Stimulus is working, in DC

There is good news for workers who still have jobs. A WorldatWork survey of more than 1,000 U.S. companies found that 77 percent of the work force can expect to receive base pay raises this year.

And Washington is among the four metro areas with the largest projected salary budget increases of 3.1 percent. The other three are: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

The results in the "WorldatWork Special Update: 2008-09 Salary Budget Survey" were determined from interviews in early December, after credit markets tightened and after the presidential election in order to gather the latest outlook for compensation plans for 2009.

A survey conducted in April 2008 found salary budget increases of 3.9 percent in the Washington area (also the top of the range) along with Boston, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego and San Francisco.

That's from the Washington Business Journal. It is already the case that the 3 richest counties and 9 of the 20 richest counties are suburbs of DC. Let's hear it for targeted stimulus! Maybe the idea is a kind of trickle-down economics. We get rich in DC, then we buy stuff from the rest of you poor bastards. I just got back from Haiti, but that's a long way to go for poverty tourism. Soon I'll be able to do it in my own country! First up is Seattle.

The Metro monopoly keeps serving up laughs

Another question I asked my students was the following:
1) What kind of business is Metro? Are you happy with that? How could it be improved?

The answer of course is it's a sorry-ass government monopoly, which can only be remedied by competition. In the meantime it gets to do things like raise price way above marginal cost, pack people like sardines into rush hour trains, run non-rush hour trains rediculously infrequently, completely abandon bus schedules, put you on hold for hours when you call, run off the rails, open the doors while moving and on the side without a platform, run people over, and waste money on frivolous programs and excessive salaries.

Today's Examiner finds one more reason to laugh or cry or cry through the laughter:

A Metro station manager and a Metro custodian were arrested on prostitution charges after an undercover transit police investigation found they arranged sexual trysts for money from inside the Dupont Circle Metro station.

At one point the employees used the Metro loudspeaker system to facilitate an illicit sexual arrangement, according to police who arrested the pair last week.

I think H.L Mencken's statements on democracy apply equally well to Metro:

I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

This post is dedicated to Rusty at Why I Hate DC.

Have some fun, shoot the gun!

Shooting guns is not fun for me, nor do I enjoy chainsaws, but I do believe we should be allowed to own them. Of course there should be restictions on what you do with them and where you use them, e.g. not near my ear. And everyone draws the line somewhere, i.e. no sensible person believes in a right to own nuclear weapons.

So I'm glad the Supreme Court has overturned DC's ban on handguns. That it existed for 32 years, during which time we were named murder capital of the world, illustrates how out of whack democracy can get.

Since when does DC pass up federal money?

When the teachers' unions demand it. Here's Dan Lips describing Del. Norton's absurd battle:

How much funding for the education of students is District of Columbia Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton willing to lose to prove a political point? At least $18 million, apparently.

Del. Norton is using her voice in Congress to try to end the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, a federally-funded program that currently helps more than 1,900 disadvantaged kids attend private schools in the District.

This program has proven widely popular with D.C. families. Since it began in 2004, approximately 7,200 students have applied -- about four applicants per scholarship.

...

Unfortunately, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton remains fiercely opposed to vouchers. She was honest about her intentions: "I can tell you that the Democratic Congress is not about to extend this program." As the House Appropriations Committee considers whether to fund the program, Norton appears intent on leading an effort to block the $18 million in funding for scholarships.

For D.C. taxpayers, this is a costly way to score points in the political struggle over public education. Terminating the program would pull $18 million out of the D.C. public education system and increase the burden on the school budget by sending 1,900 kids back into public schools.

For families with children in the scholarship program, it's impossible to quantify what taking these scholarships away will mean. You can hear directly from participating families themselves by visiting http://www.voicesofschoolchoice.org/. There, families explain how they are benefiting from the opportunity to choose a safe and effective private school for their children.

Conveniently, as the House Appropriations subcomittee considers the issue today, the Department of Education issues a report claiming no significant improvement from vouchers. From the Post:

The congressionally mandated study, conducted through the Institute of Education Sciences, the department's research arm, compared the performance and attitudes of students who had scholarships with those of peers who sought scholarships but weren't chosen in the lottery.

