Snow All About Perspective

For some people here in the Philadelphia area and across the northeastern United States it's panic time for the third time this winter, the 2nd time in five days. For others it's a time of excitement and anticipation. Fact is that snowfalls, even large ones, in these modern days are really all just about perspective.

Are you one of those people who reflexively have to run out to the grocery store when a large snowfall is predicted? I stopped out at my local Acme supermarket last Friday evening just before the most recent two footer was supposed to hit. I just wanted to have a couple of 'comfort' treats in the house. By the look on the bread shelves you would have thought it was the end of the world.

The crowds bum-rushed the supermarkets and the neighborhood groceries, stripped the shelves bare of all milk, bread, eggs, and cigarettes, and then retreated to the comfort and safety of their homes where they battened down the hatches and prepared to ride out the inevitable burial inside their homes that was being forecast.

Overnight on Friday the snow began to fall, and then all through the morning and early afternoon on Saturday the storm intensified, just as predicted. The weathercasters got this one right on, and by the end we had received more than two feet for the 2nd time this winter.

But a funny thing happened by Sunday morning or afternoon at the latest. People were out already driving in their cars. Most major roads and primary routes were clear. Stores were open and shelves had food on them. The snow fell, it squashed activity for awhile, but the world recovered quickly and the end never came for most.

Meanwhile, back during the hours that the snow was falling during the day, the picture of the world that most got was from inside their homes, and it was a pretty picture indeed. The snow was beautiful as it fell, laid, built-up, and buried. It provided a perfect excuse for couch potato television watching and napping.

The simple fact is that large snowfalls just ain't what they used to be 'back in the day' when such events really did cripple an area. Most municipalities have strong plowing and road treatment equipment, supplies, and planning in place. And have you noticed the vastly increased numbers of smaller vehicles with their own little plows on them in recent years?

The recovery systems of every major and medium-sized municipality and even many rural areas have advanced to the point where almost no one gets snowed into their homes for days without access to basic food stuffs and other vital supplies. People are out digging and plowing, and we get back to business. That's me in the picture accompanying this story, digging out after the first storm this season back in December.

Now Philadelphia is bracing for it's 2nd major winter storm in five days. Beginning overnight tonight and then continuing through tomorrow, this storm is predicted to be less intense than the pair of two-footers that have already hit us this winter. But it will leave between a foot and 18 inches, depending on a number of variables that are still changing.

The area still has large amounts of snow, slush, and ice on the ground from the weekend storm because temperatures just haven't gone up enough to get rid of much. So this storm is going to dump it's load on top of what we already have on the ground and in large piles on the sides of roads and properties. If it dumps a little over 9 inches, as expected, this will officially be the snowiest winter in recording history in this region.

The combination of the exact timing of the storm and the mess still around from the previous one is causing the Philadelphia area to shut down already. The city has already announced that all of it's offices are closed on Wednesday. Schools, courts, museums, the zoo, and many private businesses are also closing. SEPTA and AMTRAK will try to run through the storm, but there will be delays and at least in SEPTA's case, there are likely to be shutdowns.

So for the second time in a period of days it's time to get that milk, break, eggs, and cigarettes order into the house and prepare to hibernate. When we wake up on Wednesday morning and look out the windows it will be yet another winter wonderland. Smile and keep a sunny perspective, it ain't the end of the world. The next day will be Thursday, and everything will open up once again and begin to return to normal. It's all about perspective.

Have We Got a Deal For You

"I," said the president, who is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun, "want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector." He said that in March, when the government already owned 80 percent of AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "When a difficult decision has to be made on matters like where to open a new plant or what type of new car to make, the new GM, not the United States government, will make that decision."

But the government is GM's largest shareholder, customer, tax collector, regulator, partner in determining employees' compensation, protector of dealers and pension guarantor. GM's other large owner, the United Auto Workers, is increasingly a government dependant.

Yet Steve Rattner and Ron Bloom, two of the president's fixers of Detroit, recently wrote in USA Today that government "will play no role" in running GM. They were not under oath.

