From the WSJ, hat tip Chi:
Casualty of Cities’ Resurgence: The Suburban Offices Left Behind
Companies from General Electric to Weyerhaeuser are pulling their headquarters out of leafy suburban campuses and moving to downtown high-rises, giving cities an economic jolt.
But figuring out what to do with the vacant corporate campuses left behind is a quandary for civic leaders and landlords across the U.S. Towns have pondered turning them into gyms, community centers or education facilities, but finding large tenants for such spaces has proven difficult, and nearby residents often resist plans to build dense apartment complexes on empty sites.
Upper Saddle River, N.J., 30 miles northwest of Manhattan, is a prime example of the headaches involved. The wealthy town of about 8,000 people is locked in a standoff with a landlord over how to reuse the former U.S. headquarters of publisher Pearson Education.
The bunkerlike structure of gray concrete, set on a grassy 47-acre plot, was built in 1973 for Western Union when the telegraph company decamped from Manhattan, instantly becoming a fixture of the town.
That began to change four years ago, when the division of U.K.-based Pearson PLC, the building’s last tenant, decided to move its operations to Manhattan and Hoboken, N.J., in a bid to be closer to public transportation and appeal to a younger, urban-dwelling workforce. That left landlord Mack-Cali Realty Corp. with an empty 470,000-square-foot building—and few prospects in sight.
The site had earlier brought Mack-Cali annual revenue of about $8.6 million, but after testing the market, the landlord found no demand for an aging, isolated building in a region already inundated with empty office space. So it pushed a plan to demolish the structure, built to hold as many as 2,000 workers, and replace it with a mixed-use development mostly consisting of apartments.
…
But for a town filled with large houses and winding streets, the idea of replacing the office building with a dense collection of 240 apartments was less than welcome.Residents and borough officials including the mayor have been outspoken in their opposition, and locals overwhelmingly rejected the landlord’s plan in a 2014 vote. Mack-Cali sued the town in federal court, alleging racial bias over opposition to its apartments, which include some units for low-income residents.
“It looks out of place—you’re going to overpopulate the area,” said Eric Halpern, a resident whose property abuts the complex. He prefers a mixed-use development but one that is less dense, an idea Mack-Cali has avoided in part because it would mean losing some value.
Similar clashes are flaring up around the country as the preferences of American corporations undergo a shift. A number of companies that once followed their workers to the suburbs in the second half of the 20th century are reverting to urban areas as major cities have revitalized and become magnets for a generation of young professionals.
Not all suburbs are struggling. Silicon Valley, for example, is booming thanks to growth by U.S. technology giants.
But the roster of well known companies moving back to cities is growing. The latest was General Electric Co., which recently said it would leave Fairfield, Conn., for Boston. Packaged-foods company ConAgra Foods Inc. announced a move last year from a spacious Nebraska campus to downtown Chicago. Timber giant Weyerhaeuser Co. opted to leave a bucolic headquarters south of Seattle for the downtown.
…
Northern New Jersey has been the epicenter of this trend, dotted with abandoned homes of corporate giants.Communities and landlords throughout the area are struggling with finding new uses for the buildings. A developer in Holmdel, N.J., has an ambitious plan to turn the 2-million-square-foot former Bell Labs headquarters into a mix of apartments, shops and offices for multiple tenants.
German chemicals company BASF’s former North American headquarters in Mount Olive, N.J., sits vacant, as does the 500-acre former home of drugmaker Merck & Co. in Readington, N.J.
Adding to the quandary, the once-thriving office parks often were big tax- revenue generators, while uses like apartments tend to bring in substantially less. In Upper Saddle River, the Pearson site brought in more than $900,000 a year, a big chunk of tax revenue for the small town.
“All of a sudden it’s very hard to replace that tax base,” said Mr. DeMarco of Mack-Cali. Offices, he added, “are an innocuous use—they don’t bother you on the weekend. It’s not like retail or hotels.”
Perhaps now the suburbs can stop having to subsidize NJ’s urban areas, which can’t afford themselves today. How much of NJ’s suburban property taxes go to support urban areas (and Abbott) in places like Passaic, Paterson, Newark, Irvington, Camden, Trenton, etc etc etc etc.
Would imagine an increase in the tax base, incomes, reduced poverty levels in the urban areas would be net positive, after considering the negatives to the local areas as a result of the relocation.
From the Paterson Press:
Paterson’s Mayor Torres looks to take next step in vacant property initiative
After the city reaped $1.2 million in an auction involving abandoned properties last week, Mayor Jose “Joey” Torres said his staff is ready to move on to the next – and more ambitious – phase of his neighborhood stabilization program.
The mayor said he is looking to conduct a second auction involving as many as 150 abandoned properties sometime in March.
The next auction, the mayor said, would be the first one conducted under the “receivership” powers established by a city law adopted in 2014. It would follow a different process from last week’s auction and involve properties that meet a separate set of criteria from the ones used last week.
In last week’s auction, the city sold liens on vacant sites whose owners were delinquent on their taxes. The liens provided developers with incentives, such as a vastly-expedited foreclosure process, in an effort to get blighted areas redeveloped.
The next auction would cover properties that may be current on their taxes, but whose owners allegedly have failed to maintain them in compliance with city requirements or are delinquent in paying fees imposed under
Paterson’s abandoned property ordinance, officials said. The sites must be vacant for a minimum of six months to qualify under the law, said Paterson’s law director, Domenick Stampone.
Torres said there are about 900 locations on the abandoned property list established under the ordinance, including about 150 are almost ready to be offered at auction.
How are Hoboken and Jersey City still Abbott districts anyway?
Absurd – tallest building in the state being built in JC – as a luxury residential building.
But they can’t afford their own schools?
https://youtu.be/miXMWJyOdgw
Relax to views of historic Kenney’s house.
Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location vote overwhelmingly for Sanders.
Feel the Bern!!!
#3…hmmm….large voting blocs…hmmmm…..
The Abbott thing is corrupt on many levels. Not only should some cities not be receiving funds, but the cities that do receive funds should get an amount per student equal to the state average.
Wouldn’t that be fair(assuming that’s the point of Abbot), spending the same amount per student in all districts instead of spending 23-24k in Abbotts and 5k less in non Abbotts?
