This is how political earthquakes start. The Freedom to Park movement has moved to Facebook. Next, major public figures need to be pressed for their opinions. Then, op-ed pieces and letters to the editor. Then a referendum on the 2010 ballot.

Then a presidential candidate in 2012. The Republicans ought be backing the property rights of hardworking Americans who through their rugged individualism create a parking space where once existed only piles of frozen water. The Freedom to Park movement, on the other hand, can look to Democrats, who ought to have compassion for the person in need of a space even if s/he didn't shovel one out.

The movement's Facebook title: "Just because you spent hours digging your car out from under the snowdrifts - and then drove away - does NOT mean you "own" the parking spot! And leaving a plastic chair there? Really???"

Doesn't fit in a headline, guys. Go with Freedom to Park. Only 18 members now. But just wait. Meanwhile, the debate rages in Pittsburgh. 

UPDATE: Check out The Sun's photo gallery of illegal street furniture claim stakes made by hardworking Baltimoreans. Like the one that says "MOM AND BABY PARKING, PLEASE."  

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (40)
        

So far we can file this only in the Department of Irony, not Hypocrisy. But stand by. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Mortgage Bankers Association, the country's premier mortgage trade group, is selling its headquarters for $41.3 million -- way less than the $79 million it paid for the building three years ago. That's also far less than its mortgage of $75 million, says the Journal, via Reuters.

Will this turn into a short sale? Will the MBA walk away from the difference that it owes a lending group headed by PNC Financial? Will it do what it has urged homeowners not to do? That would be an act of headline hypocrisy for the books. As the Journal's James R. Hagerty reports, MBA executive John Courson has urged families with underwater mortgages to keep making the payments.

"What about the mess they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?" Courson asked the Journal last year.

Now, says Hagerty: "On Saturday, Mr. Courson declined in an interview to say whether the MBA would pay off the full loan amount. 'We're not going to discuss the financing,' he said."

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Real estate
        

Digging a parking place out of maybe 400 cubic feet of snow exerts a classic claim of property rights as described by John Locke. When somebody takes the trouble to create something useful out of a wilderness or a desert, Locke said, he obtains a natural right to use it for his own benefit to the exclusion of others.

I'm with Locke here. If you can't assume you'll be able to use the parking space you dug out, your incentive to create it would plunge. The city and neighborhoods would lose the labor of thousands of car owners who help recreate civilization each time the heavens dump white stuff all over the place. True, during the time the proprietor claims exclusive rights to the parking space by protecting it with a lawn chair, it's not doing much good for anybody else. But it does help society a little by furnishing "positive externalities," in the jargon. Cleared curbs make it easier to cross streets. Mail deliverers can get around more easily.

And in the long run, space-by-space citizen snow removal accomplishes what would be difficult for the city to do. Municipal plows can't clear curbs with all the cars parked there -- or even one or two per block. So by giving Baltimoreans temporary, exclusive use of the spaces they dig out -- allowing cars to move and commerce to resume -- civic good is accomplished. Honor those lawn chairs!!

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)
        

Ryan Avent, for some reason, confuses current account deficits with fiscal deficits. This is not a mistake one wants to make blogging for a magazine called The Economist. Brad Delong, whom I admire, catches the mistake. But the response is notably un-DeLongian. Gentle, even.

"A Rare Event: The Sharp and Thoughtful Ryan Avent Gets One Wrong..." is the heading of Brad's post. If the Washington Post had made the same error, or any newspaper, all the bandwidth in Berkeley could not have handled the DeLongian scorn!

Posted by Jay Hancock at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Media
        

Today's column is about 91 folks who were laid off from Erickson Retirement last year and promised severance payments, vacation-time payments and other money that they never got. The payments got hung up in the bankruptcy process, which is normal. What's not right is that Erickson and its creditors have neglected to press the bankruptcy judge for permission to make the severance payments. More than three months have gone by since the bankruptcy filing, and nobody will even tell these folks what's happening.

They're in tough shape -- without a job and then without even the compensation they were supposed to get for being laid off. They didn't seek publicity. I found their names in court papers and called them up. Most were hesitant about talking on the record. And most of them still have great things to say about Erickson. But, to be blunt, they were screwed by the bankruptcy process. Pressure needs to be put on the company and the other people involved in the bankruptcy to pay them the money.