"What we are not doing -- what I have no interest in doing -- is running GM," says the president who, when not firing GM's CEO, purging its board of directors and picking new members, is designing new products (imposing fuel economy requirements that will control size, weight, passenger capacity and safety). The president, overcoming his professed reluctance to run GM, resembles the journalist Don Marquis when, after a month on the wagon, he ordered a double martini and exclaimed: "I've conquered my goddam willpower."

Washington mandates that Detroit must build cars for which there is much less demand than Washington demands that there be. Then Washington tries to manufacture demand with a $7,500 tax credit for purchasers of the electric Chevrolet Volt, supposedly GM's salvation. So, GM is to be saved by a product people will not buy without a cash incentive larger than the income tax paid by 83.4 percent of America's families.

It is reasonable to assume that GM will become profitable -- if you make unreasonable assumptions about annual vehicle sales and GM's share of the market. Besides, the government that runs Amtrak (which has lost $23 billion, in today's dollars, just since 1990) vows to make GM efficient.

But one reason Amtrak runs on red ink is that legislators treat it as their toy train set, preventing it from cutting egregiously unprofitable routes. Will Congress passively accept auto plant-closing decisions? Rattner says Washington's demure vow is: "No plant decisions, no dealer decisions, no color-of-the-car decisions." He is one-third right. Last week, under the headline "Senators Blast Automakers Over Dealer Closings," The Washington Post reported, "Because the federal government is slated to own most of General Motors and 8 percent of Chrysler, some of the senators said they have a responsibility, as major shareholders do, to review company decisions."

The pressure to politicize the economy is spreading. John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, and Gerald McEntee, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees -- which is government organized as an interest group to lobby itself -- have demanded the resignation of two directors of Citigroup. Their premise is that businesses receiving direct government subventions should conform to the wishes of the president's allies.

GM is adopting new ways to lose money: Responsive to its UAW masters, GM is moving from China to America the production of some components of one Chevrolet model. Says UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, "It should be built here if it's going to be sold here." That principle, now successfully asserted, means economic autarky -- the end of international trade, and of prosperity.

The government's $50 billion -- so far -- acquisition of the shadow of GM will injure, with unfair financial advantages, the surprisingly healthy U.S. auto company, Ford. Of course, the government does not intend that injury, any more than it intended to cause protests in Mexico over the high price of corn tortillas, a result of Washington's mandate that Americans burn corn (ethanol) in their cars.

Washington's "rescue" of GM began because GM is "too big to fail," and bankruptcy is (well, was) "unthinkable." Big? GM's market capitalization, $375.8 million on Wednesday, is about the size of California Pizza Kitchen's ($340 million) -- is it too big to fail? -- and one-eleventh that of Harley-Davidson ($4.3 billion). Fail? If GM has not already failed, New Coke was a success.

The administration is determined to prop up GM as a jobs program for the UAW and Midwestern states rich in electoral votes. This frenzy will intensify as the administration's decisions deepen the debacle.