@nytimes
Marco Rubio, lampooned for repeating himself, does it again
@Marco_Robotio
@nytimes It’s become hard to dispel the fiction that I am a robot when you continually instill that I am by using my quotes against me
@washingtonpost
Marco Rubio has another repeat glitch in New Hampshire
“We are taking our message to families that are struggling to raise their children in the 21st Century, because as you saw, Jeanette and I are raising our four children in the 21st Century.
And we know how hard it’s become to instill our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats.
In the 21st Century, it’s become harder than ever to instill in your children the values they teach in our homes and in our church, instead of the values that they try to ram down our throats in the movies, in music and in popular culture.”
@AnnCoulter
Possibilities for Rubio campaign: 1) Turn the Marco Rubio off and then back on again….
…
Agreed! It’s time to give the suburbs a break. Time for the cities to carry their weight.
You know what gets me annoyed about the abbott city dwellers in jersey…..their complete lack of care for their neighborhood and homes. Being poor doesn’t mean you have to live like a dirt-bag. You don’t have to throw garbage in the streets and make your apartments resemble a garbage dump. Being poor is not an excuse to live like this. Having respect for your home and neighborhood should have nothing to do with being poor and everything to do with the character of the individual. I know a little off topic, but had to put this out there.
grim says:
February 9, 2016 at 5:32 am
Perhaps now the suburbs can stop having to subsidize NJ’s urban areas, which can’t afford themselves today. How much of NJ’s suburban property taxes go to support urban areas (and Abbott) in places like Passaic, Paterson, Newark, Irvington, Camden, Trenton, etc etc etc etc.
Would imagine an increase in the tax base, incomes, reduced poverty levels in the urban areas would be net positive, after considering the negatives to the local areas as a result of the relocation.
Insanity. Mine as well give the fort lees and cliffside parks an abbott label.
grim says:
February 9, 2016 at 5:45 am
How are Hoboken and Jersey City still Abbott districts anyway?
Absurd – tallest building in the state being built in JC – as a luxury residential building.
But they can’t afford their own schools?
Insanity. Mine as well give the fort lees an abbott label.
grim says:
February 9, 2016 at 5:45 am
How are Hoboken and Jersey City still Abbott districts anyway?
Absurd – tallest building in the state being built in JC – as a luxury residential building.
But they can’t afford their own schools?
For Hillary Clinton, it’s Deja Crazy Vu.
déjà vu |ˌdāZHä ˈvo͞oo|
noun
a feeling of having already experienced the present situation.
As the adroit Ron Fournier points out on Twitter, when it comes to the Clintons it’s always someone else’s fault.
Sometimes, it’s the voters. This time, right on schedule, it’s the consultants.
On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, we’re hearing a Clinton staff shakeup is on the way. Sound familiar? It should.
Clinton’s 2016 campaign is following an eerily similar path to that of her ill-fated 2008 bid for the presidency. Devastating and embarrassing early shortcomings (Iowa in 2008, and polling indicates a 2016 blowout is coming in New Hampshire) followed by internal recriminations.
As Glenn Thrush of Politico has reported, the Clintons are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more. Maybe they should adopt Donald Trump’s theme song, because like Twisted Sister they’re telling their staff “if that’s your best your best won’t do” and ordering another purge.
In 2008, Clinton sacked her campaign manager and shook up the staff after losing in Iowa to a skilled novice and an experienced maggot. Here we are again, eight years later – almost to the day – and it’s second verse, same as the first: an underperforming campaign that doesn’t connect with voters embarrassed by an outsider they “didn’t see coming.”
2008: Angry candidate blames staff. 2016: Rinse, repeat.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Clinton played it smart this time. She hired those wily Obama veterans who beat her in 2008 to run this race. Genius! She would have a bionic campaign, rebuilt… better, stronger, faster.
Not so much. It might be a bionic campaign, but it’s the same candidate. And that’s the rub with voters.
There are many parallels between the brands with which I work and the politicians with which I used to work. One of the biggest is that a great product solves a lot of problems, but a bad one brings problems to the surface with a vengeance.
Barack Obama was a great candidate. He made everything from organizing to digital to fundraising to messaging easier. But when you go to market with a product the market doesn’t like, it’s hard. You can have expensive ads, the best space on the shelf, great technology… and still fail.
Hillary Clinton was likable enough. But to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, she’s no Barack Obama.
Clinton’s people couldn’t sell her then. Obama’s people can’t sell her now. No one is warming up in the bullpen – Joe Biden has left to find a cure for Cancer, an easier job than selling candidate Clinton to voters – and the Democratic party is staring down the reality of watching a second Clinton campaign crumble, this time humiliated by a 74 year old self-declared Social1st from Vermont.
We opened with a definition and we close with a quote:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein.
Those crazy Clintons. Here they go again.
Trump says the same 3 things over and over and over again and he doesn’t get accused.
That’s the bottom line. The funds should not be more than their suburban counterparts, how is that fair?
nwnj3 says:
February 9, 2016 at 7:57 am
The Abbott thing is corrupt on many levels. Not only should some cities not be receiving funds, but the cities that do receive funds should get an amount per student equal to the state average.
Wouldn’t that be fair(assuming that’s the point of Abbot), spending the same amount per student in all districts instead of spending 23-24k in Abbotts and 5k less in non Abbotts?
Grim [15];
The time has come to thin the GOP field… those who wont jump are pushed. The GOP ‘opposition’ coalesced behind Cruz a month or two ago. At a meeting of dozens of small groups they hashed it out, then put it to a vote. If you voted, you could endorse the consensus candidate or endorse no one, but your couldn’t endorse anyone else. The candidate getting 2/3 vote was the ‘outsider’ choice in the primary.
There’s still the “establishment” choice to be made; and the wild card is Trump. Like the energizer bunny, he just keeps on ticking.
Re: [16];
That’s the bottom line. The funds should not be more than their suburban counterparts, how is that fair?
How cute. AnonoPumkin thinks “fair” has anything to do with it. Here’s how it works: “Fnck you, pay me.”
Holy cow – NJ CRUSHING the foreclosure and delinquency pipeline in the new core logic data.
re: # 1 – Mess from a previous generation, tax law at the State Level from 1991 allows towns to work out deals where NO SCHOOL TAXES are paid at all, the so called PILOT deals, and the State of NJ due to the Abbot ruling from the courts has to make up the difference.
For example only 18 percent Jersey City’s residents live in those new high rise buildings along the waterfront. Few of those people pay any school taxes, thanks to PILOT agreements which last decades.
Consider this example.
