The Tax Foundation came out with its annual report ranking states by a Tax Climate Index and Hawaii came in around the middle of the pack for a change. At 33rd Hawaii was neither near the best or the worst in terms of tax climate. Those states that made up the top 10 typically had no sales or state income tax and those at the bottom of the list had high rates of every conceivable tax. Hawaii falls in the middle but doesn’t mean the same is true for the individual tax climate. Still it is nice to not to lead a bad list or be last in line for a good one as is so often the case.

The Background Paper is here and the full report is a pdf file at the bottom of the page.

Our friend Ted Balaker over at the Reason Foundation on their Out of Control blog explores the alleged “growth” in public rail transit. The common wisdom, promulgated by the MSM, is that high gas prices are spurring an increase in public transportation usage. The fact is that the raw numbers are not even comparable. An example from an article Ted quotes:

Second, the absolute amount of total travel in private automobiles dwarfs public ransit’s totals: In 2000, transit provided about 46.6 billion miles of movement while passenger miles traveled in the same year on highways totaled about 4 trillion—2.5 trillion in cars and another 1.5 trillion in small trucks and SUVs. That’s 86 times greater than passenger miles on transit. In fact, transit’s share of all passenger miles traveled in the U.S. from 1985 through 2000 averaged only 1.26 percent.

The whole blog piece is quite informative. Rail advocates have been lauding the increase of transit figures for years, but rail is still a tiny fraction of actual miles traveled. In “27 of the top 50 metro areas” telecommuters already outnumber the number of public transit commuters. Spend over $7 Billion on construction, operations and maintenance for public transportation on Oahu? Why?

Portland, OR is considered the poster child for light rail, smart growth and city planning. The latest 2 posts on the American Dream Coalition Blog shed light on how wrong this designation is, and another example from Seattle.

Business owners in downtown Portland are dismayed to realize that a two-year project of reconstructing the city’s bus mall to accommodate light-rail trains will force Tri-Met, the region’s transit agency, to reroute hundreds of buses to streets in front of their businesses. “Buses are noisy,” says one. “They set off car alarms just from the vibrations.”

This reconstruction is a part of Tri-Met’s plan to blanket the region in expensive light-rail lines that will carry former bus riders. Existing light-rail lines traverse downtown in an east-west direction. Although there is no funding to build a light-rail line south of downtown, Tri-Met wants to build a north-south route through downtown so it can extend the route south when such funding becomes available.

. . .

The estimated costs of “public amenities” for Portland’s South Waterfront District — known to its detractors as the “So What” district — have doubled, and the final estimates are not yet in. Street improvements and parks are expected to cost $50 million more than their original estimates, and “affordable housing” will cost even more.

The district is planned as a high-rise, high-density office and housing complex connected to downtown by a streetcar and connected to several hospitals in the hills above downtown by an aerial tram. The city rejected an ordinary housing complex that originally proposed by the landowners because it was not dense enough.

And city planners wonder why housing has become so unaffordable.

And then there is this from Washington state:

In a five-to-four ruling, Washington state’s supreme court refused to overturn the condemnation of someone’s land for a train station. Sound Transit, the agency responsible for Seattle’s light-rail boondoggle, wanted someone’s land for a commuter rail station. The agency held a public hearing on the condemnation, but the only notice of the hearing was an agenda posted on the agency’s web site. Thus, the landowners had no idea their land was being considered for condemnation until it was too late.

Washington state law requires prior notification, which is usually given by posting notices in local newspapers and on signs around the property being considered for condemnation. But the supreme court said a web site notification was sufficient.

Does anyone really believe that this system is, or intended to be, fair?

Naivity spring eternal, I guess.

Link to ADC Blog.

Lead article today in World Net Daily.

Hawaii’s gas price controls, imposed last fall when the cost of fuel was hovering around $3 a gallon in many parts of the U.S., have actually triggered much higher costs for consumers.

But the most significant observation of the article is this:

Before the gas cap law, Hawaii paid an average of 44 cents more per gallon than the rest of the mainland. Since the law went into effect in September, however, the differential has increased to more than 50 cents per gallon.

Still Senator Ron Menor refuses to face reality:

“I cannot support a repeal because I think that would really be caving in to the oil industry that doesn’t want to be regulated.”

Not “caving in to the oil industry” isn’t a reason to keep the price controls in place, especially if they are costing consumers money rather than saving them money. This statement is more a revelation of Menor’s ideology rather than sound public policy. As has been pointed out time and time again price caps never work as intended and regulations always increase prices and cost consumers money.

Let’s just start of with some random quotes from the Tech Central Station article:

Proposals for an alcohol-fueled end to dependence on foreign oil do not sit lightly on the American landscape. Can they fit within our borders at all?

