America 3.0

Adding to Illinois’ Debacle

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This billboard is in my River North neighborhood in Chicago. It is an advertisement for a mall and entertainment location in Rosemont, a small city near O’Hare airport.

Rosemont was profiled by the Chicago Tribune in this excellent article. A single family has run Rosemont for generations, and they benefit from a levy on taxi rides from O’Hare and spend this money on no-bid contracts for friends, family and politicians as well as large entertainment complexes underwritten by large amounts of debt.

The suburb is digging itself deeper into debt to subsidize a new bar district, professional softball stadium and outlet mall. With $370 million in taxpayer-backed loans outstanding, Rosemont has one of the top debt loads in the Chicago region.

Another Chicago suburb, Bridgeview, hosts a stadium for the Chicago Fire, a major-league soccer team. Their debacle is chronicled here, in a typically great Bloomberg article.

The mayor of Bridgeview, Illinois, said building a taxpayer-financed arena for the billionaire owner of Major League Soccer’s Chicago Fire would bring hotels and restaurants to his suburb. Instead, the town has more than doubled property taxes and may raise them again to pay more than $200 million in stadium debt.

One of the big problems in Illinois is that we have so many various overlapping public bodies, many with the ability to issue debt and all of whom have expensive board members, employees, and often public contracts doled out to associated cronies. This article, from the “Illinois Policy” web site, describes the myriad overlapping public entities in the State of Illinois and how we dwarf ALL states and especially neighboring (and much better managed) states like Indiana.

Illinoisans suffer from the second-highest property tax rates in the nation.

Their state is the third most corrupt in the nation.

And driving this expensive and corrupt reality on the local level is the fact that Illinois has more units of local government than any other state in the nation. With 6,963 units of local government, Illinois beats its nearest competitor by more than 1,800.

When Illinois finally hits the wall, and we won’t be able to issue new debt (and thus an immediate fiscal crisis will occur), we will have to have a reckoning with all of these various entities, each of whom has their own debt problems and the ability to create NEW problems by issuing MORE debt. On one hand, the market will constrain their ability to sell debt by the fact that these insolvent entities survive through the “implied” promise that they will be bailed out by some higher power, whether that is a county, state, or Federal government.

The act of unwinding all of the problems of the inter-related corrupt and insolvent entities will be a herculean task, made even more difficult by the fact that there will be little incentive for the politicians to solve the crisis if the end result is that they won’t have these same public entities for no-bid contracts, jobs for themselves, and their campaign workers and donors once the clean-up is complete.
The only thing for certain is that the lawyers in the state will feast at the trough of lawsuits from all parties. They just need to make sure that they find a way to get paid themselves on a timely basis…

Cross posted at LITGM

Bastille Day II

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I usually have a post on Bastille day which is the one day a year I let my Francophilia run wild, and I write a love letter to France. But I have a second Bastille day post in 2014 because things are not so good in France. And is so often the case, the problem is self inflicted.

Our sister republic, France, is in trouble.

The EU is a failure, the French political class is the architect of the disaster, and they dare not admit how bad it is, so the French are paralyzed.

Emmanuel Todd, above left, whose work Jim Bennett and I used in America 3.0 has been vocal about this problem. I had a post up the other day with a lengthy discussion by Todd in English on this topic.

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America’s Impending Tuberculosis Epidemic

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(NOTE — Update at the End of the Column)

One of the things that changes you, when you become a parent, is the body of knowledge you acquire to protect your spouse and children including things like knowledge of infectious diseases in public schools. In my case that meant looking at the NY Times saying the following: “…the administration has begun to send the expected 240,000 migrants and 52,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border illegally in recent months in the Rio Grande Valley to cities around the county.” And at headlines for the open border crisis like this by Todd Starnes titled “Immigration crisis: Tuberculosis spreading at camps” which caused me to immediately free associate them with a pair of “Tuberculosis in Public School”, headlines, one local to North Texas in 2011 and the other very recently in California. See this 2011 Consumer Health Daily article from Denton Texas “TB Outbreaks in Texas Schools Show Disease Still a Threat – At least 100 people have tested positive for the respiratory ailment” and this 1 July 2014 article from the Sacramento Bee “Four more students test positive for tuberculosis at Grant High.”

As a Texas parent, this idea of TB positive illegal alien children released to illegal immigrant parents scares the heck out of me from the point of view of epidemiology. In the 1920s TB was the eighth leading cause of death for children 1-to-4 years old. Since then American public health has been so effective in preventing it that the USA no longer has any “herd immunity” to TB.

