Robert Whitcomb: WPA-Style Work for Panhandlers; Pollyanna’s Economic Forecasts

Sunday, June 11, 2017

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

As I type this, I see panhandlers on the street below, right before a traffic intersection. Too often cars stop without warning in order to give the panhandlers money. From their behavior, I’d guess that most are mentally ill and/or have substance-abuse problems.

 

There have been reports that in some cities syndicates place the panhandlers at certain corners and then take some of the revenue, sort of like pimps.

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In many places (such as Rhode Island) the local chapters of the ACLU have made it too difficult to force these people to stop their “work,’’ or whatever you want to call it. So they continue to create litter (lots of cigarette butts) and threaten car crashes. In some (more conservative?) places, however, municipalities have managed to make bans on panhandling stick. Indeed, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty reports that the number of communities that bar all panhandling has risen 40 percent in the past decade and more than 60 percent now prohibit the practice in some public places.

 

But some cities are being more creative. As a story by Maine Public Radio’s Ed Morin reports, Portland officials have hired some beggars to do such public chores as cleaning parks, focusing on picking up trash (which panhandlers, who are often homeless, help litter), generally at the local minimum wage.  Private donations have also been used in some places to support these initiatives. To see Mr. Morin’s story, hit:  https://nenc.news/portland-program-puts-panhandlers-productive-paying-public-projects/

 

As Mr. Morin reports, some other cities are taking the same approach, including Albuquerque, Denver and Chicago. I applaud this effort to financially support people to help prevent their homelessness, to give more structure,  meaning and self-respect to their dysfunctional lives and to clean up communities, especially in public places. Let’s not let municipal labor unions  get in the way.

 

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Speaker Nick Mattiello

Rhode Island House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello has promised to try to phase out the local car tax by 2023 but has offered no plausible way to cover the cost. The plan’s annual cost to the state would be $26 million in 2017-18, rising to about $221 million starting in 2023-24.

 

He says be hopes that “leaner government’’ and more economic growth will pay for it. But while parts of state government are sometimes not well managed, state government is already lean and far from overstaffed. As for economic growth, it’s unlikely to be strong in  Rhode Island or in America in general over the next few years because of an aging population, slow productivity growth, Brexit,  Chinese economic problems and a very corrupt and incompetent president in Washington, among other things.  

 

It’s tough to make an accurate economic forecast for more than three months out. In any event, we’re very far along in the upside of the economic cycle and may find ourselves in a recession next year. The speaker needs to scale back his plans.

 

 

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The extent of the Russian assault last year aimed at weakening the U.S. by sowing distrust of, and anxiety about, our political and governmental system and, if possible, to elect their boy Donald Trump as president is becoming clearer.

 

Already clear is that the most corrupt presidential administration in history (so far?) is more interested in obscuring the details of the Russian cyberwar against our country  (which continues) and its American accomplices than in offending Trump’s Russian creditors or endangering the careers of the Russians’ Trumpian collaborators (including Trump family members).

 

A report from the National Security Agency describes how Russia's military intelligence agency cracked into a U.S. voting database software supplier, VR Systems, and then used the pilfered information to craft fake emails laden with malware and send them to 122 local election officials, according to The Intercept's story. The Russian agency, the infamous GRU, is the same one that U.S. intelligence officials had linked to the theft and release of massive troves of internal emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

 

An analysis of polls strongly suggest that the Russia-enabled anti-Clinton propaganda reduced the number of her votes in a very narrowly fought election. But it’s too early to know how much, if at all, the Russians manipulated the actual vote through computer crimes – though it’s clear that they tried very hard to do so.

 

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President Donald Trump

Interestingly, we learned this because the Feds arrested a federal contractor, Reality (Reality bites!) Leigh Winner, for allegedly pulling some classified material on this election-system hacking from the NSA and sending it to The Intercept, a news site that focuses on national security matters.

 

If she did do what is alleged, then she committed a crime. But she did it because she had no faith that the heavily compromised Trump regime would adequately investigate and publicize Russia’s actions against America. In short, she seems to be a patriot who is willing to go to prison to help protect our country from the great security risk that is Donald Trump & Co.