” In 1999, the Jersey City City Council
granted Sugar House Urban Renewal Company a 20-year tax
abatement to convert the 136-year-old American Sugar Refining
Company warehouse into approximately 65 market-rate
condominiums. Under the terms of the abatement agreement,
Sugar House Urban Renewal Company agreed to pay 15
percent of its annual revenue, an administrative fee of 2 percent
of the previous year’s revenue to the city’s general fund and a
one-time $1,000 fee for each condominium it built for recreation
or another municipal public service.
The units, which range in size from 1,000 to 2,000 square feet,
are advertised as selling for between $600,000 and $1.3 million
and had a median sale price of $800,000.
Despite the hefty price tags, Sugar House condominium owners pay only a fraction
of the taxes paid by their neighbors with properties that are
not abated. In 2007, all of Sugar House’s condominium owners
paid a total of $695,477 to Jersey City ($39,066 in taxes and
$656,411 in payments in lieu of taxes or PILOTs). Had they
paid conventional taxes, the owners would have paid
$1,627,108 or $931,631 more than they did. The city would
have received $746,845, according to information compiled
using online data. The county, which received 5 percent of the
PILOT, would have received $413,741. The Jersey City School
District, which got nothing from the Sugar House agreement,
would have received $455,965. An additional $10,556 would
have been paid to the county’s open space fund.”
As of today one unit sold last month for for $2,160,000 and still pay NO SCHOOL TAXES. The town councils are also asked to extend these PILOT agreements when they expire, for another decade or more. There was one development in Hoboken that was recently extended another decade it is were a bunch of BnRs live.
The State needs to change this law, agreements that leave out school funding for decades should never have been allowed to exist.
Chris Krispy criticizes someone for responding in 25 second sound bites when the rules of the debate allow 30 seconds to answer? Is he supposed to try a 2 minute discussion and dare them to turn of his mic?
Repetition of message is a virtue, when it reinforces a strong message. The problem with Rubio is that he’s trying to play it too safe by withholding policy content, and making vaguely inspiring speeches about “the future”. All of them are guilty of it. Trump makes promises that are BS. Cruz has controversial policies but doesn’t seem to want to really sell them to the broad public – he doesn’t talk much about his flat tax proposal in debates for example, I bet people are less aware of that than Trump’s wall. Krispy constantly repeats the misleading stats about NJ job growth as if he deserves the credit. Virtually none of the candidates talk about which popular government programs they would cut to reduce the deficit.
“Fnck you, pay me.”
The history of the earth summarized in four words.
It’s absolute genius.
I’m going to repost this from last night, because I think it’s an important thing to understand as yet another of the ZIRP distortions created.
Shkreli is the kind of “pharmaceutical executive” you get when central planners conspire to underprice the cost of debt for over a decade, and the financial engineers bred on ZIRP and fed puts take over what used to be real businesses to play short term asset stripping and milking games, with no view to long term value creation.
re # 21 – Money talks and bullshite walks.
Our very own Ralph Kramden and his PACs will be out of money soon.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate.php?id=N00037008
Stockman upsets the CNBC talking heads
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-02-09/david-stockman-markets-going-to-be-mauled-by-bear
tnx = $1.71
Another $.25 and my lock on the historical record low can be matched.
If you don’t have parental involvement in educating the kids, then spending money (Abbott) or Charter Schools wouldn’t work. The failure of Abbott school districts should forever solidify that education problems can be solved by throwing more money at it.
Starts in the home.
Interesting concept that has been in place in other countries. I don’t know why anyone would trust the government but if you don’t have a checking account at a bank, I guess what do you have to lose.
Postal Banking
The USPS Office of Inspector General sparked quite a controversy when it published a white paper in January 2014 that endorsed a concept postal unions have quietly supported for years: The Postal Service should provide basic financial services to the 68 million American adults who don’t have bank accounts or who have limited access to bank services.
At his swearing-in ceremony in November 2013, APWU President Mark Dimondstein championed the idea – although he expressed it very differently than the OIG ever would. “To protect our jobs, we must enhance postal services,” Dimondstein told an audience of union members and friends. “Services such as basic, non-profit banking would be a great and real benefit to the people of this country, and a good answer to what I call ‘the Wall Street Banksters,’ who devastated the economy and with it the lives of millions of people.”
http://www.apwu.org/issues/postal-banking
In many countries, you have postal everything, including prepaid cellular. From what I’ve been able to garner, this has more to do with marketing and poor attempts to maintain relevance, based on leveraging the historical trust with these establishments.
Krispy must really dread having to go back to work after running for president the last 5 years.
I really feel we should push to enact the Nationwide Do Not Mail List – to prohibit marketers from targeting individuals who do not wish to be contacted via mail.
No different from phone, and no different from anti-spam LAWS that we’ve put in place.
We have an entire postal megalith who is being subsidized to deliver junk mail.
With ZIRP, what’s the difference between a postal bank account and a bank deposit box stuffed with cash? Either way, the customer gets no interest. But when the post office runs a bank, they send the deposits to the government, to make further deficit spending easier.
Very rare that I have seen a competent person working in a Post Office, let alone any govt job. I wouldn’t trust them with my money. The concept may have wings back in the day when people put their money in mattresses but not so much today. But again, if you don’t have a bank account today, your may be open to that option.
The post office is complicit in the spread of junk mail, ever put in a change of address form? Not only do they charge you $1, but they ask you to sign up for “interest” related crap from moving and home decorating companies.
Want to make the post office profitable?
Immediately change the licensing structure for the national change of address database.
Make a license cost $100 million annually, no, $500 million.
Even better, make every COA lookup cost $10 dollars.
From a non-mail perspective, it’s the single most important thing the post office does – keep track of where you live, when you move, and where you move to. Everyone wants this data, and today it’s too cheap.
Debt collectors, credit cards, cable companies, etc. These companies all have processes set up to use the NCOA databases to market, target, or retain customers.
Far too cheap, I have no doubt that the post office could make BILLIONS in additional revenue from this database. Hell, Epsilon, Axciom, and all the others do it.
For example.
Let’s say you are a cable and internet customer with a big player.
You plan to move across town to a new apartment.
You file an change of address.
Nearly immediately, your cable company will know, and they will target you with a move offer to keep you as a customer, as they realize there may be an option to switch providers (lets just say, Cable to Fios for example).
What is this information worth to a cable company? Today, they get it for nearly nothing. I say it’s worth at least $10, maybe more. One year of contract to them is worth thousands in revenue, and that $10 is cost of entry. The cable company might spend upwards of $100 to retarget you as a customer, though outbound, mail, or discounts.