UPDATE: Thanks to William Brattain for telling his story and allowing himself to be photographed. He doesn't have much to gain by going public; if he files for bankruptcy anything he eventually gets from Erickson will probably go to his creditors. But he said he wanted to talk about it for the sake of others in the same boat.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)
Categories: Erickson Bankruptcy
        

Think of The sells a Glad-style baggie with fake mold on the plastic so it looks like your sandwich inside is moldy. It's getting attention in the blogosphere as an anti-sandwich-theft device. However, I suspect workplace lunch larceny is exaggerated. People wouldn't steal the sustenance of their colleagues, would they?

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)
        

Holy cow. As Noam Levey reports in today's Baltimore Sun, federal bean counters estimate that health care comprised 17.3 percent of the economy last year. That's the highest portion ever. Also, last year health spending jumped higher in one year as a portion of the economy than ever before in the half-century statisticians have been keeping track. You can see the trend in metro Baltimore, where health-care has accounted for maybe half of all the jobs created in the last five years.

The Woodlawn-based Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services report that government-financed health care could surpass privately-paid health care this year for the first time. That's 6 years sooner than had previously been estimated. The recession is a driving factor in these trends. The non-health-care portion of the economy was stagnant last year, which would give health care a bigger portion even if it grew at a normal rate. But the recession caused many to lose their private health insurance and go on Medicaid, the health program for low-income folks.

It's a total mess. It can't continue. Congress needs to do something.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Health Care
        

The Public Service Commission is out with an offer to settle complaints against Verizon's bad service record for its traditional, landline phone service. The company was taking too long to fix failed service, missing appointments, the usual stuff. As most telecom is increasingly unregulated, the PSC would explicitly tie Verizon's ability to raise prices for local landline service to the company's service record. Verizon can accept the offer or counteroffer.

Some excerpts from the offer:

As we explained at length in the April 6 Order, Verizon’s service quality performance has fallen far below our regulatory standards, and neither competitive market forces nor an open service quality investigation has improved Verizon’s performance.We rejected the Prior Proposal in part because it left unbridged the structural gap between service quality and rates. A new AFOR [regulatory structure] consistent with our Order will address this fundamental concern.

Among other things, the AFOR we contemplate creates a new set of service quality metrics, holds Verizon directly accountable to its customers (by requiring it to pay substantial customer credits) if it fails to satisfy those metrics, precludes Verizon from raising prices on residential basic local telephone service until it demonstrates service quality improvements, and provides customers with a year (calendar year 2009) free of any increase in residential basic local service rates.

Continue reading "PSC tries to crack down on Verizon's poor service " »

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Regulation
        

Maybe I'm trying too hard, but I detect tea-party anger in the opposition to Gov. O'Malley's plan to rescue the empty unemployment-insurance pool with federal stimulus money. That's the topic of today's column.

Opposition to a federal bailout of Maryland's unemployment fund is channeling the anti-government energy that gets aimed at less humdrum targets elsewhere. Gov. Martin O'Malley's plan to accept $127 million in stimulus dollars to fix the fund has assumed a symbolic importance greater than its substance.

It's hard to believe the protest is mainly about money.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Politics
        

Baltimore Gas & Electric has posted a natural-gas price for February of 65.85 cents per therm -- a nice dip from January's 72.59 cents. Unlike BGE's electricity price, which stays the same for months at a time, the BGE gas price floats from month to month based on the company's costs in the wholesale market.

Wholesale gas prices have been trending up lately, but obviously not enough to put serious upward pressure on what BGE customers are paying. BGE locked up a lot of its supply for this winter in the middle of 2009, when prices were really low, so that helps. In any event we're way below the costs of recent winters. Last February the gas commodity price was 89.71 cents; in February 2008 it was 93.60.

Those of us who said "no" to this winter's fixed-price deal from Washington Gas Energy Services of 73 cents per therm should have no reason to regret it. Looks like BGE's standard price will stay below that at least until the cold months are over. Now WGES is offering a 1-year gas deal for 85 cents and a two-year deal for 88 cents. If the economy picks up and energy demand rises (or if another Hurricane Katrina disrupts Gulf gas commerce), those prices may look good. But the other factor is the new supplies of shale gas that have come on line in recent years. Those could keep the wholesale price somewhat contained even with an increase in demand.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: BGE/electricity
        

As Paul West reports, President Obama's budget contains numerous goodies for Maryland, a development that is hardly surprising and that will continue to shield the state from the worst part of the economic slump.

Among other things, federal workers, of which there are 133,000 who work in Maryland and many more who live in the state and work in D.C., would get a 1.4 percent raise. The president would spend $800 million on Maryland construction, including $219 for a power station at the National Security Agency and $120 million for Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Raised from the archives: The Jan. 1 column about how growing federal spending was the economic story of the decade for Maryland. Read the whole thing here.