Both groups took widely used math and reading tests, such as the Stanford Achievement Test. Overall, there was no statistically significant difference in performance.

But some groups of voucher recipients showed improvement. For instance, among students who earned relatively high reading scores before the program started, those with scholarships progressed faster and are now about two months ahead of their peers.

Students who previously attended struggling schools -- a group the program is designed to help -- showed no boost in test scores compared with their peers. Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, director of the institute, said one possible explanation is that those children lagged far behind academically and had trouble adjusting to what may be a more demanding classroom.

Parents of students with scholarships were more satisfied with their children's new schools and were less likely to worry that schools could be dangerous, the report found. Students showed no difference in their level of satisfaction.

First, the program has purposely been hobbled by its political enemies through regulations and spending limits, precisely to limit any significant effects. Second, insignificance indicates just that, i.e. neither significantly positive nor negative effects. This is not surprising in a new (and hobbled) program. Third, so why give up the federal money? There's no loss to DC taxpayers. Fourth, a little perspective is in order. We're talking about allowing parents and kids, poor parents and kids, the freedom to choose a way out of a miserable state run monopoly. If monopoly is so great, why not expand it to shoe sales, let the government do that. Or consider the beautiful irony of the Senate's monopolized cafeteria, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg:

As befits a government-run commissary, the Senate cafeteria has a decidedly Soviet attitude toward variety. It has averaged only two new menu items a year over the last decade. The food is so bad, every lunch hour Senate staffers rush to the House side of the Capitol, like starving New Yorkers of the future storming the last Soylent Green vendor.

According to auditors, the chain of restaurants run by the Senate food service, including the snooty Senate Dining Room, has almost never been in the black. It's lost more than $18 million since 1993 and dropped about $2 million last year alone. If the food service doesn't get an emergency bridge loan of a quarter-million dollars, it won't be able to make payroll.

So how will the Senate fix the problem? Well, with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein taking the lead, the Democrats -- that's right, the Democrats -- have called a classic Republican play: Privatize it.

The House of Representatives made the switch in the 1980s, and its food service is now better. And profitable: the House has made $1.2 million in commissions since 2003. True to the founders' vision of the Senate as the more slow-moving branch of government, the Senate has taken 20 years to follow suit.

This was a painful decision for many Democrats who believe that privatization cannot be justified simply because it delivers better service and higher quality for less money. "What about the workers?" they cried. Apparently, some in the Democratic caucus feel that the top priority in the restaurant business is to generate paychecks for people who are bad at their jobs.

Feinstein, head of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administrations, was forced to deal with reality. "It's cratering," the Washington Post quoted Feinstein as saying. "Candidly, I don't think the taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn't need to be. There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like businesses."

Yes, yes, go on Dianne. Run with that thought. Explore it, as the therapists say.

Perhaps you might meditate on the District of Columbia's public school system, which spends roughly $14,000 a pupil in exchange for one of the worst educations in the country. Every year, one of the greatest mysteries in the nation's capital is whether textbooks have been delivered to the right kids, or even to the right schools. It can take until Christmas to get it all worked out. FedEx Corp., meanwhile, can tell you where any of its millions of packages are in more than 100 countries, right now. (Why not just FedEx the textbooks to the kids?)

And fifth: There's an immense amount of evidence that vouchers work. See Salibury and Tooley's international overview, especially Lewis Andrews chapter on special education.

American weddings

This is not Monsoon Wedding, this is a real wedding in downtown DC! Manan Shah married Swati Raval at the Ronald Reagan building. He rode in on an elephant. Read more, courtesy of today's Post.

Occasionally I wonder about the extravagance of American weddings. Especially when I'm forced to buy a $100 herb grinder for my friend because that's all that's left on his Williams-Sonoma registry. I've been to a few weddings that probably cost upwards of $100,000. I know some couples who have taken out loans to pay for it. According to this site, the average wedding costs $28,732. What gives? Why not get married in Safeway, as I plan to do?

