The last holdouts from Buick North:
When Buick City was at its peak production in the mid-1980s, G.M. had 80,000 workers spread across the city. Now it is down to about 5,000, a number that could fall more in a bankruptcy.
My brother is one of the survivors, but who knows for how long?
Can we have them?
We may find out.
…has gone from The Nation to Cato. That should make for some interesting economics discussions around the water cooler.
Is the winner Alan Grayson? Would that it were true — it would be nice to think that he establishes a floor, but I think that he’s unfortunately typical, particularly among Democrats.
[Afternoon update]
Considering all of the trollery in comments, in which people desperately want to change the subject from economic ignorance to BUSH! and TORTURE! of INNOCENT TERRORISTS!, I wonder if any of them even bothered to follow the link, or just decided to pathetically play pin the tail on the Republican?
The Great Right North.
It will be amusing if, after all the overwrought talk about leftists fleeing Jesusland after the 2004 election to head off to the progressive paradise north of the border, it instead becomes a haven for the fiscally sane. And I write this from the perspective of someone who may in fact be relocating to Toronto in the near future, though not for that reason.
Alan Boyle doesn’t review the movie per se, but rather talks about its making and makers.
This isn’t really news, of course, but apparently, the lesson has to be relearned over and over.
I heard an interview a couple days ago with the Democrat who’s planning to challenge Chris Dodd in the primary, and he pointed out that he had started and managed several successful businesses, whereas Dodd had done nothing but be a politician his entire life. I wonder what he thinks of the Democrat president and vice president…, neither of whom has run so much as a lemonade stand? Or maybe Obama did when he was a kid, and his communist mother subsidized it?
They can vote with their feet:
We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.
One has to be particularly pig headed not to understand this.
[Thursday morning update]
Adios, New York:
Last week I spent 90 minutes doing a couple of simple things — registering to vote, changing my driver’s license, filling out a domicile certificate and signing a homestead certificate — in Florida. Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually.
By moving to Florida, I can spend that $5 million on worthy causes, like better hospitals, improving education or the Clinton Global Initiative. Or maybe I’ll continue to invest it in fighting the status quo in Albany. One thing’s certain: That money won’t continue to fund Albany’s bloated bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and regular special-interest handouts.
I thought it was stupidly amusing the other week when “Governor” Paterson expressed such glee that he was chasing Rush Limbaugh away with his policies. Well, there are a lot of other people who won’t be any more happy than Rush is to continue to fund these parasites.
[Bumped]
[Evening update]
A disgusting but apt metaphor from Mark Steyn:
As Miss McArdle notes, whether you bail out states “too big to fail” or let them go bankrupt, it will cause pain to taxpayers. But the pain of the latter is relatively short-term. Passing Sacramento’s buck to Washington will accelerate the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminate any advantage to voting with your feet.
Not to be too gloomy, but the country feels like it’s seizing up. It’s as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.
I hope that a bailout of California and New York will have huge electoral blowback (including from many Californians, like the ones who voted down the continued state tax and spending on Tuesday, and New Yorkers).
Yes, I understand that there is a desire to salvage the employment of people working on the existing space transportation industry, and particularly the Shuttle components, and that is what is driving the DIRECT design (and Stephen Metschan has weighed in with the conventional false wisdom in comments over there, about the problem with launch costs being one of Isp). The argument is that by using existing parts, we save on development costs. Which is true, probably. If development costs are all that matters.
But, you know, the reason we want to shut down Shuttle isn’t just because it’s “unsafe” (as though safety is a binary condition), but because it kills people at such a high operational cost. And the reason for the high cost? The very thing that they want to preserve, which is the standing army that supports Shuttle.
Now, in the unlikely event I were called to testify before Congress, the first thing that I’d ask them to do would be to ask themselves what goal they are trying to accomplish. Are they trying to accomplish things in space, are they trying to make us seriously space faring, or are they in the business of preserving/creating jobs (note, not wealth)? If the latter, then by all means, come up with Shuttle derivatives. If the former, we need a clean slate.
Sorry, but what some see as a feature, I see as a bug. If people like that feature, then let’s go ahead and keep space access expensive forever. But don’t give us this Bravo Sierra about how it saves money.
How to blame George Bush for Europe’s recession:
Do you notice anything funny about these numbers? Here is what I notice: the recession in the US is milder than that of Europe. Every country on this list had more economic shrinkage from 2008 to 2009 (Q1 to Q1) than did the US.
How could this be? Did they all have George Bush for President? Did they all succumb to free market ideology in the last eight years? Did they all repeal part of Glass-Steagall? Did they all spend wildly on an unnecessary war in Iraq? Did they all bankrupt themselves with out-of-control defense spending?
It’s a mystery.