This “catch and release” illegal alien policy is horrible from the infectious disease point of view in that phlegm or aerosolized sputum that are contaminated with Mycobacterium tuberculosis are active biohazards that have long latent infection periods. This makes “exposure” very easy. The clinical definition of TB Exposure — which I found in a University of Vanderbilt student medical file PDF — is the following:

“A person is considered to be exposed if there is shared breathing space with someone with infectious pulmonary or laryngeal tuberculosis at a time when the infectious person is not wearing a mask and the other person is not wearing an N95 respirator. Usually a person has to be in close contact with someone with infectious tuberculosis for a long period of time to become infected; however, some people do become infected after short periods, especially if the contact is in a closed or poorly ventilated space.”

The Federal Government Hazmat protocol for dealing with suspected active TB cases is as follows:

1. Administrative controls
”¢ “Develop policies and protocols to ensure the rapid identification, isolation, diagnostic evaluation and treatment of persons likely to have TB.”
 
2. Engineering controls
Ӣ Isolation and
Ӣ Negative pressure room ventilation
 
3.Personal protective equipment controls
Ӣ N95 personal respirator protection

Questions people and reporters need to be asking their local, state and federal elected officials regards the so-called “unattended child immigration crisis” include:

1. How many Border Patrol Agents, health workers or other support staff at these immigration processing centers have worn N95 respirators in treating symptomatic TB sufferers?
 
2. How many TB sufferers were also wearing masks?
 
3. Have those Border Patrol Agents, health workers or other support staff followed a rigorous TB decontamination protocol?

Whether people ask those questions or not, we are going to find out the answers soon, and not just in Texas. Testable anti-bodies to TB infection appear in two to 12 weeks for skin and blood tests and the incubation period for full blown active TB is six months to two(+) years.

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Emmanuel Todd, Speaking in English, on Why the Euro is a Failure

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Todd applies his family structure analytic model to explain why the Euro is doomed to fail. He notes that the French and the Germans, for example, have little in common. He expressly says that the French individualism is much closer to the Anglo-American individualistic culture, distinct from the German authoritarian style. He says that the French elite caused the problem and they cannot admit their mistake or the entire foundation of the French political structure would collapse.

The European idea of a union of free and equal states has been destroyed by the Euro, and it is now an economic hierarchy, with the Germans at the top. Further, democracy itself is incompatible with the Euro.

Todd notes that the very low birth rates in Europe have a positive benefit: There will be no open or violent conflict to resolve the current political conflicts. Rather, contentious issues are kicked up to the “European level” — which means nothing whatsoever will happen.

He sympathizes with the British position. Britain is dependent on a dying content, Europe. “It is committing suicide under German leadership.” But Britain is part of a much larger Anglo-American world, which in ten years, on current trends, will have more people than all of Europe.

Of course, America 3.0 is based in large part on a “Toddean” understanding of American culture, and this talk is consistent with our understanding.

A fascinating talk.

H/t Brian Micklethwait

Quote of the Day from Winston Churchill, July 4, 1918

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The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking peoples are founded…. The political conceptions embodied in the Declaration of Independence are the same as those expressed at that time by Lord Chatham and Mr. Burke and handed down to them by John Hampden and Algernon Sidney. They spring from the same source; they come from the same well of practical truth….

Winston Churchill, speech given at the Anglo-American rally at the Albert Hall on US Independence Day 1918.

RTWT.

(Note that Churchill’s reference to the “Bill of Rights” is to the English Bill of Rights of 1689.)

Quoted in a review by Andrew Roberts of Mr. Churchill’s Profession: The Statesman as Author and the Book That Defined the “Special Relationship” by Peter Clarke.

We made a similar argument in America 3.0:

[T]o fully understand the meaning of the American Founding, and of our Declaration and Constitution, we need to go back even farther, to see where they came from. The Founders were not writing on a blank page. Far from it. They made a Revolution because the American people already held strongly to certain principles that they saw coming under increasing threat. And they wrote our Founding documents as a conscious attempt to preserve a valued way of life, at least as much as to make something entirely new.

And Daniel Hannan made much the same point in Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, when he wrote:

American Patriots didn’t just propose ideas that were inspired by the philosophy of Magna Carta. They saw that document itself as a part of their inheritance. When, as they perceived it, George III violated their patrimony, they too up arms to defend it.

We rightly celebrate our independence, and the Declaration that proclaimed it.

And we are right to recognize that the freedom our Founders fought for was ancient and the Declaration was the embodiment of something very old.