I figure part of it has to do with credible commitment, i.e. the bride and groom will think twice about redoing such a costly venture. And in this way they are also tying their own and each others hands to some extent. This of course was accomplished by the bonds of marriage before divorce became socially and legally acceptable, with the advent of no-fault divorce, etc. So has the cost of marriage gone up as a result? I can't really tell from this site (or without paying for a subscription), but I would need to correct for increased income anyway. One thing to look at is divorce rates by state and see if that is correlated with average wedding cost. It looks like states in New England and the Midwest have the lowest divorce rates. So I would expect them to have the cheapest weddings.

So does that mean India, with notoriously extravagant weddings, should have high divorce rates? Good luck finding those numbers!

Dewey Beach 911!

Battle-weary police forces along the Delmarva shoreline are bracing today for the peak of beach week, when as many as 150,000 high school graduates from around the Washington area descend on seaside towns in droves, without parents, and bearing the threat of mess and mayhem.

Already this week in Ocean City, Md., nearly 100 people have been arrested for raucous behavior — everything from a fight on the boardwalk drawing 500 onlookers to 27 drug arrests in one night alone.

In nearby Dewey Beach, Del., the residents of an entire house were arrested earlier in the week — 25 students on charges of underage drinking and possession of drug paraphernalia.

“Finally saw my first gas-mask water bong,” said Cliff Dempsey, a Dewey Beach police sergeant, describing a seized military-style gas mask with a plastic tube and bowl attached for smoking marijuana.

More from the Examiner.

DC v. New Orleans

Jay Greene talks about DC vouchers v. Louisianna vouchers. Remember when we competed for murder capital of the world?

Education roundup

1) Alex Tabarrok and the New York Times on New Orleans' new schools.

2) Paul Peterson on the eduction industrial complex.

3) Marion Barry comes out in support of school choice.

4) Juliet Williams on teachers unions busting the budget in California.

Education reform in DC looking ever more likely

Mayor Fentry has named Rick Hess and Kenneth Wong as independent evaluators of the city's school reforms. That is yet more good news for DC's kids, maybe not so good for the adult interest groups which stand in the way of reform. Here is Hess on the need to focus on labor market reform:

For two decades, choice-based reform has been unwisely and deceptively offered by its proponents as something akin to a miracle cure that will boost student achievement, unleash competition, and advance core democratic values.

Along the way, little attention has been paid to the design of these efforts to deregulate a $500 billion a year industry, fostering a vibrant supply of effective providers, nurturing effective mechanisms for quality control, or understanding the multiplicity of arrangements and practices that stifle even nontraditional schools and service providers. For instance, the choice community has had next to nothing to say about the need for venture capital in education, about the ways in which personnel policies and benefit systems stifle new ventures, or about how consumer choices should impact the compensation and job security of educators and school leaders.

One result is that some who were once enthusiastic proponents of “choice” have reversed course and expressed doubts about the viability of educational markets — without ever having stopped to consider all the ways in which simply promoting one-off choice programs falls desperately short of any serious effort to thoughtfully deregulate schooling or promote a coherent K-12 marketplace. Indeed, some have abandoned the choice bandwagon with the same ill-considered haste that marked their initial enthusiasm.

For decades, we have poured money into schooling while seeing few obvious benefits. Current per-pupil spending in constant dollars more than tripled between 1961-62 and 2003-04, from $2,603 to $8,886. Pupil-to-teacher ratios plunged, from 25.1 students per teacher in 1965 to 15.3 per teacher in 2007. Meanwhile, educational progress has been disappointing, at best, over the past quarter-century. This is the epitome of pushing on a string. In an economy marked by new technologies, labor-saving devices, steady growth in productivity, and an evolving labor pool, we are hiring and deploying educators just the way we did a half-century ago. The result is that new investments have not delivered the hoped-for results.

In other words, we need to do what is difficult, we need to fire people, and overcome the special interests which protect them. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee is doing just that. God bless her.

Addendum: Good to see the DCist is in agreement.

Help is on the way in DC?