Multiply this towards every single company that knows you as a customer.
I would argue the address and change databases have an enterprise value nearly equivalent to the mail delivery business, especially when you consider they could have a monopoly on the data.
Think about it, what good is paying Axciom $25 million a year to maintain your customer/prospect/decisioning databases, if they have no idea if your customers actually live where they think they live.
There are businesses that generate billions of dollars in revenue that would be absolutely worthless without this data.
Did you all just think it was magic that companies knew that you moved?
Grim,
Then our cable bills jump from $150 to $250. F#ck you, pay me.
Likewise, delivery address validation services – there are a good number of third party companies in this business today, who leverage postal data and data licensing agreements to provide these services – essentially – when you go to a website, order a product, that they know the address is correct, and that you are actually living at that address, before they ship a product. Because, if you are wrong, the company takes a rather costly hit on not only the shipping and packaging materials, but also the restocking, and potential damages/losses related to shipping.
People are poor typists, and will regularly miskey their own addresses. This is not a rare occurrence at all, a company like Amazon would not be able to exist without address standardization and delivery point validation. They would get eaten up – can you imagine the tens of thousands of “Returned Undeliverable” they would get every day? In addition, the cost of tens of thousands of packages left on the wrong doorstep? The shipper isn’t going to pay this claim, nor will they be responsible for picking these up.
Again, lay customers think it’s magic that they can bang on the keyboard with their heads and their packages still arrive.
This is being given away nearly for free today. Again, what is this worth to a company like Amazon? I would say hundreds of millions of dollars a year in value are received from having access to this kind of data.
In the past, these services were nearly given away because they used to increase the utilization of the post office. Today, the post office isn’t delivering this mail. What data do you think Fed Ex and UPS use? Their own?
So the post office gives away the most valuable things it has, data. Amazon could not exist without this.
But hey, what do I know. Let’s just write the USPS another check for a billion dollars.
A few years back when I was closer to the shipping business, UPS rolled out a service where they would actually charge a shipper a fee, as a convenience, to reroute delivery to a new address based on the USPS change of address data, and then UPS would tell you the customer’s new address.
This was pretty common for things like auto-delivery services, orders placed in advance, back-orders, items with future ship/release dates, etc.
Do you need any more egregious of an example that the USPS’s most valuable asset is data, and not those stupid little trucks?
It wasn’t cheap either, but when you considered the cost of processing the return and reship, it was cheaper to pay the $5 or $7 or whatever it cost. Especially if it made the customer happy to get their Lucille Ball collectible plate even after they moved and forgot to tell them.
Anon, 8-11:
L1beral establishment getting nervous, eh?
Lib, 14:
Comedian (might have Maher) did a recent hilarious sketch on topic if you can find it. Went along the lines of: Hillary, we are really, really trying to help you get the nomination. Last time against you we put up a blcak dude with no experience and a mulsim name not even born here. This time it’s an old jweish soc1alist. You need to step it up babe.
FKA2010, 21.
Thank you. Stop giving these leeches home field advantage and conceding right out of the gate that the equal education is defined by dollars. It’s not.
Grim? Alter the national flow of advertising? Are you mad? The Constitution gave Congress the power to establish Post Offices and to build post roads. All in the name of economic expansion, even if today the post office is becoming technologically obsolete and a burden to the taxpayers it mission to deliver advertising to entice one to immediately run out to the shopping centers and strip malls of America to perform the act of a credit transaction still holds true and no law less than than an ACT of Congress or even perhaps even a Constitutional convention will ever change that.
Sorry Hillary, your face is just too hateable for you to be president, especially given that your personality, ideas, and cankles are terrible too.
http://www.zombietime.com/really_truly_hillary_gallery/
Guess we just articulated the waste in another government entity. There’s definite waste there but what’s the alternative?
re: what’s the alternative… Sharia? Dunno really we hold our Constitution as tightly as our guns, I gather without it we go back to the dark ages.
“Trump says the same 3 things over and over and over again and he doesn’t get accused.”
Likely because those same 3 things resonate with the American people:
1. Control our own borders.
2. Stop the flood of jobs and industry leaving the country.
3. Clean out lobbyists and do-nothing politicians awestruck by tall ceilings and marble columns.
FKA [28];
Federal Gubmint has the express power to coin money and regulate its value. “Coin” is figurative, not literal — It includes paper money. Why can’t “money” be electronic bits? Visa/MC/Amex skim 2% off trillions in transaction volume to make cashless transactions happen — the government can snap their fingers and all that business turns into tax revenue. Western Union remitances? Whoa, Nelly!
Move along, nothing to see here….
European banks face major cash crunch
More than a dozen European banks facing exposure in excess of $100 billion to energy sector loans may need to sell assets to bolster against future losses.
Potential buyers of those assets include a mix of large private equity firms, a select group of pension investors, U.S. banks and hedge funds. Due to the recent decline in major European banks’ shares and increasing scrutiny over the bad loans the banks hold, investors are starting to gravitate toward the idea of getting actively involved in European banking names.
“European banks are under pressure because they have to continually raise capital ratios” in order to offset troubled loans, Julien Jarmoszko, senior investment manager at S&P Capital IQ, told CNBC.com. “We’re seeing more restructuring being initiated.”
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/08/european-banks-face-major-cash-crunch.html
Many postal companies globally have been privatized. Including post offices in European countries that leftists encourage the US to copy. Royal Mail in the UK, Deutsche Post, PostNL in the Netherlands, Osterreichesche Post AG in Austria.
They’ve been planning to privatize Japan Post for years, but still haven’t pulled the trigger.
My wife and I almost bought in Sugar House lofts in April 2002…….we were looking at a 1BR + den……turned off by the super high maint fees…..nice place though….at the time there was no PATH service…..there was also no neighborhood around there other than the Iron Monkey…..the Light Rail was in place though….
Juice Box says:
February 9, 2016 at 9:24 am
re: # 1 – Mess from a previous generation, tax law at the State Level from 1991 allows towns to work out deals where NO SCHOOL TAXES are paid at all, the so called PILOT deals, and the State of NJ due to the Abbot ruling from the courts has to make up the difference.
For example only 18 percent Jersey City’s residents live in those new high rise buildings along the waterfront. Few of those people pay any school taxes, thanks to PILOT agreements which last decades.
Consider this example.