For 2008, the year for which the most recent figures are available, total federal spending and obligations in Maryland came to $78 billion. That includes everything from Social Security checks to Transportation Safety Administration salaries to payments to computer contractors.

It's up 60 percent from the level in 2001, almost three times the inflation rate. Maryland's whole economy is less than $300 billion in size. So you can see, more than a decade after then-House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. said, "We no longer have the luxury of relying on the public sector employment engine," Maryland relies on government spending as much as ever.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
        

Is it crass for restaurants and stores to solicit business by promising that part of the proceeds will be donated to Haiti? (Or any other cause?) Here's a discussion on Don Rockwell's DC dining site, which contains good views from both sides. Rockwell starts it off by saying:

"Restaurants and bars that donate an insignificant portion of their revenue to Haitian relief organizations are both trite AND self-serving. Here's an actual example, if you can believe it: One restaurant group has the chutzpah to say that they're going to "donate $1 to the Red Cross every time certain appetizers and entrees are ordered between Jan. 19 and Feb. 19." Guess who gets to take the tax deduction on that dollar?"

My view: A donation to a good cause is a donation to a good cause, as long as it gets to the right nonprofit. But there is something bathetic about tying charity for catastrophe victims to an order of nachos. Or certain other products.  

Posted by Jay Hancock at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Nonprofits
        

Two profs at Dartmouth compared snowfall as reported by ski resorts with that in government weather records. The resorts had seemingly found an astonishing new meteorological phenomenon: Regular, unusually large deposits of fresh powder on weekends, just when most skiers are inclined to head to the slopes and just when resort prices are higher! Of course, the weekend-powder pattern didn't show up in the weather-service reports.

Here's what's coolest: The iPhone's ski-report app, which lets skiers share real-time conditions, is forcing the resorts to be more honest. Exaggeration fell at the resorts with iPhone reception. The wisdom of crowds, indeed. HT Marginal Revolution.

The paper, by Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz, can be read here. Here is the abstract:

Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore its causes and consequences. We provide some unusually sharp empirical evidence on the extent, mechanics, and dynamics of deceptive advertising. Ski resorts self-report 23 percent more snowfall on weekends; there is no such weekend effect in government precipitation data. Resorts that plausibly reap greater benefits from exaggerating do it more. We find little evidence that competition restrains or encourages exaggeration. Near the end of our sample period, we observe a shock to the information environment: a new iPhone application feature makes it easier for skiers to comment on resort ski conditions in real time. Exaggeration falls sharply, especially at resorts where iPhones can get reception.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Marketing
        

Interesting story in the Albany Times-Union over the weekend. Two sisters in their 30s, heirs to the Seagram liquor fortune, are alleged to have lost tens of millions of dollars through NXIVM and leader Keith Raniere.

Court documents claim that Keith Raniere "is the absolute leader of a cult called NXIVM" who "exercised complete control" over Sara and Clare Bronfman. The sisters are heiresses to the Seagram Company liquor fortune and have been bankrolling Raniere's investments and his substantial legal fees, court documents say.

For several years, the sisters have been trainers and followers of Raniere's philosophies on ethical life and paths to self improvement. Raniere's organization, NXIVM (pronounced like the patented drug "NEXIUM"), also known as Executive Success Programs, has given many people, including celebrities, instruction in personal improvement though courses and seminars.

Continue reading "Seagram heiresses allegedly taken in by 'cult' " »

Posted by Jay Hancock at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Big pharma concern AstraZeneca announced more major job cuts and restructuring this morning, but it could be good news for the company's MedImmune division, based in Gaithersburg. While the company plans to shrink as a whole, including in research & development, it sounds like AstraZeneca is bringing additional jobs to MedImmune. Overall the company anticipates a net decrease of 1,800 jobs. But the press release also refers to "further expansion of our Biologics activities." That's MedImmune. From the press release:

These initiatives are designed to achieve material efficiency savings in R&D, which will partially mitigate the increase in R&D investment that would be required as projects in the current pipeline progress to the more resource intensive, later phases of development. By 2014, annual savings of $1 billion should be realised, of which one-half is estimated to be cost savings and the other half cost avoidance. Based on preliminary estimates, approximately 3,500 positions may be affected by this programme. After taking account of positions that will be retained whilst being relocated to another site, the investment in new skills and capabilities and further expansion of our Biologics activities, the net reduction may be around 1,800 positions.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Health Care