Chicagoania

Journalism Whitewash

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One of the first things Dan and I agreed on about blogging is that we wouldn’t go after the “easy” targets like Krugman because that kind of “fisking” is already all over the web and we aren’t adding anything to the discussion that hasn’t been done before.

However, this “free pass” does not apply to journalists. In general, we believe that most journalists are uninformed about the topics that they write about beyond a superficial level and as a result often miss the entire point of the issue. There are exceptions, of course, such as Michael Lewis, who wrote the great books Moneyball, Liar’s Poker and the Blind Side about baseball, finance, and football respectively. Michael Lewis represents the pinnacle of journalism in that he inhabits and deeply understands the topics that he writes about and weaves together a gripping tale of individuals that illuminates rather than obscures his topics.

In 2007 I attended a seminar on journalism sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that I wrote about in this blog post. At the seminar I asked the journalists how they could compete against bloggers who wrote about a narrow range of topics that they understood exceedingly well while the journalists were mostly generalists who skimmed the surface and threw in “the human element”. Their basic answer is that the reader couldn’t trust someone like me because they don’t know my motivation but the journalist in the paper or through the official channel was a trustworthy professional by comparison.

While I thought then (and still do) that this answer is mainly bullsh*t it was a pretty thoughtful and effective answer on their part, because this cover of objectivity is better than trying to engage bloggers on their own terms who understand the topics that they write about (on good blogs, that is) far better than the journalist ever could.

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Taxes In Chicago and Illinois

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The tax situation in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois is unsettled.

On a semi-humorous note, the City of Chicago proposed a 5 cent / bottle tax on bottled water. Apparently the goal is to reduce consumption of bottled water since it is bad for the environment (compared to tap water, I guess). The real goal of course is to raise money, and as this article from the Chicago Tribune points out, a 5 cent increase in a vending machine isn’t a big deal but on a case of bottled water a 24 pack case would go up from $3.99 to $5.19, which is effectively a 20% increase (19.4% for sticklers out there). The City of Chicago claims that this tax would raise $10.5M, which is I guess 210M bottles of water annually or about 70 for each citizen on average (I guess you need to include tourists and commuters in the calculation, so that is maybe 50 per permanent citizen. The article claims that this might create a black market in bottled water, which is plausible, and in any case it would be interesting to see if the revenue target is achieved or if people find ways to avoid it.

And another funny note is that a tax on str*p clubs (don’t want the traffic) also was thrown out by an appellate court; apparently small clubs were exempt from a tax but the city tried to apply it to these types of enterprises.

It appears for now that the proposed 2% sales tax increase (to 11%, effectively the highest in the country) is dead. This article describes the recent measures that county government are starting to consider in order to deal with these cuts, including reducing their fleet of vehicles, thinking about new fees to pay directly for services (like court fees), and some more e-government opportunities.

The city council of Chicago passed the mayor’s budget featuring $83.4M in additional property taxes over the 2007 budget. The budget also features numerous “fee” increases such as the bottled water tax listed above totalling $276.5M.

For the State of Illinois, we are still hearing about “doomsday” predictions of reduced service for the CTA due to a lack of funding. There were two previous dates listed but emergency funds postponed the day of reckoning; the latest day scheduled (fliers are up all over the city and the message drones over and over on the buses and trains) is January 20th. The CTA claims it would have to eliminate 81 of its 154 bus routes and raise fares, among other cuts. No one knows what is true or not and how much of it is posturing, but it is already growing tedious.

It is unclear what is going on with the state of Illinois. Apparently the Governor’s gross receipts tax is dead; when I google it the links return right back to this blog where I wrote about it in the first place and I can’t see any recent references to it. Here is the most recent budget article I can find… I don’t know how this solves the situation yet.

I will update the posts when I figure out what is going on with the State of Illinois and the CTA. Of course we are doing NOTHING to fix our pension situation (check the link, it is a great article, definitely a post in of itself)… since we rank last in the nation by most measures. The key is to leave the state before it all melts down, I guess.

Cross posted at LITGM

Energy In Illinois Intertwined

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Over time I have noticed that as a story or trend continues the quality of journalistic reporting tends to rise. This trend is due to the fact that “generic” journalists who just try to tell a fact-based story with the human element thrown in learn about the subtleties of the situation that are not apparent on first glance, and the relations between complex topics that are not obvious. Sunday’s Chicago Tribune moved forward on these fronts today.