From the Examiner:

Columbia Heights is getting a new Target store, a Staples, new condos, a Starbucks, sit down restaurants, parking and other services. The new commerce is made possible because the local government provided initial funding (Tax Increment Funding TIF) for the projects. Mayor Adrian Fenty and several councilmembers unveiled a new $95 million TIF Tuesday to bring new development to other blighted neighborhood corridors. These include a total of $35 million for Georgia Avenue in Northwest, $10 million for Martin Luther King and South Capitol in Southeast.The H street Corridor in Northeast will see 25 million. Minnesota-Benning in Northeast will get $15 million and Pennsylvania Avenue in Southeast will receive $10 million.

What's not reported here is that Columbia Heights residents waited for these businesses for a decade or more. Columbia Heights has a tragic history going back to the 1968 riots. I've only observed it since early 2000 when I moved there. For seven years, the commercial center of the neighborhood, around the metro, looked like a moonscape - literally several acres of dirt. Until a Giant opened in the neighborhood in 2005 you'd have been hard pressed to find a place to buy milk. It remains to be seen if the sudden big box development will really produce a viable, organic neighborhood.

So why did this happen in Columbia Heights while surrounding neighborhoods, such as Adams Morgan and U street, and the city as a whole experienced a historic rebirth? The answer is that city bureaucrats essentially owned Columbia Heights, treated it as an urban planning experiment, and doled out the development rights to a single monopolist, unaccountable to the taxpayer. Columbia Heights never suffered from a lack of access to capital. It suffered from central planning.

A much simpler, more straightforward, and less discriminatory approach to revitalizing DC's neighborhoods would be to make them more attractive to business by reducing DC's notoriously high taxes and regulation.

Keeping the Soviet dream alive in DC

Hard to believe the DC Convention Center is losing money:

Nearly four years ago, city officials opened the $850 million Washington Convention Center with a string of superlatives. The largest publicly financed project ever built in the city, they said, would attract more than a million visitors a year, fill hotels and set off an economic boom.

Instead, convention attendance is dropping, the surrounding neighborhood is yet to be transformed by the promised new development, and conventioneers are filling fewer hotel rooms than expected.

The number of hotel rooms booked is especially significant because it is the most accurate measure of performance, and last year hotel convention bookings missed projections by 13 percent. Bookings are likely to fall short of projections by 24 percent this year and 29 percent next year.

...

The city's solution is to increase its investment, pressing ahead with plans to build a $550 million hotel next to the convention center, financed in part with a $135 million tax subsidy from the city, which convention center officials expect to be repaid with tax revenue generated by the project. The rest will be privately financed.

Someone please explain how DC officials are supposed to be experts, or even average, at the convention and hotel business. Likewise for the baseball and stadium business.

Maximum overdrive

Congratulations, Metrobus. You've really hit your stride. Three women plowed over in one week. Two were on Valentine's Day. Fantastic.

Are we ready to question the wisdom of granting monopoly status to Metro?

Someone's been reading Jane Jacobs

Ryan Avent at the DCist reminds us that it is diversity which makes great cities. Unfortunately, DC ain't one of them:

almost no one, other than the President of the United States, makes his home among the office blocks of downtown and the Golden Triangle. And it shows. Despite being the single densest employment center in the metropolitan area, holding more Greater Washingtonians at any one time than any other place in the region, the streetscape is strikingly--sometimes shockingly--bleak.

I would add that Adams Morgan continues to be the most vibrant neighborhood in town precisely because its residents have steadfastly fought off various ill-conceived urban renewal efforts by government. The one that slipped by is the Marie Reed Learning Center, an awful eyesore and dead space which nearly cuts Adams Morgan off from Dupont Circle to the south and U street to the southeast.

What is missing in Adams Morgan is daytime businesses, and that, I'm afraid, is because the resident activists lack consistency in their fight for diversity. It's really just a few anti-business Nazis, some of whom I know, who have made it difficult for any large business to move in. Just ask Harris Teeter.

The bottom line is that zoning regs are pure evil, and the enemy of diversity. They are vestiges of the high modernist era, a time in which social planners arrogantly disregarded the interests of the Everyman, the man on the street, as it were, and pretended to have an elite access to and interpretation of information. But the high modernists are dead. Can we not move on now?

