home-buying mania

Maybe I only notice it because of the push to extend and expand the home-buyers’ tax-credit, but it seems as though all of my coworkers are buying houses (either looking, closing, or recently closed). Even those who have trouble making ends meet want to hop in the pool. In a weird way, it feels vaguely … oh, wait.

I said it as a freshman in high school (and was right) and will say it again: not everyone is fit for home-ownership. Pushing people who cannot afford the risk that is buying a house out of the rental market may be popular policy, but it is not good policy. I understand that developers hurt right now, but shouldn’t we take care of the fallout from the last housing bubble before using tax money to subsidize the purchase of their excess housing stock?

hunger for knowledge

In the state of Nebraska, possession of one ounce or less of marijuana is punishable by a $300 fine. It is one of 13 states to have decriminalized marijuana in some way. (h/t Cloud of Atlases)

hunger for knowledge

Note: I would like this to become a regular post on the blog, perhaps daily or semi-weekly.

The University of Michigan only receives 7% of its budget from the state of Michigan. (h/t: NYT)

why stay in michigan?

Phil Power at The Center for Michigan posted yesterday about why Michigan’s economic situation is the best reason for young people and recent graduates to stay in Michigan. Money quote:

“I know it’s counter-intuitive,” I began. “But I believe the best time to stay in a place — even move in — is when it is in trouble.”

As an aspiring entrepreneur, nonprofit creator, and politician, I know that this is exactly why I want to stay in the state. Sure, I feel a debt of gratitude to the state that financed much of the education that contributed to who I am. But, at its core, my desire is to pursue my own goals — be they organic farming, brewing beer, or providing Internet products. A place like Detroit simply provides opportunities that no other major city can because of how cheap it is to set up shop and how easy it is to craft one’s own path there. If you can create jobs and make money in this state right now, then you control your own destiny. As with the man in Power’s article, though, this all depends on having minimal debts from the outset. A mortgage on a house that has lost its worth or monstrous student loan debt present liabilities that limit the amount of risk that a would-be adventurer can take.

michigan’s brain drain

Over at Michigan Radio’s promising new project Generation Y Michigan about convincing Generation Y-ers like yours truly to stay in the state, Lauren Silverman (of whom I’m totally jealous since she gets to do this as an intern with Michigan Radio) posts about Michigan’s brain drain and the problems that it causes for the state’s hopes for a recovery. It’s a good summary of the issue, and I encourage you to read it. I do have one bone to pick, though, with this paragraph:

Michigan has 15 public universities that serve almost 300,000 students each year. But almost half of these students leave the state after they graduate. That means Michigan has the 8th worst migration rate in the nation. Even South Dakota, Alabama and Idaho do a better job keeping college graduates in their states.

I think that this overstates the situation a bit. It seems like a false analogy between Michigan and South Dakota, Alabama, and Idaho since our state has two public institutions that are indisputably better than any school in those three states. The University of Michigan and Michigan State both have the ability to draw in talented students from other states that universities in those states lack. This means, in turn, that we have more students who will leave the state after graduating. After all, their families reside in California, Massachusetts, or some other state, so those places have a draw that Michigan cannot match. This is the price that we pay for having universities that can draw from wealthy areas across the country.

november 4

Today was the anniversary of election night last year on which America elected President Obama, so Democrat types across the web are posting their “OMG what a super year” thoughts. I thought that I might as well give a short report card about what I think of the progress made since election day 2008.

Economics: the Obama administration scores points for advocating any stimulus package, financial regulatory reform, and health care overhaul. But, really, what are the differences between this crew’s ties to the established interests and the Bushies’? The stimulus didn’t go far enough. Regulatory reform looks like it won’t do anything worthwhile to limit the size of institutions in a way that will make the moronic “too big to fail” doctrine a thing of the past. The health care reform package that Obama will sign is a dud that includes a guaranteed-to-fail public option that will cost more than private insurance plans. They came into office saying that major changes were coming on all three of these fronts, but none of that is on the horizon. The administration is afraid that people who don’t understand that economics will rebel against an effective stimulus, Wall Street still controls the Treasury, and Obama wouldn’t dare push back against anyone to get actual solutions in health care. Meanwhile, the economy sucks and unemployment is approaching 10%. C+

