Unexpected end to sales tax balkanization?

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The Tribune reports that the Civic Federation will release a report questioning an upcoming (but news-to-me) proposal by several Midwestern states to streamline sales taxes in exchange for collecting taxes on out of state (read: catalog and Internet) purchases. The end of the article points out that the micro taxes that add up to 9.75% for my takeout lunch — but 6% on an identical meal sold just 15 miles away, across the Indiana line — could fall victim to this streamlining. After all, we can’t expect every single online retailer to remember all of the thousands of sales tax rates across the US, right?

Although this might seem to be a nightmarish predicament that will result in huge revenue losses for local governments reliant on local-option sales taxes, one interesting wrinkle arises: what if this “sales tax streamlining” could result in sales tax revenue sharing? Doing so would iron out local inefficiencies, like retail sales “leaking” to lower tax jurisdictions or fiscal zoning that lures big box stores solely for the resulting sales tax revenue.

Apollo Project #2

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Redefining Progress has released state by state reports of how The Apollo Project — a largely unheralded initiative (which has been folded into John Kerry’s platform) to “declare energy independence” by launching a nationwide effort to harness renewable energy and improve our efficiency — will affect each state. It’s pretty cool.

I’ll never live blog

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but a roundup of points Kerry failed to make tonight:
– Bush provided a great opening on drug reimportation by referencing “working with Canada” on the flu vaccine. Yes, Kerry eventually got to reimportation, but not right when it counted.
– On the deficit, Bush “has a plan” but has never referenced exactly what it is; instead, he’s just attacked Kerry’s plan (which we’ve gone over before). Kerry should point out that Bush’s “plan” involves draconian 80% cuts in almost every government service known to mankind.
– To counter Bush’s warm words on education, roll out what Howard Dean called “the Bush tax”: the cuts in education and services and hikes in state taxes and fees (most especially college tuition). Where the feds have expanded programs by a bit, the states have already pulled out the rug — and Bush, instead of offering revenue sharing, again chose tax cuts for the rich.
– “98 times” is just wrong. Just call him out on “fuzzy math” and point out a few ways in which it double-counts votes.
– The “marriage protection amendment” does nothing of the sort. It’s an attempt to create a wedge issue, plain and simple, since this nonsense about state courts forcing other states to accept marriages is just silly.
– “Activist judges” is another right-wing trope. Didn’t Bush land his job thanks to some activist judges?
– Bush is bringing up the same old “compassionate conservative” tropes he did in 2000, only now he’s had four years to not act on them. Great opening to talk about the divisiveness, like…
– Much of the post-2001 divisiveness stems from Bush’s rush to war in Iraq and other actions from the administration. Kerry was right to pin the blame on the House leadership, but the President’s arrogance is more fundamentally at fault.
– HSAs are simply bad policy: “market reforms” for health care services don’t make sense, since health care is almost the definition of a market riddled with imperfect information. (If I had perfect information about health care, what use would I have for a doctor?) Besides, HSAs undermine the entire premise of health insurance — to spread the risks, to encourage preventive care, and to reduce costs for the poor — while opening up a huge new tax break for the rich. I know it’s not at all sound-bite-able, but someone has to make a cogent critique of these before they become too common.

Casino spots

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The Trib is reporting that Block 37 has arisen as a potential location for a casino, along with McCormick Place East (Lakeside Center). If anything, McCormick North is more optimally designed for a casino: a giant, windowless box. McCormick East may be woefully underused, but the monumental curtainwall of the current building should be maintained. (One good reason to not open McCormick East for 24-hour operation is migratory bird fatalities: until McPier began turning off the building’s nighttime lights a few years back, its lakeside facade lured hundreds of birds each year to their deaths. Birds don’t understand glass [why should they?] and fly full speed into the wall, breaking their necks. Good for the Field Museum, which has cabinets filled with the resulting [stuffed] carcasses; not so good for the birds.)

Of course, maybe the gaming hall could fit into the giant masonry podium underneath. I have no idea what’s inside that bunker, besides some very long ramps to ground level.

And where would a casino fit at Block 37? Underground? Casinos don’t like multistory layouts, even less than big box retailers.

Speaking of which, the frequent media complaints about few identified tenants strike me as silly. Mills has relationships with literally thousands of tenants and specialty shop space in the last proposals was already spoken for by a variety of “lifestyle” chains. Sure, a few of the bigger users–Office Depot, Barnes & Noble — have tired of waiting and found other locations on State. But being across from Field’s flagship, in the heart of the second largest office market in the country, will get tenants on board.

