Across the Great Divide

Number of the Day: Playing Horse with Tommy.

Tommy Hilfiger's Greenwich estate is on the market for
$27.9 million.

It's apparently so big no one can accurately count the numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms, though estimates I've read range from eight and eight to 13 and seven.

Before you pull out your checkbook... I mean, before your people pull out your checkbook, be forewarned that the basketball court advertised as one of the amenities looks more like a designer-converted handball court. Not enough room for 3 on 3, but no chasing caroms down the driveway, either.

I have looked, but cannot find any scouting service that will tell me whether Tommy is a one or a two.

Hammond Can Still Fly.

It took a few days longer than I originally predicted, but the blessing did arrive.

Prosperity gospel minister Mac Hammond has a new plane.

Hammond's ministry has been retrenching — cutting back its hour Sunday broadcast, eliminating the print editions of its magazine and newsletter, stopping live broadcasts to its satellite churches in Duluth and Eau Claire, and cutting loose its affiliations with its outreach ministries in Orono and Club 3 Degrees in downtown Minneapolis.

And, most humbling for a televangelist hovering just below the top tier of prosperity gospel ministers, Living Word Christian Center was offering its Citation 3 jet for sale.

When Hammond flew to his mentor Kenneth Copeland's now notorious Ministers Conference in late January, I had a hunch that he would be the recipient of a Copeland-orchestrated outpouring of support from the attendees. But a late appeal from Mike Huckabee for help from his friend Copeland and the assembled ministers may have sucked a million dollars out of the room that otherwise could've kept the jet in the family.

Hammond found no buyer for his plane in Texas. But it turns out he did not have to wait long after his sermon on earnest expectation for his believing to be realized.

Near the end of the Ministers Conference, Hammond later informed church members, he was called into Copeland's office and was told that the debt on the airplane was the bottleneck for his church's finances. The Lord, speaking through Brother Copeland, revealed "Your willingness to sell it has broken the bottleneck. The bottleneck is gone!"

Hammond said he first wondered why the debt on the airplane would be more of a bottleneck than the $14 million owed on the church building. And then it came to him. "Because I wanted the Citation 3 and borrowed the money to make it happen. My motive in acquiring that airplane wasn't right"

Now that the blessing was free to flow, Copeland said, "I'm going to give you a Citation 1" — without a dime owed on it.

Next time: Musical jets.

Thursday Bike Blogging.

When I was growing up out here, Gay Johnson was one of the best known names in Western Colorado, and it never attracted a snicker.

He owned a truck stop, tire store and restaurant that advertised heavily on local television with a catchy jingle and menu mascots Roscoe the Rooster and Gus the Ranch hand.

In that pre-Perkins era, if you were headed into Grand Junction from out of town, Gay Johnson's was probably the place you sought out for dinner.

Now, the great brand is on  just a couple generic truck stops and a little farm out in the middle of almost nowhere.

The Biggest [Blank] Continued.

Blue Man in a Red District does a concise deconstruction of "the biggest tax increase in Minnesota history" claim.

As we've said here, that's a misleading label put on the transportation bill. Hal Kimball tells why it's wrong.

Show Me the Money.

Recently I found a great site that nicely combines two of my interests — information design and the economic implications of political choices (or political implications of economic realities). It's called Visualizing Economics: Making the Invisible Hand Visible.

Catherine Mulbrandon combines a degree in economics and experience working in the financial world with master's in interaction design, which she applies to "help people who are interested in the subject of economics (but are not experts) to understand and participate in public discussions."

Although the field of information design is growing, her set of skills is still pretty unusual — especially in the public interest sphere. Policy analysts and academics tend to be word people (or numbers people). Graphic designers  generally aren't interested in going deep into content. Reporters and people I've met in the non-profit sector who want to illuminate this information aren't visual thinkers or familiar with graphic tools.

Bloggers? Well... doing good design slows you down, even if you're so inclined.

Mulbrandon's visualizations are polished and free of the chart junk that too often accompanies attempts to present data to the general public. Here's a recent depiction of the highest-paid U.S. sports figures. [Note: I spliced her chart in order to copy it. Here's the original.]

More than a pure hierarchy, it contrasts salary/winnings and endorsement income, inviting all kinds of reflection on the economics of different sports and the people who play them.