Civil liberties: Guantánamo Bay is still open with no plans in place to shut it down, and word is that the administration will miss its original deadline for closing it. On the one hand, we did stop torturing people. On the other, preventive detention is the hot new idea that they have used to justify holding innocent people indefinitely to ensure that they don’t take their stories of being tortured and join anti-American terrorist groups. The military commissions are still around. The administration is pushing for renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act. The Justice Department has decided not to punish the people who knowingly authorized torture. Good thing number two: Obama signed a reversal of the HIV ban into law. C-

International Relations: escalating the war in Afghanistan is stupid. It’s just plain dumb. The push to do so hurts his grade here. But, we have met with Iran, which is great and huge. Just starting those talks represents a tidal wave of change from the Bush administration. However, Obama and Clinton clearly don’t have the guts to stand up to Israel, tell Netanyahu to sit down, and demonstrate to both sides that we are serious about crafting a two-state solution. Adjusting the missile defense system in Eastern Europe was a good move (which you can tell from the neoconservatives universally panning it). I hope that the administration continues to reform our relations with Cuba. The first step was good, but I want to move towards ending the embargo. B

Food: boo. The Farmer-In-Chief has instead continued the rein of big agribusiness over Americans’ plates. This started with the nomination of Tom Vilsack and hasn’t really changed. Kudos to Michelle on planting the organic White House garden, but I wish that her husband would push for sustainable food for the rest of the country. Reforming the food system would help out in reducing health care costs (by making bad food more expensive), combatting climate change (by reducing the amount of petroleum and coal that we use and methane that CAFOs produce), and creating jobs (by moving towards more labor-intensive farming methods and eliminating the unnatural cheapness of industrial food). F

That’s all for now since it’s bed-time.

reality has a well-known liberal bias

BPAs are back, and now they aren’t being very nice to the food industry. From Marion Nestle:

It tested a bunch of canned juices, soups, tuna, and green beans and found bisphenol A (BPA) in almost all of them — even the ones labeled organic or bisphenol A-free.

The industry responds by saying, “The use of bisphenol A (BPA) in can linings is both safe and vital for food protection.” Oh, you don’t say! While this is clearly just corporate butt-covering, they can reasonably argue that their claim is true. How, you might ask, in light of the controversy surrounding BPA and plastic water bottles, could that be? Well, as Nestle points out, the FDA still hasn’t released its report telling us how bad BPA is for us, and that means that the industry is free to make this claim.

about last night …

First I have to thank upstate New York for excusing the rest of the country from having to put up with another member of Congress from the Palin-Beck-Limbaugh gang. It is impossible to watch C-SPAN with people like Bachmann always threatening to hijack a hearing or debate, but at least she is mildly constrained by representing one of the major parties. Hoffman would have been answerable only to the type of people who ask Barney Frank, a Boston Jew, why he supports “a Nazi policy.” A policy platform of drawing on misdirected and misunderstood fears would not contribute in any positive way to the legislative debates in which Hoffman would have had to engage. Instead, you have delivered the latest defeat to the jingoistic, wrong-headed wing of the Republican Party. For that, I praise you.

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One of my Facebook-friends posted this today while linking to an ABC News article about the successful ballot measure to overturn the law legalizing same-sex marriage:

Funny how every time they ask the people what they want, they stand up for marriage and reject false “equality.”

This Facebook-friend is, granted, a conservative Catholic interested in apologetics and expanding the projection of American power worldwide. To put an exclamation point on this aside, let me just add that this person is a fan of Sam Brownback. So, I shouldn’t expect much from him in terms of demonstrating an appreciation for the ideas behind the battle for marriage equality.

