Accounting gimmickry

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Gene Sperling at the Center for American Progress calls the Bush tax-cut sunsets “Cinderella tax cut accounting”: since the tax cuts, like Cinderella’s lovely gown, will supposedly disappear with a poof. (Disappearing gowns — now that’s a real “wardrobe malfunction.”)

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities lays out much larger accounting gimmicks hidden in the 2005 budget:

  • cutting off the forecasts at 2009, conveniently before the ticking Social Security-Medicare time bomb is set to explode
  • creating tax giveaways (especially the tax-advantaged savings accounts) which spiral in cost after 2009, but have minimal or negative short-term costs
  • taking the costs of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism and evil everywhere off-budget
  • never mentioning the potential cost of Alternative Minimum Tax reform
  • overstating 2004 deficits, to make 2009 deficits look better by comparison
  • putting a cap on all discretionary spending — but understating defense spending growth, thus forcing larger cuts in domestic programs (at least 15.2% by 2009, adjusted for inflation and population)
  • increasing funding for certain domestic programs in 2005, but cutting in 2006
  • identifying various “miscellaneous” savings, like “waste, fraud, and abuse” and “we’ll work with Congress to find a way to pay for the medical savings accounts”
  • rewriting “pay-as-you-go” rules to specifically apply only to government subsidies to poor folks, while specifically exempting subsidies for rich people and corporations from further budgetary scrutiny
  • similarly, “baselining” the Bush tax cuts so that CBO can no longer track how much they’re costing — and hiding the cost of extensions past their sunset
  • inflating even the paltry 0.5% increase in domestic discretionary spending by including foreign aid and other programs; the real increase is 0.1% before inflation

    Hey, Enron Economics worked for the Texas Republicans before. No reason why it can’t work now, I suppose. (Speaking of which, why isn’t Kenneth Lay in jail yet?) And, at least for now, it looks like the investors are still buying, putting off a dollar collapse for another day. Hopefully, of course, after the election — just like the findings of the “Why No WMDs?” Commission and the 9/11 Commission and, well, anything else that might cause the slightest bit of embarrassment to the administration. (All this shifting of deadlines really makes me worry about what they’ve got planned for Term Two.)

    • City mouse, suburban mouse

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    From Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice’s article on the libertarian Manhattan Institute’s recent survey analysis on teenage delinquency, suburban and urban. The longitudinal survey found that teenagers in both cities and suburbs were familiar with sex and drugs.

    Surprised? That’s because we continue to idealize the more affluent suburbs and demonize the poorer sections of the city…

    Most of us recognize that there is no hermetically sealed place to rear youngsters. But some people still think so, says [Jay] Greene, [co-author of the study and] a graduate of New Trier High School on the North Shore.

    “A lot of the flight to the suburbs is still related to the perception that certain social ills are so concentrated in the city,” Greene said.

    That perception is reinforced by television shows and movies about city life; by the news. It’s so ingrained that we tend not question it. We take it for granted.

    The bottom line is that if parents and teens give up their responsibilities or are disengaged, no matter the reason, then these rates will continue to rise across the board.

    Combined with the higher accidental death rate of suburban teens — driving is the #1 cause of death for young Americans, and suburbanites drive far more than city dwellers — and the case for moving “for the children” falls apart.

    What’s more, a move to the socially alienated suburbs is a radical way to disengage from the public life of the city streets, a way to “give up the responsibilities” of being a citizen. Most obviously, it is a way to avoid paying city taxes, thus becoming a way to avoid the messy business of democratic cross-subsidization that comes with any large government with diverse interests to please. In the USA, suburbanites are fiscally disengaged from the real problem of fixing the social ills concentrated in cities: poverty, crime, deteriorating infrastructure.

    Rosty gets a rezoning

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    Former U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski and members of his family have begun cashing in on property they own on Chicago�s North Side, property whose value in one case sharply increased after a rezoning was pushed through the City Council by a prot�g� of his…

    Breaking with his usual practice, [Alderman] Matlak did not notify the Bucktown [Community Organization] of the proposed rezoning of the Rostenkowski property, Mr. Lipe [president of BCO] says. In fact, when Mr. Lipe last summer asked Mr. Matlak�s office about the status of the long-vacant property, “They said, as far as they knew, nothing was going on.”

    [Crain’s this week]

    These doings are not quite illegal, but there’s no other way to explain the underhanded upzoning. The upzone increases FAR from 2.2 to 3.0, allowing 36% more floor area: four floors instead of three. Damen Avenue in Bucktown is solidly two to three stories, except for the southernmost reaches — five blocks south of the parcel in question.

    Ugh. At least the residents of that fourth-floor condo will have nasty views of the Kennedy Expressway from their front windows.

