is rather than as you would hope for it to be.

The extent to which planning for transportation is a market-based phenomenon is the extent to which cities will become more convenient, cost-effective, and dynamic for everyone.

 Finally, Ross Kecseg of Empower Texans details the situation closer to home:

Texas still has the second highest, per person local debt in the United States. And although it appears that the growth over the last twelve months has slowed when compared to past years, the long-term trajectory is alarming.

So which local governments are borrowing on your behalf?

Cities and school districts are the largest taxing, borrowing and spending entities, making up two-thirds of the overall debt burden.

....

Although necessary in some cases, debt financing is an extremely expensive way to pay for government services. Although Texans have received $200 billion in tangible assets for local government entities, they will pay an additional $128 billion in interest expense alone; a tangible cost without a tangible benefit.

In other words, taxpayers will pay $328 billion for only $200 billion in actual benefits.

 Each of the articles is worth reading in full; see here, and here, and here.

Rick Perry meets David Asman in NYC

"Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea the son of Elah, king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz, king of Judah, began to reign. He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abi the daughter of Zechariah. And he did what was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father David had done."
2 Kings 18:1-3

During his recent NYC trip, Governor Perry sat down with Cahnman's Musings' old family friend David Asman to discuss economics and Texas' recent success:



Highlights:

• 30% of jobs in the last decade were in Texas.

• "You don't see tech companies moving to New York."

• Texas has the 3rd highest graduation rates in the country.

• Note: We have to laugh when Perry talks about accountability in government schools, considering that he helped gut accountability in the government schools last session.

• We agree 100% with Perry on immigration.

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For some reason, the video player isn't loading; if you want to watch the video, you can follow the link.

Rick Perry Tells Cuomo and DiBlasio to Pound Sand

"He trusted in the Lord God of Israel, so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor who were before him."
2 Kings 18:5

Following a suggestion we made late last year, Governor Perry is in NYC this week; Breitbart Texas reports:

New York City will get a brief taste of Lone Star State economics, as Texas Governor Rick Perry travels there to speak to various business leaders. TexasOne is hosting a reception from April 22-24, focused around Texas' pro-business policies and their positive effects on companies.

A press release from Perry's office stated that the governor plans to tout "Texas' message of low taxes, smart regulations, and job creation" during his brief stay in New York City.

TexasOne aims to market Texas "nationally and internationally as a prime business destination."

Indeed, Texas has consistently been ranked as one of the nation's best place to start a business and find a job. Perry's release pointed to a recent CNBC survey, which polled over 700 CEOs, has ranked Texas as the best U.S. state in which to conduct business for nine consecutive years.

Breitbart Texas has reported extensively on Texas' booming economy, which continues to extend into numerous industries.

....

Meanwhile, New York is home to one of the least business-friendly environments. CNBC ranked the state as the 49th best state to conduct business in.

It is not surprising that the Big Apple is rapidly losing inhabitants to Texan cities. Breitbart Texas previously reported on new data released by the federal government which shows that people from America's biggest cities, like New York and L.A., are moving to Texas cities. Using the new data, Bloomberg Businessweek compiled a list of the top fastest-growing large metros. Four Texas cities made the top ten: Austin (which ranked number one), San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas. The bountiful job market and business-friendly environment have unquestionably been the driving forces behind the ever-increasing populations in Texan cities.

Perry is also airing this ad while he's in New York:



As someone born and raised in NYC, this topic hits home.  New Yorkers who want to keep their guns and their money have an option.  Move to Texas!!!

Book Review: The Circle Maker, by Mark Batterson

"And the Lord said to Joshua: “See! I have given Jericho into your hand, its king, and the mighty men of valor. You shall march around the city, all you men of war; you shall go all around the city once. This you shall do six days. And seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark. But the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets."
Joshua 6:2-4

"And it came to pass, at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near and said, “Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that You are God in Israel and I am Your servant, and that I have done all these things at Your word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that You are the Lord God, and that You have turned their hearts back to You again.”

Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood and the stones and the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench."
1 Kings 18:36-38

"Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went home. And in his upper room, with his windows open toward Jerusalem, he knelt down on his knees three times that day, and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as was his custom since early days."
Daniel 6:10

If you are reading this review at this moment in your life, there's a reason.  As Mark Batterson explains: "[W]e specifically prayed that God would get the book into the right hands at the right time" (58).  Given the circumstances under which we purchased and read the Circle Maker, we are confident the Lord has answered Mark Batterson's prayer.

We first heard of Mark Batterson when a member of his church posted this article to Facebook.  Having grown up in 1980's New York City, the Lord's specific power over a crack house always impressed.  Our pastor has plugged the book for a year.  We didn't read the book, however, until after the March 2014 primary.  Remember that detail.