” In 1999, the Jersey City City Council
granted Sugar House Urban Renewal Company a 20-year tax
abatement to convert the 136-year-old American Sugar Refining
Company warehouse into approximately 65 market-rate
condominiums. Under the terms of the abatement agreement,
Sugar House Urban Renewal Company agreed to pay 15
percent of its annual revenue, an administrative fee of 2 percent
of the previous year’s revenue to the city’s general fund and a
one-time $1,000 fee for each condominium it built for recreation
or another municipal public service.
The units, which range in size from 1,000 to 2,000 square feet,
are advertised as selling for between $600,000 and $1.3 million
and had a median sale price of $800,000.
Despite the hefty price tags, Sugar House condominium owners pay only a fraction
of the taxes paid by their neighbors with properties that are
not abated. In 2007, all of Sugar House’s condominium owners
paid a total of $695,477 to Jersey City ($39,066 in taxes and
$656,411 in payments in lieu of taxes or PILOTs). Had they
paid conventional taxes, the owners would have paid
$1,627,108 or $931,631 more than they did. The city would
have received $746,845, according to information compiled
using online data. The county, which received 5 percent of the
PILOT, would have received $413,741. The Jersey City School
District, which got nothing from the Sugar House agreement,
would have received $455,965. An additional $10,556 would
have been paid to the county’s open space fund.”
As of today one unit sold last month for for $2,160,000 and still pay NO SCHOOL TAXES. The town councils are also asked to extend these PILOT agreements when they expire, for another decade or more. There was one development in Hoboken that was recently extended another decade it is were a bunch of BnRs live.
The State needs to change this law, agreements that leave out school funding for decades should never have been allowed to exist.
I’m not too sure, but I think I read somewhere that the post office is not run on tax dollars. They must fund their own existence.
Agreed. Rubio just talks nonsense about Obama. No one cares about Obama, he is gone. You can call Trump an idiot, but he knows what the people want. That’s better than any of these career politicians that only know what bribing hands want.
Statler Waldorf says:
February 9, 2016 at 11:40 am
“Trump says the same 3 things over and over and over again and he doesn’t get accused.”
Likely because those same 3 things resonate with the American people:
1. Control our own borders.
2. Stop the flood of jobs and industry leaving the country.
3. Clean out lobbyists and do-nothing politicians awestruck by tall ceilings and marble columns.
Pumpkin this pancake is for you.
http://www.businessinsider.com/pancake-printer-machine-2016-2
Postal Service Net Income/Loss By Year
2015 – $5.1 billion loss
2014 – $5.5 billion loss
2013 – $5 billion loss
2012 – $15.9 billion loss
2011 – $5.1 billion loss
2010 – $8.5 billion loss
2009 – $3.8 billion loss
2008 – $2.8 billion loss
2007 – $5.1 billion loss
2006 – $900 million surplus
2005 – $1.4 billion surplus
2004 – $3.1 billion surplus
2003 – $3.9 billion surplus
2002 – $676 million loss
2001 – $1.7 billion loss
No worries, only 50 billion in the hole over the last 15 years. “Fund their own existence” he said..
They cut 37% of their employee since 2001.. What do you want them to do end home delivery?
year #postal employees
2001 775,903
2002 752,949
2003 729,035
2004 707,485
2005 704,716
2006 696,138
2007 684,762
2008 663,238
2009 623,128
2010 583,908
2011 557,251
2012 528,458
2013 491,017
2014 488,300
2015 491,863
Eliminate junk mail and cut that by upwards of 75%. Why are we subsidizing the delivery of junk mail?
How about permitting other carriers to deliver mail to a mailbox? Which, by the way, is illegal.
USPS package delivery is up 11% since last year, but first class mail is down a whopping 40% since 2001. They would have to end home delivery or curtail to part time workers to cut wages enough to plug the budget gap.
The reduction in employees and mail volumes is primarily due to online e-statements and the elimination of paper based statements, along with the ability to pay by ACH or Credit Card, which eliminated the need to mail back a paper check (aka statement and lockbox processing). We used to have 700 people in a building in Clifton that did nothing but print statements, truck them to the post office, and process the returning checks. There were probably 50 people in the Clifton post office that did nothing but manage the work associated with our mail.
Ask Stu what it would mean to the post office if prospectuses didn’t need to be mailed.
Snicker…
September 09, 2010
CLYDE, TX – The U.S. Postal Service would like to warn people that only authorized U.S. Postal Service delivery personnel are allowed to place items in a mailbox. By law, a mailbox is intended only for receipt of postage-paid U.S. Mail.
Recently, there have been reports of people placing non-mail items that did not bear U.S. postage in local mailboxes. The U.S. Postal Service recognizes customers may place non-mail items into mailboxes as a convenient way of “dropping something off,” but those items may cause a smaller mailbox to become full. When a mailbox is full, Postal Service regulations say the letter carrier cannot place mail in the box.
Additionally, the Postal Service has received complaints of flyers without paid postage being placed in mailboxes. Though many may be unaware, it is important to know that this type of activity is illegal by federal law. It may seem to be an easy way to advertise, but only U.S. Mail delivered by authorized personnel may be placed in mailboxes.
Permitting other carriers to deliver would “destroy the middle class” that wouldn’t exist without big taxpayer funded government unions with fat pensions.
In these privatizations, incentives of the private sector “miraculously” turned these activities profitable. Hard to believe after over 200 years of solid evidence, but capitalism works.
“Ask Stu what it would mean to the post office if prospectuses didn’t need to be mailed.”
Why do you think there is still a mailing requirement? Puhraise the SEC!
Free mail delivery began in American cities in 1863, and the rural folks petitioned to be added later that century.
They tried to shut around 3,700 post offices and routes already and there was a backlash and the politicians stopped it.
Interesting pro post office site.
http://savethepostoffice.com/news-briefs
IMO, post office should only deliver once per week. Anything more time critical is sent via private carrier, email or a via a phone call anyway. Would reduce the PO budget by 80%.
Problem is postal delivery is at best a minimum wage job, and probably shouldn’t carry any kind of pension. This is essentially a no-skill position.