The first article is titled “New Energy In Nuclear Power Supply Battle“. This article had a cool graph showing the construction start dates for our nations’ nuclear power plants, which started in the late 60’s, spiked in 1968, and then had a smaller peak in the mid 70’s, before dying out utterly in 1978. Our installed base of power went up until it reached 98,000 MW in the early 1990’s, from where it has stayed fixed (since no new power plants have come on-line since that time).

While this graph is cool, the article totally missed another trend – that the “effective” capacity of these nuclear plants has grown immensely across this time period. 98,000 MW means that you have built reactors that could theoretically generate this much power; but this only happens if the reactors are fueled, on-line and continuously functioning (not breaking down). In the 70’s and 80’s, it would typically take weeks or even months to refuel the reactor; during those times, the reactors were down and not generating power. The utilities didn’t really care, however, since the cost of “purchased power” from other utilities (most companies had interconnections with other utilities and there was spare power around) was just passed on to customers in the form of an immediate rise in monthly rates. The utilities only made money on the capital invested on the plant, a “rate of return” of usually 12-15% / year.

As power became more valuable, however, utilities really picked up the ball and increased the “effective” power capacity by speeding refuelings and limiting down times. Utilities that had maybe 1-2 nuclear power stations sold them off to other operators that ran them far more efficiently – no where more so than Illinois and Pennsylvania where Exelon now runs a whole fleet across two major ex-utility holding companies including plants they bought from others. It is this “effective” power capacity that has been holding the US supply (barely) in line with demand, and operators like Illinois should get credit for this.

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2007 In Review for Chicago and Illinois

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2007 ended up with the happiest note for Illinois politics in years. On November 7, 2007 disgraced former “Republican” governor George Ryan reported to Federal prison to begin serving his 6 1/2 year sentence. I put the word “Republican” in quotes because the most prominent events in his tenure include waiving the death penalty in Illinois and continued deterioration of our states’ precarious finances.

When the last governor’s race occurred in Illinois between the Democrat Blagojevich and equally uninspiring Judy Barr Topinka I actually hoped for a Democratic victory (normally anathema on this blog) because I figured that the oozing “snail trail” of corruption could be followed to its logical destination if Blogo remained in power. And, sure enough, on December 21, 2007 the Federal prosecutors formally linked Blogo to the Rezco corruption case with more to come.

As always, the FBI are the only people who fight corruption in Illinois, despite our myriad local police and judicial armies dutifully punching the clock, as I noted in this post (it is from 2006, but some things never change, and likely you could utilize it in 2076). The Chicago Police kicked out their superintendent after a series of shocking events, caught on videotape, including the beating of a tiny female bartender by off-duty cops and the inevitable attempts to cover it up. His name is Weis and he is from the FBI; while I admire his guts for taking on this job (where the locals are already disgruntled that the new top cop comes from outside) I think that his odds of success are about the same as the lone survivor in that new “Justice” movie where he attempts to battle 1 billion zombies.

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Distribution

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Chase (formerly Bank One, which merged with JP Morgan Chase in 2004) has a large network of branch offices here in Chicago. When I moved into Bucktown about 6 years ago, there were no branches locally; but soon they filled in every corner (it seems) as the neighborhood gentrified. In River North there weren’t a lot of branches because there was limited residential traffic until recently when all of the condominiums were built over the last 5 years or so; now we have branches all over the place.

In a branch near my condo in River North (which oddly enough has a “fake” 2nd story that you can see as you ride on the Brown line of the “L” overhead) they added a coin counting machine that you see in the picture above. Unlike the coin counting machines in grocery stores, this coin counting machine doesn’t charge 5 to 10 cents for each dollar – you just feed in your coins and collect your cash from the bank teller (presumably in paper dollars, else why else visit?).

The coin counting machine was great; I lugged over plastic cups full of change and received over $200 in return. While I was waiting for my cash, I started up a conversation with the bank teller, who said that they were going to leave the coin counting machine only for a limited time but it was bringing in tons of foot traffic to the branch so they decided to make them permanent.

I found this to be interesting; only a few years ago banks were trying to get customers to use their online services instead of going to a retail branch and physically speaking with a teller or representative. This article from 1999 talks about banks that were charging $2 to speak with a bank employee for transactions that could either be done online or by phone.

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