 

Of course, Donald Trump himself is legally permitted to leak top-secret information to our foes -- and has done so – and maybe some of his particularly sleazy aides and relatives will get away with it, too. You’ll recall that in the campaign last year, Trump applauded the leaking and distribution of stolen Democratic  Party information and urged Moscow to keep up the hacking. Just what you'd expect from the training that Trump received from the sleazy New York lawyer Roy Cohn and Donald’s ruthless father, Fred.

 

We can only hope that patriotic federal investigators  pursue  any evidence of treason, election tampering, bribery and perjury by Trump and his associates as enthusiastically as they are going after the likes of Ms. Reality Leigh Winner.

 

 

Buy your own New England village! I just came across this ad:

 

The TOWN OF JOHNSONVILLE, CT established in 1802 **NOW OFFERED AT JUST OVER $30k PER ACRE ** ! LOCATED IN THE MOODUS SECTION OF EAST HADDAM, CT. AN ENTIRE TOWN SET ON 62 ACRES with ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS BARN, MANY BUILDINGS INCLUDING FORMER BANK/POST OFFICE, GENERAL STORE, SCHOOL, CHURCH, RESTAURANT, AND SEVERAL HOMES! ALL WITH EXTRAORDINARY VIEWS OF FABULOUS LAKE WITH BREATHTAKING WATERFALL. THIS WAS ONCE A THRIVING MILL COMMUNITY, THEN A VICTORIAN ERA TOURIST ATTRACTION. MUCH TOO SHOW AND TELL HERE. VIEW VIRTUAL TOUR VIDEO! INCREDIBLE INVESTOR OPPORTUNITY LOCATED CLOSE TO DESTINATION ENTERTAINMENT AND CONNECTICUT RIVER! View Aerial Video on Youtube. Also Listed as Commercial MLS#E102223708.

 

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Buy your own town

 

 

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Aetna, the huge insurance company, plans to leave Hartford and go a bigger, sexier city, probably Boston or New York. Connecticut officials have been falling over themselves to try to bribe the company to stay. But perhaps they should step back and consider whether the one-time “Insurance Capital of the World’’ would do better if it stopped relying on a few remaining big companies  there to keep the fiscally and sociologically troubled city (barely) afloat and made tax, regulatory and other changes to help create a diversified economy.

 

But first, it should go officially bankrupt to clean up decades of irresponsible labor agreements and stupid ordinances. Detroit, the car capital, famously went bankrupt and now its future looks brighter than it has for many years as it evolves into a smaller and safer city with a wide range of businesses.

 

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Harvard

Harvard College has withdrawn the acceptances of at least 10 young people because of their nasty postings on Facebook. As in so many ways, the Internet has made life worse, not better. Some civil libertarians, such as writer and Harvard Law  Emeritus Prof. Alan Dershowitz, have criticized Harvard’s actions on the grounds of free speech. But Harvard is a private institution that has every right to let in whomever it wants into its community. In this case, it doesn’t want a bunch of young people who are crude and cruel or at least act as if they are.

 

These kids, smart and generally affluent, if lacking judgment, can apply elsewhere – assuming they can remove most traces of their comments, though that may be difficult, or get colleges to chalk it all up to youthful exuberance.  Stuff on the Internet is as enduring as a manmade monster can be. Everything about us that anyone has ever entered on the Internet is there in some crevasse.

 

If only more people of all ages would spend much less time on social media and more time, well, outdoors, for example, or reading a book on  paper and thus while doing so not being constantly distracted by the gyrations of the Internet and especially of social media, which are engineered to be addictive.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the famous Harvard dropout, has done far more harm than good to civil society, while making billions.

 

But the genie is out of the bottle!

 

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Getting a summer job used to be almost mandatory, building starter bank accounts and, sometimes, character. That involved such activities as mowing lawns, cutting shrubs, filing bills of lading at a truck company, working as a camp counselor, waiting on tables and a myriad of other tedious activities (which I did in my time). Things have changed a lot: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that in July 2016 only 43 percent of those 16 to 19 were working or trying to get a job. In the late ‘80s the rate was nearly 70 percent. (I suspect it was even higher than that in my time as summer worker – ’62-’69).