For example, are Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens about to turn Jason Giambi-all-purple? Does Michelle Wie care if she ever wins a golf tournament?

I'm a word man first, but  I wish we had fewer words and more good design informing public discourse.

Boys and Girls Apart.

A school district in Georgia is making all its public schools switch to single-sex classrooms in an effort to improve student performance.

Big changes are needed to drive a big improvement in student achievement, say school leaders. Although radical, segregating classrooms is a relatively simple change to implement. Whether it has been shown effective is another matter.

Research shows that when boys and girls are separated, each group performs better in school and is more likely to go to college, said Julie Ancis, a professor in the school of education at Georgia State University.

But she said single-sex schools tend to be private institutions with updated technology and ample resources, not poor school systems like Greene County's.

Meanwhile, Greene County, with 70 percent black students,  has one charter school that's still coed. And, you guessed it, in the prosperous, mostly white part of town.

I Hate It When I Do That.

One of my personal failings is being sure I'm right, even when I'm not. It's a trait I share with many bloggers, but knowing that, I am careful to check myself and offer up my sources. (In my grown-up blog for Growth & Justice, I am even more meticulous.)

I want readers to be able to rely on what I write here.

So I need to admit an error.

In critiquing estimates of how much the gas tax would cost certain poster children for the anti-tax movement, I made some calculations of their costs based on an outdated description of how quickly a gas tax would phase in. As a result, I unintentionally underestimated the short-term impact on those drivers. Maybe not a big deal, since the amounts are still small, except I was criticizing others for using numbers in a way that would inflate the impact.

If I were a newspaper, I'd say something like, Across the Great Divide regrets the error. Even more, so do I.

More Fuzzy Math.

The other day, I posted about how some commentators have a habit of overstating the impact of the gas tax increase and understating the impact of personal choices.

If I support a gas tax increase, I'm imposing my choice on how to fund transportation on people who have made choices to burn more fuel and use roads more than I do. In his post "An argument worth having," King Banaian prefers to frame it differently:

Even if we accept the premise of our interlocutor, that we "need" roads and bridges and even if we assume that we actually will get roads and bridges and not just more transit projects, what makes Grandma [paying for roads through property taxes] more deserving of protection from government taxation than the family trying to better themselves, provide for their children, and producing goods and services people want to buy?

You can read his argument, which is based on principle. My bone is that he does the same thing as other fuzzy mathketeers. He talks about the gas tax increase, which is being phased in, as if the eventual amount would be paid now, and states the cost, paid in pennies a day, as a lump sum.

In that way, he comes up with a $172 cost for a hypothetical supercommuter who is actually paying about $65 a  year from now, at a rate of about $1.30 a week.

As I left in a comment on his post, long before that $1.30 a week becomes $3.50, I'd be questioning the wisdom of paying for gas, insurance, depreciation, interest, etc. on a car driven nearly 40,000 miles a year just for work.

UPDATE: And as King gently pointed out, I was using an incorrect schedule for how fast the tax escalates. I believe the tax opponents are still wrong to use the ultimate gas tax cost to calculate immediate costs, but that does not excuse my error, which led me to understate the rise.

Sometimes You Make a Difference.

I've taken a break from reading stuff about taxes, economic development and who's tried on tribal costumes, but even my fun reading draws me back to politics.

'Zines may seem to be the polar opposite of white papers on education and transportation policy, but they can also offer a potent reminder of why any of this politics stuff matters.

A few days ago, I read Call for Reservations, an account of working as a housekeeper at a Super 8 Motel in Stillwater, Minnesota, that was used in part by the county for transitional housing. Elizabeth Belz is an artist who has lived Nickled and Dimed for real, and she exposes aspects of motel life you'd probably rather not know.

Now, I'm halfway through On Subbing, an expanded collection of Dave Roche's 'zines documenting four years as a Substitute Special Needs Educational Assistant.

Roche was a punk rocker who, as one reviewer put it, spent a brief time in the "thrift store clerk industry" before signing on as a classroom aide in the Portland, Oregon, schools. He worked as a sub, which meant he had brief assignments in a wide variety of schools.

What makes his stories so compelling is that he worked with the kids who are on the absolute fringes of the system — the behavior problem kids, kids with retardation or severe physical disabilities, homeless kids, very few of whom would fit the definition of students.