Office supplies downtown

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Finally, both Staples and Office Depot have realized that their office products superstores can fit inside the Loop. Both have operated downtown stores elsewhere for years, but have recently signed leases in the State-Wabash corridor (oddly, not the real center of office space but likely the only area with large enough retail floorplates): Staples in the old Sym’s space at Wabash & Washington and Office Depot in the Toys ‘R’ Us space on State south of Madison.

Harper Court is moving up

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The Hyde Park shopping center originally built to keep an artist presence in the face of urban renewal (but subsequently purchased by the university) will gain two new entertainment tenants: the long promised Checkerboard Lounge, “price out” of Bronzeville (only in Dorothy Tillman’s world could that happen) and a generically named restaurant from KDK, impresario of the Randolph and Wabash restaurant districts. Together with Bar Louie and the bowling alley, the result is that Hyde Park now has more than 133% more places to drink now than it did just three years ago.

Arrogance is okay

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A nice quote from Barack Obama on Bush, from a speech given to a crowd in Wisconsin (?): “I mean, it’s one thing that somebody’s wrong and they know they’re wrong. Or it’s one thing if they’re arrogant but they’re right all the time. But when they’re arrogant and wrong all the time, that’s a problem.” [WaPo]

Security’s many sides

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Two articles this week underline the Bush administration’s ridiculous (but relentless) focus on one kind of security.

Salon has run a lovely essay by John Brady Kiesling, appealing to the “security mom’s” sense of civic duty. The daily security threat to average Americans is vastly overrated, but the scary world that the Homeland Security Department hypes up is nearer at hand every day because we Americans are neglecting our own homeland. Some excerpts:

Keeping a country or a community going is hard work, just as the president said. You knew without question why that work was necessary. There is nothing on earth more precious than our children and their future. Children do not raise themselves. They need a family and a community, they need values, and they need protection from the dangers of a dangerous world.

Because of you, the city council built sidewalks and fixed the playground and hired the crossing guard. Because of you the school didn’t lay off teachers or close down the library when the budget crunch hit. You raised money, reached out to your friends to help you, fought when you needed to fight. You complained about the dangerous potholes and the drug dealers. And you found the time and money needed to give your kids the chance to succeed: Sunday school, music lessons, soccer practice, the sacrifices required to put kids on the track to happiness as good citizens…

America used to be the biggest, bravest, most responsible kid on the international playground, the natural leader. But nothing we diplomats said or did could stop the erosion of that leadership after 2001. We were still the biggest, but suddenly also the meanest. We tell our kids they have to stand up to schoolyard bullies. That’s what our foreign friends tell their kids too, and currently they’re talking about standing up to us. This is not good for us, and it’s not good for the world.

President Bush is strong, his speechwriters maintain, because he does not shrink from sending American soldiers to die. It may seem strange to you, but it takes little political courage to send American soldiers to war. Americans have never turned down a president who invited them to battle.

True moral courage recognizes that there is no automatic connection between killing foreigners and defeating America’s enemies… What moral courage has President Bush shown? He never vetoed a single piece of legislation, never said no to a spending bill, never fired anyone…

Deficits don’t matter, Vice President Cheney said. But your kids are going to spend the rest of their lives paying back, with interest, the money we are borrowing from our Chinese friends to make up for this government’s extravagance. President Bush says he won’t give foreigners a veto over U.S. security. But he already has. All they have to do is stop buying our Treasury bills.

Oil has hit more than $50 a barrel. Two billion Chinese and Indians intend to drive cars the way we do, and it isn’t going to get better. The rest of the world saw this coming and is investing in renewable energy and conservation. I can’t figure out what the president has in mind besides praying that our buddies in Venezuela and Nigeria and Saudi Arabia keep pumping. We can get only six months’ worth of oil by opening up Alaska’s remaining wilderness to Exxon. Better than nothing, I suppose, but six months isn’t a long time in your kids’ life.

Sorry, Soccer, oops, Security Mom. I’ve spent a career agonizing about America’s security and I can’t keep quiet when danger looms. Be an economic security mom. Be an energy security mom. Be an environmental security mom. Fight for better schools, for child care and healthcare and jobs. Those are the threats facing your children, and those are threats we can do something about.

Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman points out in the Times that the administration has made a tremendous opportunity cost: allowing gas prices to spiral up without demanding that Washington get a share. A truly forward thinking president would have demanded (and won) a major gas tax (“oil independence”) increase in 2001, preparing the US for an era of $50/barrel oil while raising incredible revenues in the meantime. Major investments in infrastructure — or even reduced deficits — would leave our nation more resilient to energy and monetary crises in the years ahead. (Indeed, US economic growth is slowing as interest rates and oil prices rise. An economy less dependent on oil prices could have saved or invested more, thus lessening the impact of both on the larger economic picture.)