The Circle Maker is a written sermon about prayer.  Batterson illustrates how bold, persistent, and specific prayer accomplishes miracles when accompanied by a tireless work ethic.  Batterson cites the March around Jericho, Elijah's prayer for rain, and Daniel's prayer for restoration as Biblical examples.  He recalls several episodes from his Church's testimony as examples.  The key is to mix prayer with action.

To summarize in five bullet points:

• Pray Boldly -- Nothing honors God like a prayer so big only He can fill it. (45)

• Pray Specifically -- A detailed prayer gives God greater opportunity to undeniably reveal Himself as the source of the blessing. 

• Pray Persistently -- This is what trips most people up.  God works on His timeline, not ours.  Unfortunately, most people give up instead of praying through.
• "God knows that if He provides too much too soon, we lose our spiritual hunger." (112)
• "Praying through is long and boring...but very few of us are willing to love that long or pray that hard." (140)
• "Prayer intensity is a product of prayer consistency." (151)
• "Every breakthrough has a Genesis and a Revelation." (168)
• Sometimes it's instant, sometimes it takes decades.
• "One step at a time." (195)

• Physical Location and Posture Matter -- We don't fully understand this one, but we concur with Batterson's Biblical examples and have experienced a similar phenomenon personally.

• "Pray like it depends on God while working like it depends on you" -- Besides persistence, action is the other area where many fall short.  Usually, we need to act first (118).  But if you mix persistent prayer with persistent action, there's no limit to the miracles God will use you to accomplish.

-----

A personal example: In 2012, the day after Barack Obama's re-election, we did major business with the Lord.  He was clear about where we were to stand.  One of those missions is to protect and strengthen Texas' economy.

Since then, our yearning for God to create an oasis of peace and prosperity in Texas amidst the coming global chaos has been our dominant prayer.  We've said countless prayers on this topic (including hundreds around Governor Perry alone).  We can only accomplish this objective with God.

That same desire for an oasis of peace and prosperity drives everything we do at the state level.  Due to our size, Texas has a unique potential to weather the coming global economic Cluster[REDACTED].  Unfortunately, big-ticket economic reforms don't pass themselves.  They require electing candidates to pass legislation.  Both the electoral and legislative processes are long and boring.

There have been plenty of setbacks.  The budget debacle of the 83rd legislature was heartbreaking.  John Cornyn stabbed Ted Cruz in the back.  But through it all, we persistently prayed and worked.  On primary day 2014, the Lord moved.

Like we stated above, we find it interesting that the Lord put a copy of The Circle Maker in our hand shortly after primary 2014.  Our experience in the trenches of Texas politics illustrates the principles Batterson discusses.  A prayer whose Genesis was November 7, 2012 had it's first Revelation on March 6, 2014.

-----

As Batterson explains: "God answers prayer to bring glory to His name....[t]here is nothing God loves more than proving His faithfulness" (197).  In order for the Lord to move, however, we first need to ask for Him to prove it.  The Circle Maker, by Mark Batterson, is a robust presentation of the power of prayer mixed with action.

In Memoriam: Ned Vizzini

"Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."
Matthew 11:28-30

Two obituaries in a week isn't fun.  This one's personal.  Ned Vizzini was our best friend in nursery school.  We've known him since we were two years old.  He died by his own hand last Thursday in Brooklyn.

To most people, Ned was a celebrated author.  He wrote four critically acclaimed novels.  His largely autobiographical 2006 release, It's Kind of a Funny Story, was the basis for the 2010 film by the same name.  For those who've seen the movie, the character Craig was Ned's self-portrait:



Cahnman's Musings last saw Ned in March 2011.  He visited Austin to speak during SxSW.  He stayed at our house for three days.  We had no idea that would be the last time we saw him.  We last spoke by telephone during the 2012 presidential election.

Describing Ned as an adult, we concur with this description from Kyle Buchanan:

It hit me like an electric shock last night to find out that my friend, the writer Ned Vizzini, took his own life in New York yesterday at age 32. He was one of the most enthusiastic, vibrant people I knew; his classic YA novel It's Kind of a Funny Story (which was adapted into a film in 2010) was based on Ned's own stay in a psychiatric hospital after he was gripped by suicidal thoughts in his early twenties, but that still doesn't make it any easier to believe that those feelings bested him now, because when I think of Ned, I think of that happy, crooked smile that you barely had to coax out of him.

Where Kyle knew Ned as an adult, we knew him primarily as a young child.  We attended the same New York City pre-school.  As five year olds, we used to play a game: who could sit in a running clothes' dryer the longest.  Cahnman's Musings always won.  This probably does not surprise regular readers.

That's our best Ned Vizzini story.  We also remember Ned's infections love of maps.  As a four year old, Ned gave us a lesson on the geography of Texas, which is pretty ironic in hindsight.

In the late 1980's, Ned moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn.  We lost touch for the next decade and a half.  We resumed contact in the early to mid 2000's.  As a closet conservative in the publishing industry (and later Hollywood), sometimes Ned needed a place to vent.  We filled that role.