 

But the refusal of successive Republican Congresses to raise the minimum wage, the arrival of illegal aliens to perform many jobs, especially yard work, house painting and other very physical labor, has discouraged many young people from even trying to get a job. Anyway, the days when  you could pay for college with summer earnings are long gone.

 

At the same time, affluent parents tend to encourage their teens to accumulate assorted extracurricular experiences and to take summer courses to promote themselves in order to get into a “good college’’  rather than get a job.  It used to be that well-off and even many rich parents would push their offspring to get summer jobs as an useful introduction to the world of work,  where  they’d learn how to deal with bosses and colleagues and to manage money.

 

You don’t hear much about character-building anymore. The results of its absence are all around and extend from the White House to your neighborhood.

 

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London Bridge

Ignore the tweets of our ignoramus/liar in chief about the latest London terror attack. He is too lazy to research anything.  He is a slob and demagogue.

But do listen to British Prime Minister Theresa May when she demands that Britain take a much tougher stand in rooting out what she properly calls “Islamic terrorism,’’ a phrase that President Obama timidly refused to use. There is a deep, deep sickness in part of Islam based on the idea of returning to the desert barbarism of 7th Century Islam that lures the mentally and emotionally ill.

 

But there are crazies/fanatics all over the place and there always will be.  While Britain and other civilized nations need more power to stop social-media outlets from being used to encourage and organize criminal behavior, the world is far too complicated, with far too many variables, to “defeat terrorism.’’ We must resign ourselves to the fact that we will always be vulnerable. As with most of life, there are no final victories.

 

As long as there are people there will be terror attacks.

 

And while Trump goes on and on about the need to prevent nasty Muslims from attacking us, Americans might bear in mind that they're in far more danger from their crazy heavily armed compatriots in this gun-nut nation than from terrorists. (Not to mention texting drivers.)

 

Consider the guy who shot to death five people and then himself  the other day in Orlando. Such multiple murders are far more common  in America than in any other Western country. You can kill a lot more people a lot faster with guns than with the knives used in the latest London attack. Britain’s tough gun laws prevented the terrorists from killing far more people than they did. Meanwhile, many British cops, who used to be celebrated worldwide for the fact that most of them didn't carry guns, now do have guns – needed in this increasingly crazy world.

 

 

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The cliché (which I, too, believed to some extent) has been that Trump was elected because he appealed to the working class.  As it turns out, a recent analysis of the vote showed that they skewed in the upper half of income. Trump’s further-enrich-the-rich program would have been alluring to many of them and of course Fox ‘’News,’’  (the Republican propaganda machine) endlessly threw gasoline on hatred of the Clintons.

 

 

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As we seek to control healthcare costs, one place to look is on TV. There, especially on shows that appeal to an older demographic, such as the evening network news, you can see a Niagara of ads for new and expensive brand-name drugs that purport to be better than the meds that are on the market already –mostly much cheaper generics. Often the new pills are no better (or actually worse, with dangerous side-effects) than the current ones although their ad copy is sexy.

 

People see these ads and then ask their overworked physicians for a prescription for these pricey pills. Some physicians cave in and write a script to move the patients out of their offices ASAP. Keep ‘em happy! We all get the bill in higher insurance premiums, and surging Medicaid and Medicare costs.

 

The Feds started allowing direct-to-consumer prescription-drug ads in 1985.

It has been a financial disaster except for the drug companies. And few consumers are competent to understand all the workings of these drugs hyped on the tube. Too often we confuse “new’’ with “better’’ – a confusion that the drug companies are pleased to promote.

 

Meanwhile, sometimes the old, cheap out-of-patent drugs may prevent or treat ailments they weren’t invented for.  Consider trazadone, used to treat anxiety and depression, and often given to older people as a sleep aid. It turns out it may help prevent or slow dementia.  If trials work out, this could turn out to be a huge benefit to America’s surging population of old folks and their families. And save vast sums of money.

 

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