Why the Post Office Makes America Great
obert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth provides a compelling interpretation of how technical change and innovation has radically changed the living standards of the citizens of the US in the past 150 years. Lying behind these changes are the institutions which have allowed the country to harness its human potential. In this paper we conduct an empirical investigation of the impact of one key set of institutions, the capacity of the US state as proxied by the presence of post offices in a county, on innovation. We show that between 1804 and 1899, the time when the US became the world technological leader, there is a strong association between the presence and number of post offices in a county and patenting activity, and it appears that it is the opening of postal offices that leads to surges in patenting activity, not the other way around. Our evidence suggests that part of the yet untold story of US technological exceptionalism is the way in which the US created an immensely capable and effective state.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21932
When you get one of Pumpkin’s penny stock come-ons delivered by FedEx, they didn’t pay for it just to impress you, they paid for private delivery so they can’t be charged with federal mail fraud.
The next step in mail delivery is cutting back from 6x per week to 3 or even 2. There’s nothing I receive by snail mail that can’t wait a day.
Grim is right again. We pay firefighters like lawyers in this country. Sure it’s a dangerous job. Perhaps you should have gone to class once in a while in high school.
Glen Ridge taken to court over Baldwin study, affordable housing
Glen Ridge faces a lawsuit related to last year’s planned development of several properties on Baldwin Street.
During Monday night’s council meeting, Borough Attorney John Malyska gave a status review on the lawsuit, which he said had been brought by Glen Ridge Developers LLC; the company had sought to build an apartment complex, with a designated number of affordable housing units, on four plots of land on Baldwin Street.
Malyska said that the lawsuit was filed last summer, and a revised complaint was submitted to the courts in late October. In it, he said, the developers said that Glen Ridge should have sent a proposed redevelopment study of the Baldwin Street area to the planning board. But the lawsuit is also related to Glen Ridge’s affordable housing situation.
Glen Ridge has filed defense papers against the lawsuit in response, Malyska said. Additionally, the borough is hiring a consultant to determine how many affordable housing units that the borough needs to have available.
Affordable Housing
Under New Jersey state law, every municipality is required to have a certain percentage of its total housing stock be available as affordable housing.
Malyska said that Glen Ridge had always been committed to making sure that it was in compliance with the state’s affordable housing guidelines.
Up until last year, it was the responsibility of the state Council on Affordable Housing to determine whether municipalities were in compliance with the law. But last year, the state determined that COAH was not functioning properly as a state agency, and handed all decisions concerning affordable housing over to the state Supreme Court.
The state has appointed one judge per county to oversee affordable housing cases, Malyska said. In Essex County, there are currently nine or 10 affordable housing-related cases that have been filed against municipalities.
Baldwin Street
Last year, Glen Ridge Developers announced interest in acquiring three residential properties on Baldwin Street and using them as the site of an apartment complex. The concept was later expanded to include a fourth property.
The properties were to include a total of 59 apartment units, nine of which were to be classified as affordable housing. The remaining 50 were to be market-rate or luxury units; the project was also to include parking areas.
The developer asked Glen Ridge to consider having the properties declared as areas in need of redevelopment.
“It became clear…that none of the properties qualified as areas in need of redevelopment,” Malyska said. All of them were being used as residential properties, in compliance with zoning laws, and none of the properties were considered to be blighted.
“At every step of the way, the developer has asked us to spend time, money and municipal resources to determine that these properties are in need of redevelopment,” Malyska said.
The idea had also generated heavy criticism from Glen Ridge residents. In July, the council announced that it was abandoning the idea of a redevelopment study.
Malyska said that the developer was seeking to add an amended complaint to the lawsuit. In it, he said, the developer claimed that they had rights to a fifth property on Baldwin Street; Malyska also said that the number of proposed apartment units had been increased to 125.
The total acreage of the properties is in dispute; the lawsuit indicates that the acreage is just over 2 acres, but the council claims that the properties are closer to 1.8 acres.
“What’s been proposed is very, very different from anything that’s been zoned in Glen Ridge,” Councilman Peter Hughes said. He also argued that the resulting development would be denser than anything in Montclair, which itself has seen a large amount of new development in recent years.
Councilwoman Ann Marie Morrow said that the last housing stock survey, including a borough demographics study, was done in 2010, at the time that the borough revised its master plan.
The master plan documents do mention that Glen Ridge should look into having a variety of housing stock available, including mixed-use and low or moderate-income housing, especially in areas near Bloomfield Avenue and the Bay Street train station in Montclair. Additionally, after the Baldwin Street debate in the summer, the council mentioned that Glen Ridge was going to have to continue exploring its options for affordable housing.
Glen Ridge has hired H2M Architects and Engineers to do a survey of all of Glen Ridge’s housing stock, to determine how many housing units should be made available as affordable housing.
H2M is also one of the firms participating in the redevelopment study of several properties at HackensackUMC Mountainside.
http://www.northjersey.com/community-news/town-government/glen-ridge-taken-to-court-over-baldwin-study-affordable-housing-1.1508540
Ending Saturday delivery would likely save a fortune as well.
Even the post office said doing it would save $3 billion a year.
Yet – it went nowhere. God Bless America – where we can blow $3 billion a year for the luxury of getting a Bed Bath and Beyond coupon in the mail on a Saturday.
Why do you want to destroy jobs? For the sake of efficiency? What’s efficient about taking jobs away from most of the population in the name of profit? Not enough jobs as it is, but let’s put more people on welfare in the name of efficiency when it comes to profit.
Ragnar says:
February 9, 2016 at 1:28 pm
Permitting other carriers to deliver would “destroy the middle class” that wouldn’t exist without big taxpayer funded government unions with fat pensions.
In these privatizations, incentives of the private sector “miraculously” turned these activities profitable. Hard to believe after over 200 years of solid evidence, but capitalism works.
73- Name me one private business that would take on everyday delivery to every address in America and come out profiting.
74- Also, that job is tough. Don’t act like the post office is some glorious job. That job is tough and it sucks. The pay is terrible and they are slave drivers. Enough with the pipe dream that every govt job is a lottery ticket. Only lottery tickets are politicians, cops, and fire fighters. Every other govt job is for a sucker.
Speaking of mail fraud,
Bank of America just yesterday sent by UPS a brand new credit card including a letter that claimed that I had requested it, with instructions on how to activate it. Problem is I had never asked for any card – they were doing this as an advertisement, hoping I would bite, thinking my wife had arranged for it. What really happened was that my wife just the week before had asked our 2 current cards to raise our limit, at my request. Mostly because I was thinking about buying some gold coins in bulk and wanted to get 1% credit by putting it through by card. (Which I later found out that gold dealers won’t do anyway). But hey, sometimes we put big payments on our cards (before paying off that month) so raising the limit doesn’t hurt. I assume BoA got tipped off on this activity by Experian, and hoped to intercept that pass by pretending their card was the one I was looking for.