Diapers are the new Tang

Just when you thought NASA was not worth a shit:

Nowak wore diapers used by astronauts to drive the 950 miles without taking a bathroom break so she could challenge Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman at the Orlando International Airport, police said.

Here is the article from Scott McCabe, who is fast becoming my favorite journalist.

In other news from the Examiner, Marion Barry is trying to extend the smoking ban to cars. Does this include crack smoke?

Correction: It's a toss up between Scott McCabe and this guy.

Bossa

A certain someone just reminded me I should spend more time at HR-57. I forgot to tell certain someone that Bossa Lounge is another excellent place for jazz, and you can find me there usually on Sunday nights for the late show. I knew this blog was good for something. Truly, Thad Wilson and the Young Lions are phenomenal, especially their drummer, Quincy Phillips, who you have to see to believe.

Addendum: Another new favorite haunt, though more bird music than jazz: the Botanical Gardens. It's perfect in the winter. I learned that the proper name for snake plant is "mother-in-law's tongue."

What does DC home rule have in common with the war in Iraq?

Both are inspired by the same flawed idea that democracy is always and everywhere the best form of government. We know the results in Iraq: tens of thousands of casualties. And we know the results in DC: Marion Barry. Sure, we've got a sober mayor now, who wants to "take over the schools," whatever that means. But Marion's always there, on the City Council now, tempting him with the crack pipe. I say the nation's capital should be treated as an experiment. I like the charter schools, but we need to go further. We need to try out some other forms of government. And we need to stop interfering with foreign governments.

There's a simple solution here: Pledge to the world that when we topple a dictator, we will then make him mayor of DC. Mayor for life, even. Imagine what Saddam would have done with DC's crime emergency. Or just think what fun we could have with Kim Jong Il as mayor, bumping into him on the metro, etc. In fact, I hear Kim's not buying his own propaganda anymore, so he might even agree to this arrangement. Then we could stop yakking about 6 party talks.

There's nothing but upside here, people. Let's make it happen with a constitutional amendment. Who's with me?

Nota bene: Yeah, some of you will remember how I originally argued for this war, but that was before I met this man. And, appropriately, under this proposition I would have had to live with a tyrant.

Addendum: It's comforting that many of the smartest people I know also fell into this trap. And, they too, as Washingtonians, would have been stuck with a tyrant.

Why are cities so expensive?

It all comes back to this guy, and people like him. Ed Glaeser' s work suggests the same radical idea, that housing prices have gone up primarily because of regulation. It restricts the supply! Supply goes down, the price goes up! Why does it take research to make this point?

Addendum: By extension, it should also be clear that excessive regulation in cities is also the root cause of sprawl. As this article states:

No other region in the country, however, has created as many jobs in recent years as the Washington metropolitan area. Between 2000 and 2005, the region added 359,000 new jobs, said Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, citing Labor Department statistics. That was 75,000 more jobs than the nation's No. 2 job engine, Miami. "We've been adding jobs faster than we've been able to add resident workers," he said. "Had we been able to produce more housing, we could have added more people."

Trader Joe's meets the District

I just made my weekly trip to Trader Joe's to replenish my collection of wines costing $3 or less. This is the new one at Foggy Bottom, the only one in DC, as far as I know. It's usually bustling, but tonight it was cheek to jowl. Slowly I realized the people I was running into in the dairy section were waiting to checkout, with the line stretching all around the interior perimeter of the store. No one was pissed off. At the Sandanista Safeway, everyone's pissed off. It gets tense when the line exceeds 5 people. If you're listening, Trader Joe's, please open another fucking store in the District. You're the best thing that's happened to this city. I often ponder where your next location should be, figuring your demographic is cheap bastards like myself who aren't opposed to well run franchises. Stay away from Mt. Pleasant, which has a slew of highly competitive bodegas offering excellent produce. Your best bet is Adams Morgan, or 14th and U. Your third location should be at 10th and Pennsylvania, the new condos going up next to Cato.