-----

Unfortunately, all of the above is vanity.  To our knowledge, Ned wasn't a believer.  Readers who understand the Bible know what that means.

Here's the real tragedy: whatever pain Ned was suffering, Jesus already bore it.  That's the whole point of the Cross.  Because Ned committed suicide, we can't help dwelling on Lacey Sturm's testimony:



The scripture quoted above is the most important for anyone in Ned's position to consider, but the Psalmist also writes:

"Cast your burden on the Lord, 

And He shall sustain you; 

He shall never permit the righteous to be moved."

Psalm 55:22

 And the Apostle Peter:

[C]asting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you....But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. 

1 Peter 5:7...10

Suffering in this world is temporary.  If there's one lesson from Ned's death, it's the transience of this world, compared to the permanence of eternity.  Entering eternity, absent a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, is a really bad way to 'relieve' temporal pain.

-----

Cahnman's Musings hasn't spoken to Ned's family in a quarter-century.  We've never met his wife or son.  We ask readers to keep them in your prayers.

Ned Vizzini, 1981-2013, Rest in Peace.

Urban Rail: The Next Great Austin Swindle

Kudos to the Austin Chronicle for this long article on the latest utopian scheme from the central planners at Austin City Hall (and the Obama administration!); the scheme calls for building a new rail line from the area around Highland mall, down the east side of UT campus, into downtown.

First things first, the timetable:

[T]hey will likely be on a ballot proposal in November 2014

But nothing's set...yet:

"several more months of discussion before we put anything on the ballot. Any­thing could change between now and then."

But this is a wide ranging plan with obvious Agenda 21 fingerprints:

In the long term, Project Connect, the regional planning initiative under the Cap­it­al Area Metropolitan Planning Organ­iz­ation, envisions a public transit system that connects not only all of Austin, but also other destinations in the Central Texas region, such as San Marcos and San Antonio.

With questionable assumptions:

\In justifying the Highland recommendation, Julitz emphasized that Project Connect is a long-term investment. As the area continues to grow, Julitz expects ridership to grow as well.

That fail to account for the obvious:

the rail route would likely go up San Jacinto, on the eastern side of the university. That's not unanimously supported at UT; in October, UT's Student Government General Assembly endorsed the Lamar/Guadalupe sub-corridor on the west side of campus, nearer to the West Campus student population.

Because, duh, most of the population in the area around UT is in WEST (not east) Campus!

But there's Obama bucks to be had in West Campus:

the UT administration prefers the eastern route, especially since the west side will soon be served by bus rapid transit along Guada­lupe and Lamar....MetroRapid will receive considerable funding from the Federal Transit Administration, specifically dedicated to that route.

 So let's neglect what we've learn from current mass transit ridership:

the undeniable fact that the Lamar/Guadalupe corridor has the strongest current population density as well as the strongest current demand for mass transit, as expressed by bus ridership..[because]..the Lamar sub-corridor contains many of the most walkable neighborhoods outside of Down­town Austin.

Because government knows best:

And they've insisted – echoed by the mayor at CCAG Friday – that surveyed public sentiment is only one factor to be considered in choosing a route, and that the project decision cannot rely simply on "a popularity contest."

And government can't do without those Obama bucks:

Dahmus thinks the city is avoiding the Lamar/Guadalupe sub-corridor largely for what he calls a political reason – specifically, to avoid endangering federal support already dedicated to bus rapid transit. The Lamar/Guadalupe area will soon have MetroRapid, which was approved in 2010 as part of Capital Metro's ServicePlan2020, a planned network of bus routes. MetroRapid cost about $47.6 million total, and the Federal Transit Administration's Very Small Starts program covered about $38.1 million of that, or roughly 80%, with Capital Metro funding the remaining fifth, about $9.5 million.

....

[T]he FTA "would be very unhappy if we reprogrammed those corridors after we gave them this plan that put in the bus rapid transit – and then we decide that we want to do rail there instead." The buses couldn't simply be moved to a different area because of the specific contract with FTA. "It's a very competitive system to get money, so cities that play ball with the federal authorities are probably more likely to get funding for their projects,"

This will probably be on the ballot next fall; stay tuned....

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Some thoughts:

• The ONLY way rail transportation in Austin could, in theory, make sense is on the Lamar/Guadelupe corridor.  Even there, it probably doesn't.  Any other route will be a boondoggle that fails to solve Austin's transportation challenges.

• This economic development mindset that made New York, Boston, and San Francisco three of the most expensive cities in the country.

• If a local project is worth pursuing, it's worth financing locally.

• Who's getting rich off the Highland corridor?!?

• This shouldn't be the purview of the current lame duck city council.

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If readers can stomach Pravdaesque writing, this pro-rail propaganda at the Austin Post is worth reading.