It's a harrowing and heartbreaking picture, as Roche describes the barriers some of his charges face. Two boys are abandoned by their mother in a homeless shelter. When some of his medically fragile kids go home, it's to a hospital. Changing a diaper or keeping a boy calm might be all he gets accomplished in a day.

Mostly, he retains his empathy and his humor. After one frustrating day he reminds himself, "I'm getting paid to play with Duplos." Though not paid very much.

He's inspired by a one-on-one assignment with an "awesome and super cheerful" boy who's paralyzed from the neck down, and considers the school's offer to take the open position to be his regular aide. But it's only for half days, and though he tries to work it out, the school can't give him hours for the rest of the day. He leaves feeling guilty, but heeding the holes in his shoes and his empty stomach. He can't live on the part-time work.

 

Unlike the kind of poignant Hallmark snapshots political candidates haul out for Message: We Care, 'zines like Belz's and Roche's preserve raw emotions and offer gritty realities.

It's easy enough for progressives to stand for some sort of idealized social services without appreciating how damned difficult the work is and how little apparent effect some of it might have. For conservatives who see social services as a waste of money, I'd ask them to read Roche and then ask for their solutions. It's difficult to see how vouchers and privatizing education would lead to any better outcomes for these kids.

A commenter on the publisher's site put it pretty well.

There are no To Sir With Love/Dangerous Minds moments when he realizes that he can truly make a difference in the lives of these needy children. Sometimes Dave makes a difference. Sometimes he gets kicked in the balls.

With each new class, it could go either way. Which is not to say that the book isn’t inspiring. I fully admit to tearing up when I read Dave’s account of asking all his friends to shoplift supplies for a severely underfunded school. When his lightfingered crowd comes through and provides the school with necessities like markers, paper, and Spanish/English dictionaries, Dave leaves the goods in the staff room with a note saying only, “Here are some gifts from the punks.”

I found both these books in the Studio Shop at Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Big Brain comics, right down the street, is a superb source for more of this subversive but also affirming work.

The Biggest [Blank] in History.

UPDATE: It's been called to my attention I was using an incorrect schedule of how soon the gas tax increases take effect. I've revised the post to reflect the actual timeframe.

On the House floor yesterday, Rep. Dan Severson (R, Sauk Rapids) brought up a good reason to uphold Gov. Pawlenty's veto of the transportation bill.

I got a call from a man who has to go down to Rochester twice a week to get medical care. He’s not rich. He’s rural. He’s out there. He’s gotta drive a lot of miles to make it happen. This bill will significantly dip into the discretionary spending, of which he has very little of now.

We should not pass a gas tax increase because Rep. Severson has a constituent who must drive past St. Cloud and the Twin Cities to receive medical treatment.

Maybe the man's illness is clouding his judgment, or maybe our medical system is in worse shape than we thought. I truly hope the man is not hurting as badly as Rep. Severson indicates and that he can find suitable treatment closer to home.

But how bad is it really? Let's figure 150 miles each way and give him a vehicle with crappy mileage, say 15 mpg. That's 40 gallons of fuel a week for his two round trips. Over the next year next year and a half, the gas tax will go up 3.5 about 7 cents in several steps.

That's right. By next July, the poor man will pay $1.40 $2.80 more a week for his trips to Rochester! And if he's not cured by 2010, he'll have to come up with $1.60.

What is it about the words "tax increase" that make certain people lose their fourth grade math skills?  Another anti-tax blogger wrote:

Hello spend-a-thon. The override of the governor’s veto today should put to rest any notion that the image of “tax-and-spend” democrats is just an outdated cliche. It’s more true now than ever, and our DFL controlled legislature just rammed through the biggest tax increase in Minnesota history. With a biannual budget of about $39 billion, the new tax bill raises another $6 billion. That’s fully 15% of the current budget.

Since the bill raises the money over 10 years, that's actually 3%.

Okay, but it was the "biggest tax increase in Minnesota history," right?  Well, possibly. I can't find that history book out here in Colorado, but I know that's the way history generally works. Stuff that happens later in history — especially where population growth is involved — is bigger than stuff that happened earlier.

But if we hadn't waited 2o years, it might not have been a tax increase at all.

*****
And if my non-Minnesota readers made it this far, the veto was overturned. That was historic. [h/t John Olson]