But, the very premise of that comment — that in truly legitimate circumstances we can rely on the general populace to voluntarily extend equal civil rights to disenfranchised groups — is completely absurd. When has this ever happened? As far as I know, the answer is never, but I will just limit this claim to modern times to be safe. It took legislative, judicial, or monarchical action to grant civil rights in each case when a group that had previously been deprived of its rights gained them. This is true from native Americans to Russian serfs to American slaves. In those cases, the enfranchised groups never would have voted to give the oppressed equal rights. Does that mean that it was wrong for Congress, Alexander II, or the Supreme Court to give them those rights? Denying this should force my Facebook-friend to deny that we cannot reasonably expect the populace to judge fairly on matters involving others’ rights. People are riled up in these matters and decide based on irrational fears, not on a dispassionate nature, and that is not what we should use as a guide in forming moral opinions.

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Meanwhile on the fight for gay equality: bravo Kalamazoo! I’m genuinely proud that one of yesterday’s progressive victories came out of Michigan, particularly K-Zoo because it proves that crazies don’t dominate all of the West Side. Going into yesterday, I didn’t think that that part of the state would boost my willingness to stay in the area while Maine hurt its own chances. I thought that things would go the opposite way.

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I was disappointed this morning to find that Washtenaw County voters had rejected the millage to replace lost state funding. I went into yesterday thinking that I would vote against it, but ended up voting for when I realized that the state budget fiasco is not the fault of WISD administrators, teachers, or students. Sure, I think that the district could use money more wisely and will find ways to cope with the hole in their budget, but, if any area in Michigan can afford to support a millage right now, it’s this one.

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As for the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, I don’t care. McDonnell is crazy, but Deeds isn’t anyone to write home about. Meanwhile, with either Corzine or Christie as governor, it’s still Jersey, and that’s all that matters in the end.

net neutrality

The Wall Street Journal featured a debate on net neutrality between Senators Hatch and DeMint and the chair and CEO of Mozilla yesterday in its opinion section. The piece by Hatch and DeMint was, unsurprisingly, silly. They argue that independent software developers (i.e. those who created Mozilla Firefox) will be stifled by FCC regulators if the federal government adopted the principle of net neutrality. Yes, they made this argument against the people behind the reason why I don’t have to type this post in an archaic Internet Explorer browser. Sensible, aye?

Anyway, this motivated me to write a letter to the editor of the Journal, which I copy here:

I find it fascinating that Sens. Hatch and DeMint argue against net neutrality by invoking the “independent software developers” responsible for all of the gains that we have seen since the rise of broadband Internet. They do it while arguing against the independent software developers who created the first browser to successfully challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer: Messrs. Baker and Lilly. If anyone has the interests of independent software developers at heart in this debate, it is people whose products would have had no chance to gain market share in an Internet subject to the restrictions that Sens. Hatch and DeMint would allow. They raise the bogeyman of government bureaucrats to scare us about obstructive regulation while ignoring the reality of bureaucrats at broadband companies enforcing their contracts with, say, Microsoft to slow downloads of the next revolutionary browser or email application. Imagine a world in which Internet Explorer were still users’ only option for exploring the Web. Yeah, it’s not a pretty thought.

I do not want to argue against Sens. Hatch and DeMint by appealing to campaign contributions because I do not think that they base their opposition solely on that. Instead, I think that they misunderstand the idea behind net neutrality. Proponents want to minimize the barriers to entry that individuals face on the Internet by ensuring that existing companies cannot block their access to customers through deals with service providers. This pressures companies like Microsoft to adapt rather than stagnate as entrepreneurs threaten to steal their customers with superior products. Encouraging this innovation by existing companies and upstarts alike is a good thing for both consumers and the economy. The way to do that is to officially adopt the principle of net neutrality.

turkey’s movement away from the west

This article on Foreign Affairs Online today is definitely worth reading. It discusses how the AKP and its brand of Turkish Islamism have shifted Turkey’s foreign policy from a pro-Western to anti-Western paradigm. One statistic that the author cites: support for EU membership, which has gone from 80% in 2002 (when the AKP came to power) to one-third in 2008. This is remarkable in a country that has long stood as the model of how Islam and secular democracy can coexist, where the separation between religion and the state has been stronger than that in most Western countries. Anyone who questions whether American aggression in the Middle East has hurt our ability to promote our interests abroad should look at this development as proof positive that it has. It is yet another example of how American interference in the region simply pushes Muslims to sympathize with the very radicals who we aim to destroy.