Wichita Visioneers in Louisville. The Wichita Business Journal’s Emily Behlmann reports on a trip by Wichitans to Louisville to get ideas on transforming Wichita’s downtown. Hopefully they won’t get this idea, as reported yesterday by the Louisville Courier-Journal: “The heavily subsidized 4th Street Live entertainment district has come under criticism from locally owned businesses for receiving millions of dollars in tax breaks and government subsidies — including a controversial, $950,000 city loan that won’t necessarily have to be repaid.” According to Wichita planner Goody Clancy, heavy subsidy isn’t supposed to be necessary in Wichita. And, I hope all the planners read Jack Cashill’s take on Louisville’s planning: Good intentions, and planners, can sap a city’s soul.
Lynn Jenkins: Don’t try to make Koch Industries a scapegoat. From today’s Wichita Eagle: “Koch management is dedicated to keeping the company growing. It reinvests 90 percent of company profits back into the businesses, allowing them to expand product lines and hire more employees. That is good for consumers and for workers. However, the company has come under fire because its owners support free-market principles inconsistent with the current Democrat leadership.”
Should candidates bother to debate? Rasmussen finds that nearly half of likely voters have watched at least one debate, and about half find them informative.
Costly approach to Kansas economic development — or defense. “Insiders were still not talking Wednesday about the potential cost of saving 6,000 aircraft workers’ jobs in Wichita. Outsiders say that some circumstances at their employer, Hawker Beechcraft, are so different from other companies Kansas has fought to keep that it may be impossible to gauge what it might cost to help prevent the 80-year-old Wichita firm from moving lock, stock and avionics to Baton Rouge, La., and cashing in on Louisiana incentive packages rumored to be worth as much as $400 million.” From Kansas Reporter.
FiveThirtyEight. More about the political site FiveThirtyEight, which I took a look at on Sunday, especially its coverage of Kansas races. Here, James Taranto discusses FiveThirtyEight, concluding: “The recent acquisition of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com makes for a striking contrast with the paper’s uneven news reporting and dreadful op-ed columnists.”
No Wichita city council today. It’s the League of Kansas Municipalities conference in Overland Park this week. LKM is a special interest group working in favor not of the citizens who live in Kansas towns and cities, but the politicians and bureaucrats that run them — and their cronies — who benefit from the LKM’s advocacy of things like TIF districts, STAR bonds, tax abatements, and eminent domain for economic development.
County commissioner forum tonight. Tonight at 7:00 pm at Gloria dei Lutheran Church, 1101 N. River Blvd. Oletha Faust-Goudeau and Richard Ranzau will appear.
Parkinson is moderate — he says again. Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson — yet again — engages in self-congratulation over “how Kansas has weathered the economic recession by setting politics aside and working together to find moderate, common-sense solutions.” He’s done this several times since the legislative session was over — so many times that I’ve lost count. Evidence of a guilty conscience, perhaps? Parkinson’s abandonment of the Kansas Democratic Party by not choosing to run for reelection has put that party at a tremendous disadvantage in this year’s elections.
Bureaucracy vs. Bureaucracy? “Andrew Gray, Libertarian Candidate for Kansas Governor, says that simplifying or repealing unnecessary statutes and regulations is a key part of his administration’s plan to empower the private sector to create jobs and prosperity in Kansas. He also says he’s pleased that Senator Brownback is at least talking about similar actions. However, Gray finds it ridiculous that Senator Brownback is actually planning to create more bureaucracy in order to cut bureaucracy.” I think he’s got a point. But anything that is necessary to reduce the size of government is what we need to do.
The impossibility of an informed electorate. D.W. MacKenzie writing for Mises Daily, reacting to a John Stossel suggestion that uninformed people have a duty not to vote: “The problem with voting in modern America is that we have a politicized society, and modern society is extraordinarily complex. Stossel suggests that only people who follow politics should vote. However, even those who follow politics very closely do not understand the implications of changes in public policy. The lesson here is that efforts to incrementally reform government policies and programs through the democratic process are futile. To the extent that we vote at all, rational people should vote to depoliticize the economy. … What this means is that we need to reintroduce the price system as the primary method of economic communication, and the profit-and-loss sorting mechanism as the primary method of social reform.”
Gallup: Americans negative towards federal government. “More than 7 in 10 Americans use a word or phrase that is clearly negative when providing a top-of-mind reaction to the federal government.” Details here: Americans’ Image of “Federal Government” Mostly Negative.
A minority opinion, or a delusion? Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “Here’s the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can’t create jobs. Here’s what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.”
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