Sleazy.
So some people can get their facts straight. Like I said earlier, they fund their own existence. I deserve an apology. You guys have to stop with the govt bashing. You are too extreme with your views of govt workers.
“1. The USPS is not technically “broke” — yet.
Operationally speaking, the USPS nets profits every year. The financial problem it faces now comes from a 2006 Congressional mandate that requires the agency to “pre-pay” into a fund that covers health care costs for future retired employees. Under the mandate, the USPS is required to make an annual $5.5 billion payment over ten years, through 2016. These “prepayments” are largely responsible for the USPS’s financial losses over the past four years and the threat of shutdown that looms ahead – take the retirement fund out of the equation, and the postal service would have actually netted $1 billion in profits over this period.
This doesn’t mean, however, that the USPS’s financial situation is good. Revenue has been declining for years, and even if the agency manages to get past this year’s $5.5 billion payment, it would again face insolvency next year.
2. The postal service doesn’t rely on taxpayer funds.
Until 1971, mail delivery was handled by the Post Office Department, a Cabinet department in the federal government. Postal worker strikes prompted President Nixon to pass the Postal Reorganization Act in 1971, transforming it into the semi-independent agency we now know as the United States Postal Service. The USPS in its current form runs like a business, relies on postage for revenue and, for the most part, has not used taxpayer money since 1982, when postage stamps became “products” instead of forms of taxation. Taxpayer money is only used in some cases to pay for mailing voter materials to disabled and overseas Americans.
USPS spokespersons have been adamant in emphasizing that they are not requesting taxpayer funds from the federal government to make this year’s payment. Rather, they say, the USPS is asking Congress to authorize access to an estimated $7 billion that they overpaid into the future retiree pension fund in previous years.
3. Junk mail sustains the system.
Although the USPS does manage to turn a profit based on operations alone, it’s a widely known fact that mail volume has dipped over the past decade. As Americans by and large correspond and pay bills online, first-class mail and, as a result, postal revenue have gone into a decline. From 2006 to 2010, mail volume decreased by a hefty 20 percent.
But although the days of custom stationery, handwritten letters and scented envelopes may be long gone, the USPS has been increasingly reliant on junk mail — advertisements, catalogs and other unsolicited mailbox “gifts” — to keep the service afloat. BusinessWeek notes that revenue from junk mail increased by 7.1 percent in the last quarter of 2010 – although volume has not increased since. Donahoe has also expressed optimism that junk mail volume and revenue will increase as the economy improves. But the lower cost of direct mailings means that more junk mail is needed to circulate in the system to make up for the accelerating loss of first-class mail.
4. The proposed cuts are big.
In his testimony last week, Donahoe presented a number of measures that he argues would halt the USPS’s rapid financial decline, including the elimination of the annual pre-fund payment requirement, stopping Saturday mail delivery and terminating a “no-layoff” clause in a contract with unionized postal workers. According to Donahoe, cutting service down to five days a week instead of six, a proposal that has been kicked around for years, would save about $3 billion a year. Donahoe has also urged Congress to allow him to shut down standalone post offices, moving them into convenience stores and supermarkets instead.
Of course, these proposals have been met with resistance, not least by postal workers who stand to lose their jobs, as well as direct mailers, the creators of the junk mail that sustains the system, who argue that Saturday deliveries are crucial times for sending advertisements while recipients have their minds on weekend shopping. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) has also argued that ending Saturday delivery could drive mail-order pharmacies and other businesses away from the USPS, further accelerating its losses.
Other critics say that simply cutting services isn’t enough, and that the real solution is figuring out a way to reinvent the postal service to meet the needs of our wired world. But how?
5. Europe could be the model for USPS 2.0.
To see just how the USPS can transform itself, some analysts have turned to European countries to observe what can be done differently. In a May cover story for BusinessWeek, journalist Devin Leonard reported on the kinds of models that have emerged in Sweden, Germany and Finland. The Swedish service, Posten, and Germany’s Deutsche Post have minimized their participation in the national postal market, allowing them to work as smaller and more streamlined organizations. Posten runs only 12 percent of Sweden’s post offices, while Deutsche Post runs 2 percent of those in Germany – the rest are handled by other businesses. The U.S., in contrast, runs all of the post offices in the country.
It also seems that European postal systems have been experimenting with services for its Internet customers, as well. From BusinessWeek:
Many used their extra cash to create digital mail products that allow customers to send and receive letters from their computers. Itella, the Finnish postal service, keeps a digital archive of its users’ mail for seven years and helps them pay bills online securely. Swiss Post lets customers choose if they want their mail delivered at home in hard copy or scanned and sent to their preferred Internet-connected device. Customers can also tell Swiss Post if they would rather not receive items such as junk mail.
Sweden’s Posten has an app that lets customers turn digital photos on their mobile phones into postcards. It is unveiling a service that will allow cell-phone users to send letters without stamps. Posten will text them a numerical code that they can jot down on envelopes in place of a stamp for a yet-to-be-determined charge.
These European postal services, however, have the financial leeway to experiment with digital services that our USPS currently does not — and the jury is still out on whether those services are profitable. But if Congress is able to figure out a way soon to get the USPS back on its feet, it will open the doors for the postal service to catch up to the 21st-century society it serves.”
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-u-s-postal-service/11433/
punkin,
Why do you want to hinder the progress of humankind by loading the economy with waste, inefficiency and debt? It’s because you don’t understand economics and never will. You also apparently don’t understand finance despite allegedly making it your life’s work. Your employer clearly is prioritizing jobs over efficiency if they still pay you to do whatever Senior Financial Analyst job that doesn’t actually require an understanding of finance or more broadly, an understanding of anything.
Hmmm?
“Until 1971, mail delivery was handled by the Post Office Department, a Cabinet department in the federal government. Postal worker strikes prompted President Nixon to pass the Postal Reorganization Act in 1971, transforming it into the semi-independent agency we now know as the United States Postal Service. The USPS in its current form runs like a business, relies on postage for revenue and, for the most part, has not used taxpayer money since 1982, when postage stamps became “products” instead of forms of taxation. Taxpayer money is only used in some cases to pay for mailing voter materials to disabled and overseas Americans.”
And exactly how is the post office not efficient? From the looks of it, they seem to be one of the most efficient businesses in America. They are forced to deliver mail every single day and then you bi!ch that they can’t do it cheaper? You need to open up your eyes.