    Urban big box gallery

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    After many requests, I’ve started a gallery of photos of big-box retailers that have made a worthy attempt to fit into Chicago’s urban fabric. Many big boxes claim that they simply can’t have doors opening out onto the sidewalk, that they need to have a moat of parking out in front. That’s nonsense, especially in locations where many people arrive on foot, on transit, or on bikes. If you demand different designs, you’ll get them — and credit goes to the Department of Planning and Development for doing just that.

    The gallery will be updated as I take more shots. Rumor has it that the new ex-Ward’s, now-Target at Addison and California (another fragment of the old Riverside streetcar-company amusement park) is a multi-level store; the recent sub-zero temperatures have sapped my wherewithal to snap photos so far.

    The new store is just a mile away from the highest-grossing Target in the chain, at Logan, Elston, and Western. The multi-level Target on Colorado in Pasadena was also a conversion of an old department store (Broadway? Bullocks?), as is the Wal-Mart at Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles. One of Target’s first ground-up multi-level stores is on Nicollet Mall, the transit mall in downtown Minneapolis; it’s part of the corporate headquarters. The store under construction at Roosevelt and Clark will have one level, a corner entrance, and structured parking.

    With Wilson Yard, Target will join a growing number of boxes that have moved past the riverside industrial corridors and onto the walkable commercial streets. Home Depot opened its first multilevel store there; the Brooklyn mini-Home Depot is in a strip center and has only a token mezzanine. Best Buy and Circuit City also took ground-floor, sidewalk-fronting spaces last year.

    One reason why these chains are willing to adapt, besides (relatively) progressive management, is that the demographics of the market are too hard to resist. The new Target is within five miles of 1.5 million people — five or ten times more people than in the suburbs. (Typical population densities on the north side are about 20,000 per square mile.) The Home Depot on Halsted sits in a neighborhood where per-capita income is nearly twice the national norm. Retailers would be stupid not to jump through hoops to reach these customers. At the same time, it’s notable that these locations are not in downtown high-rises, but in real neighborhoods.

    The desirable demographics are one reason why upmarket chains like Whole Foods Market have been leaders at adapting to gentrified urban environments. Whole Foods has opened two sidewalk-fronting stores here, with another under construction; similar designs are in Portland, Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Austin, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Cambridge, and Baltimore.

    Optimism: misguided

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    Well, as a campaign strategy for Democrats at least. It’s hard to be the sunny candidate when Karl, er, George is on the other side acting deliriously, lunching-on-‘shrooms happy. And who would blame them? After carelessly (or is that carefree-ly?) throwing all caution — fiscal discipline, the “very serious” words of the Security Council, etc. — to the wind, they had better be happy. The rest of us, on the other hand, had better not be.

    Polls consistently show solid support for cutting taxes, increasing spending, and balancing the budget. The only problem is that it can’t be done.

    But, even taken purely as a campaign strategy, there is a problem here: It’s hard to see how any Democrat could possibly outflank the incumbent as the candidate of wishful thinking. The president, after all, is the one proposing to make his current tax cuts permanent; increase domestic discretionary spending by 4 percent; and increase military, homeland-security, and entitlement spending by more than that — all while adding new tax cuts and balancing the budget. In the meantime, he thinks we can fly to Mars, take on $1 trillion in transition costs as Social Security is partially privatized, solve the health-care crisis with tax cuts, help people pay for college with more tax cuts, and further strengthen the retirement system with even more tax cuts. It’s utter nonsense, of course, but it’s certainly optimistic.

    Faced with Bush’s “candy for everyone!” politics, pessimism may be the Democrats’ only hope. If things look bad in Iraq and job growth remains weak through November, all the president’s promises will do him little good. But hoping for short-term failure isn’t very optimistic. It’s not a safe bet, either: Bush’s policies are calculated to maximize his short-term electoral prospects while pushing problems into 2005, 2009, or 2013 — when he won’t need to pay a price at the polls.

    [Matthew Yglesias in The American Prospect]

    And people wonder why I’m so dour.

    GOP attacks contract cronyism (but only in Chicago)

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    Just heard on WBEZ: in the wake of the Hired Truck Program scandal, the Cook County Republican Party has called on the city of Chicago to stop awarding contracts to political contributors.

    Hah! Next up, they’ll tackle the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, right?

    The program is yet another illustration of contract cronyism or pinstripe patronage, now the all-purpose way for corrupt, nepotistic officials — whether Democrats in Chicago or Republicans in Washington (or Baghdad) — to skirt civil service laws and fortify their political empires through patronage. I’d like to see more Republicans say “outsourcing saves money and improves service delivery” with a straight face these days.