Solar ranching translates into paving areas the size of Massachusetts with silicon panels. But farming out the fuel supply means putting multiples of Texas under the plough. Even corn as tall as an elephant’s eye yields less than half a gallon of ethanol per acre per day. And biotech might, at best, wring another quart out of fertile farmland.

That’s just not enough — it takes hundreds of millions of gallons of gas a day to run America’s cars, trucks and tractors. A switch grass combine’s mileage makes an Escalade look like a Prius rolling downhill. It would take upwards of a billion extra acres — a million square miles – to fuel the nation’s transport.

Now put that in perspective, Oahu is 597 square miles. Ethanol grown and refined here is not going to make a dent in Hawaii’s “imported oil” dependence.

The whole TCS article by Russel Sietz here.

From Newsmax.com:

The Pennsylvania Republican lawmaker’s statement was in response to a USA Today report published Thursday which said Specter had succeeded 13 times over the past four years in securing $48.7 million worth of defense projects for six clients represented by a lobbying firm co-founded by Michael Herson.

Herson is the husband of Vicki Siegel Herson, Specter’s legislative assistant for appropriations.

“Ms. Siegel’s husband did not lobby my office. The companies which received the allocations or ‘earmarks’ were represented by other lobbying firms,” Specter said in the statement.

. . .

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a leading Democrat on the lobbying reform issue, said Thursday that there was “reasonably broad consensus around the need to increase transparency,” surrounding the thousands of earmarks that make it into bills every year. He also said that, like all senators, he tries to gain approval of projects that will help his state. “That’s the game that we all play,” he said.

When did getting approval for projects that will “help his state” become the function of government? The “game” of robbing some people for the benefit of others is an assumed status quo.

Article here.

This has to be seen to be appreciated.

The only thing missing to make it relevant to here is the “Aloha.”

Cartoon

The anti-biotec crowd is relentless in its oppostion to biotec and its disinformation on the subject. They never let the facts get in the way. Dr. Henry I. Miller examines an example from the NY Times of author Andrew Pollack rewriting biotec facts.

Reflecting the views of biotech’s antagonists, Pollack approaches the subject as though the genetic engineering of plants were fundamentally new. But virtually all of the 200 major crops in North America have been genetically improved, or modified, in some way. Plant breeders, not nature, gave us seedless grapes and watermelons, the tangelo (a tangerine-grapefruit hybrid), the canola variety of
rapeseed, and fungus-resistant strawberries. In North American and European diets, only fish and wild game, berries, and mushrooms may be said not to have been genetically engineered in some fashion. North Americans have consumed more than a trillion servings of foods that contain gene-spliced ingredients, with not a single untoward reaction.

Miller goes on to point out numerous misconceptions and errors concerning biotec that Pollack asserts. Then he wraps up:

Finally, Mr. Pollack’s disparaging assertion that “industry. . . has been peddling the same two advantages herbicide tolerance and insect resistance for 10 years,” is puzzling. These traits have been of monumental importance — not only to farmers’ bottom line, but to occupational health and the natural environment. Enhanced pest resistance in plants has obviated the need for hundreds of millions of pounds of chemical pesticides (and thereby reduced environmental and occupational exposures), and herbicide tolerance has made possible a shift to more benign herbicides and to environment-friendly no-till farming.

The whole article is at Tech Central Station here.

John Stossel has more to say on what the intrasigence of teachers unions is doing to schools.

Bosses, have I got an idea for you: Don’t pay your best employees more, don’t ease out your least productive workers, and for crying out loud, never fire anyone, not even for the most blatant misconduct on the job.

It works for the public schools, doesn’t it?

Actually, it doesn’t, but since they’re government monopolies, they don’t care. They never go out of business. They just keep doing what they’re doing, year after year, churning out class after class of students handicapped by a poor education.

He recounts a story about a teacher who sent a sexual email to a student but it was next to impossible to fire the teacher.

It’s almost impossible because of the rules in the New York schools’ 200-page contract with their teachers. There are so many rules that principals rarely even try to jump through all the hoops to fire a bad teacher. It took six years of expensive litigation before the teacher who wrote Cutee101 was fired. During those six years, he received more than $300,000 in salary.

Imagine what Stossel would find if he came to Hawaii. Article here.

The windfall profits tax is a totally bankrupt idea that panders to voters much like the Gas Cap. You are sitting there with a barrel of oil. A guy offers you $60 for it. What are you supposed to do, tell him it’s only worth $40? That’s not a “windfall”, and those profits will encourage the oil companies to drill more holes deeper in more places to find more oil, ultimately lowering costs.

Brian Barbata
Jobber