WRITTEN by George Will at TownHall.com on June 7th, 2009

None of Our Business

A leading business website, Inc.com, billed as 'The Daily Resource for Entrepreneurs', has released its annual list of 'The Best Cities for Doing Business'. Where do you think that Philadelphia ranked on their list of 393 metropolitan areas? A top-ten city by population, you would think that Philly would probably be there somewhere among the leaders, right? Well, before we get too excited, let's examine some of the criteria that the e-zine factors in order to formulate the rankings. What 'Inc.com' does as an overall approach is that they analyze job-growth data as supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the previous calendar year on 393 metropolitan statistical areas across the country. The list just released was specifically derived from analysis of three-month rolling averages of the BLS state and area unadjusted employment data from January 1995 to September 2006, and uses four measures of growth to rank all areas for which data was available for the past ten years. These four measures are: recent growth trend, analyzing this and last year; midterm growth, averaging 2001-06 rates; long-term trend, analyzing 1995-2006 data; and current year growth. This data includes non-farm employment, manufacturing, financial services, business and professional services, educational and health services, information, retail and wholesale trade, transportation and utilities, leisure and hospitality, and government. While any time you attempt to put together a ranking across a broad spectrum of categories you are going to get subjectivity in the analysis of those categories, the fact is that this is not a study and listing that is done haphazardly and frivolously. It is a serious look at relevant statistics in order to determine areas that are growing, and that ultimate also exposes areas that are stagnating. On the surface, Philly would seem to have much going for it, and it does. We have major employers headquartered here, places like Comcast. We have an excellent mass-transit system including Septa, Amtrak, and Patco. We have first-class entertainment facilities such as the Avenue of the Arts, varied quality sports facilities like The Linc and Citizens Bank Park and the Palestra, a world-class Art Museum, a top-notch zoo, etc. Easy transportation access through I-95 by land, the Delaware River by sea, and Philadelphia International Airport by air among others. And we have people, lots of people, and a variety of them by racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual and any other orientation that you can describe. There is much to like about the Philadelphia area, politics aside, and you do have to set aside politics. which has been a mess for a long time here in Philly. There is much to like about Philly, tax-status aside, and you do have to set aside our taxation system. Here in Philly, our tax policies are typically liberal for a large city, and liberal Democratic Party taxation means that we tax unfairly, more than other cities, and on things that other cities do not. In recent decades, our tax policies have led to the loss of 250,000 jobs and the loss of a half-million residents. Other cities are growing, but Philly is in decline, and we continue to lose jobs and residents every single year. 'Philadelphia Forward', an organization put together in an attempt to reform Philly's tax policies, reports that "the typical city residents tax burden is 50% higher than the tax burden for a suburban resident at a similar income level." In other words, living here in the city kills your take-home pay, and it does the same to business profits. Most cities do not tax your wages, but we do, and we do it at a rate of 3.98%, the highest in the nation. Philly taxes business at the highest rate of all major American cities, and its real estate tax assessment system can be described as unfair and antiquated at best. In short, we have all the pretty things and look nice on the outside, but we are decaying on the inside. When most people look to move their families into an area, or evaluate where their families will continue to live as they grow, and when business looks to move into or remain in an area long term, they look closely not only at the surface features, but also look under the hood. When you look under the hood at the engine that drives Philadelphia, you find an entrenched liberal Democratic government that taxes and spends more than almost any other entity in the United States. No wonder then when I scan down the list of metro areas in the Inc.com rankings looking for Philadelphia and cannot find us among the top ten, where our population ranking sits. Nope, not even in the top twenty, or the top one hundred. Wow, scanning down, scanning down. Ah, found us. There we are, ranked out of 393 metro areas at number......351! Ouch. Well, at least its better than last year when we were ranked at number 392. Yikes! The bottom line is that there is really no reason to live inside the City of Philadelphia unless you have to, which is one major reason that the city clings to its antiquated policy of forcing city employees to live inside the city limits. If Philly updated its policy and allowed city employees to live wherever in the region they wanted, I can guarantee you that it would lose thousands of more residents in the ensuing half-decade. The bottom line that is revealed by the Inc.com ranking and the Philadelphia Forward assessments is that Philadelphia is a big city in big trouble, and showing no signs of changing its ways. We will continue to look pretty on the outside, but only because our politicians will continue to tax heavily to maintain that pretty look. Meanwhile, Philadelphia will continue to die slowly on the inside, further deteriorating that tax base of businesses and residents, and thus raising the tax burden continually on those who choose to. or are forced to, stay behind. Business will continue to mostly flee the city, as chemical giant Rohm & Haas is about to do. What can change this status? I have been saying it for a long time. Philadelphia needs a real, viable, political alternative. A healthy Republican Party that espouses lower taxes, less spending, a more business-friendly environment, and more conservative solutions to social problems such as crime and education. Unfortunately, that shows no signs of happening anytime soon, or even within the rest of my lifetime. As always, the title of this entry is a link to more information, in this case to the article and rankings in question.