Of all the shortsighted policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, none have been worse than their opposition to energy conservation and a gasoline tax. If we had imposed a new gasoline tax after 9/11, demand would have been dampened and gas today would probably still be $2 a gallon. But instead of the extra dollar going to Saudi Arabia — where it ends up with mullahs who build madrasas that preach intolerance — that dollar would have gone to our own Treasury to pay down our own deficit and finance our own schools. In fact, the Bush energy policy should be called No Mullah Left Behind.

Our own No Child Left Behind program has not been fully financed because the tax revenue is not there. But thanks to the Bush-Cheney energy policy, No Mullah Left Behind has been fully financed and is now the gift that keeps on giving: terrorism…

Building a decent Iraq is necessary to help reverse such trends, but it is not sufficient. We need a much more comprehensive approach, particularly if we fail in Iraq. The Bush team does not offer one. It has treated the Arab-Israeli issue with benign neglect, failed to find any way to communicate with the Arab world and adopted an energy policy that is supporting the worst Arab oil regimes and the worst trends. Phil Verleger, one of the nation’s top energy consultants and a longtime advocate of a gas tax, puts it succinctly: “U.S. energy policy today is in support of terrorism — not the war on terrorism.”

The Arab-Muslim world is in a must-change human development crisis, “but oil is like a narcotic that kills a lot of the pain for them and prevents real change,” says David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Where is all the innovation in the Arab world today? In the places with little or no oil: Bahrain is working on labor reform, just signed a free-trade agreement with the U.S. and held the first elections in the Arab gulf, allowing women to run and vote. Dubai has made itself into a regional service center. And Jordan has a free-trade agreement with the U.S. and is trying to transform itself into a knowledge economy. Who is paralyzed or rolling back reforms? Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran, all now awash in oil money.

Philadelphia comments

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I’m spoiled silly by having too much flash RAM–I never have to download photos from my camera, so I don’t. Anyhow, photos will eventually get posted. In the meantime, some notes I wrote about Philadelphia on a visit a week ago:

– I fell in love with the intimate scale of the streets and the tiny building footprints. 15′ wide lots may not have much economic use anymore, but they sure make for invitingly tiny shopfronts. The one-lane streets are eminently jaywalkable, even without looking. (Yeah, I know it’s dangerous since you’ll never see electric cars or cyclists, but still.) Plus, street vendors abound in the widely distributed office core. (The linear commuter rail tunnel under downtown helped keep office construction from focusing on a single nexus.)
– The tremendous old money influence shines through. Classical palazzos and dozens of old banking halls, especially along Walnut, clutter Center City and present excellent reuse opportunities. It’s somehow satisfying to be back in a preppy Eastern social milieu, although I’m sure the charm would wear off quickly.
– Gentrification has been very un-thorough, possibly due in part to said tiny building footprints; there’s good grit just a few feet away from Rittenhouse Square, and scuzzy shops right on Walnut, Market, and Broad. Fragmented ownership greatly helps to slow gentrification, since not all of the owners will jump to upgrade their shop spaces all at once.
– The Center City District has an admirable wayfinding scheme. Discreet color-coded maps hang above many sidewalks, allowing people to easily see what direction they’re headed in at any given time.

…yet the city and state have not kept up economically. Vacant lots, parking lots, and auto-oriented sprawlboxes sprout even in choice locations, including right in front of City Hall and just a few blocks down Broad from the core; given the awe-inspiring quality of the surrounding fabric, it’s painful to imagine what’s been lost. Mass transit is an afterthought in the regional imagination, and threatened service cuts (20% across the board, killing already scarce weekend and night service) would doom SEPTA to irrelevance. Some here have mentioned that SEPTA’s board is controlled by suburban interests who simply don’t care about transit’s importance to the city’s economic health. The current state of the system is atrocious; service frequencies are already pushing the limits of acceptability.

The lack of adequate transit has already killed Center City’s appeal as the region’s primary center for doing business and flooded the city with cars. The many (otherwise adorable) “baby streets” (the local vernacular for alleys turned into streets), in particular, look positively flooded with cars: an 8′ cartway sandwiched between rows of cars parked on the sidewalks. Sometimes, metal bollards prevent people from driving up on the sidewalk, but attempts to shoehorn monstrous metal cages into walking cities will always fail.

Several of the downtown office towers sported banners promoting a site called KeepPhillyCompetitive, which is really about keeping their own office towers competitive. However, their naked self-interest is also in the public interest; giant corporate tax breaks are not an effective use of Pennsylvania taxpayers’ money. The Keystone Opportunity Zones that the downtown owners oppose are inferior in principle to even TIF districts; after all, the latter literally make growth pay for itself, while KOZ explicitly robs from the existing tax base.