Ragnar says:
February 9, 2016 at 2:09 pm
punkin,
Why do you want to hinder the progress of humankind by loading the economy with waste, inefficiency and debt? It’s because you don’t understand economics and never will. You also apparently don’t understand finance despite allegedly making it your life’s work. Your employer clearly is prioritizing jobs over efficiency if they still pay you to do whatever Senior Financial Analyst job that doesn’t actually require an understanding of finance or more broadly, an understanding of anything.
80- Rags, what is efficient about eliminating the majority of jobs in the economic system in the name of profits? How the hell can you even call it an economic capitalist system when the majority of the population has no means to participate without a govt welfare check? What the hell is efficient about that? Oh the guy at the top is killing it profit wise? Oh great, let’s all jump for joy and try to eliminate some more jobs so that the few can even profit some more. What an awesome economic system. What A JOKE!!
Sleazy? It’s called capitalism. They are doing whatever they can to profit and you are sitting here bad mouthing them when you are the so called defender of capitalism.
Ragnar says:
February 9, 2016 at 2:03 pm
Speaking of mail fraud,
Bank of America just yesterday sent by UPS a brand new credit card including a letter that claimed that I had requested it, with instructions on how to activate it. Problem is I had never asked for any card – they were doing this as an advertisement, hoping I would bite, thinking my wife had arranged for it. What really happened was that my wife just the week before had asked our 2 current cards to raise our limit, at my request. Mostly because I was thinking about buying some gold coins in bulk and wanted to get 1% credit by putting it through by card. (Which I later found out that gold dealers won’t do anyway). But hey, sometimes we put big payments on our cards (before paying off that month) so raising the limit doesn’t hurt. I assume BoA got tipped off on this activity by Experian, and hoped to intercept that pass by pretending their card was the one I was looking for.
Sleazy.
Because….. votes.
grim says:
February 9, 2016 at 5:45 am
How are Hoboken and Jersey City still Abbott districts anyway?
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-02-09/obama-reaches-for-relevance-with-4-trillion-u-s-budget-plan
Speaking of Hoboken, a lot of the train tracks at the station were partially submerged in water the last two days. The river was almost level with the barrier wall at the beginning of the bike path and that fenced off area by the old section of the station was basically flooded.
That’s how real money is made in the stock market. The real money is made on buying the swings. Too bad most people sell during the bad times and buy during the good times, they just don’t understand how it works.
“David Samra, awarded for his stock-picking during and after the 2008 financial crisis, says he’s buying again.
Samra, who oversees about $20 billion for Artisan Partners, says now’s the time for a steady hand and no emotion as concern intensifies about the slowdown in China and the sliding price of oil. The winner of Morningstar Inc. international stock manager rankings in 2008 and 2013 says he’s sticking to his investment approach: finding undervalued shares with strong balance sheets.
“We welcome these types of markets,” Samra said in a phone interview from San Francisco on Monday. “We weren’t happy to see the potential social and economic disruption that happened during the financial crisis. It causes a lot of human misery. You’re not existentially happy about what’s going on. On the other hand, that turned out to be a market opportunity.””
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/the-20-billion-manager-who-won-after-the-crisis-is-buying-again
Pumpkin,
Why do you hate workers so much? Please use the most labor intensive method possible to communicate with us in the future, and spare no expense.
You are killing jobs by using a computer rather than hiring dozens of messenger boys to communicate your idiotic opinions, written with artisan-crafted fountain pens on handmade parchment .
By ANDY PUZDER
The evidence continues to roll in: Broad increases in the minimum wage destroy jobs and hurt the working-class Americans that they are supposed to help. The latest evidence is an announcement that Wal-Mart, America’s largest employer, will close more than 150 U.S. stores, a move that will affect 10,000 employees.
Fifteen years ago when our management team took over the financially distressed Hardee’s brand, we closed more than 400 underperforming restaurants. We made these decisions by asking this question: Given this store’s financial performance, will the company be more sound with it closed? Shutting down these unprofitable locations helped us nurse the company back to health—and create more permanent jobs.
Similarly, “financial performance” was the first factor Wal-Mart noted in its closure announcement. Having to pay increased wages obviously diminishes a business’s financial performance. Wal-Mart voluntarily raised its base wage to $9 an hour last April, then announced in November that this resulted in a 10% reduction in earnings per share for the third quarter. This year Wal-Mart will raise its base wage to $10 an hour and is forecasting as much as a 12% decline in earnings per share.
Every retailer has locations that are profitable, but only marginally. Increased labor costs can push these stores over the line and into the loss column. When that happens, companies that want to stay competitive will close them. That’s one of the reasons that substantially increasing the minimum wage poses real risks for working-class Americans.
This reality apparently came as a surprise to “Making Change at Wal-Mart,” a union-backed group that has heckled the retailer to raise its entry-level wage. After the closure announcement, the outfit warned in a news release that this “could very well be just the beginning” and that it sends “a chilling message to the company’s hardworking employees that they could be next.” Yet many of the job losses are the direct result, to borrow the outfit’s branding, of making change at Wal-Mart.
Let’s look at Oakland, Calif., where the minimum wage is $12.55. When Wal-Mart opened there in 2005, about 11,000 people applied for the 400 positions. Those jobs will soon be gone, as the Oakland store is on the closure list. While Wal-Mart declined to address the details of its decision, City Councilman Larry Reid told the San Francisco Chronicle that Oakland’s minimum wage “was one of the factors they considered in closing the store.”
Councilman Noel Gallo, who supported efforts to submit the minimum-wage increase to voters, bemoaned the closure, saying that “losing a Wal-Mart is a blow to the city of Oakland” and adding that “what Oakland needs more of is jobs.” One way to snag those jobs would be to make Oakland more hospitable to businesses that create them. Lowering the minimum wage would be a good start.
It’s harder to count the jobs that were never created in the first place because of the minimum wage. But here’s an anecdote: Wal-Mart also canceled plans to build two stores in Washington, D.C., where the minimum wage is $10.50 and rising to $11.50 in July. A November ballot initiative could bring it to $15.
Councilman Jack Evans, who sits on the district government’s finance committee, reported, according to the Washington Post, that in closed-door meetings Wal-Mart “cited the District’s rising minimum wage”—as well as proposals to force employers to provide paid family leave and a minimum number of hours for hourly employees—as a reason to pull out. “They were saying, ‘How are we going to run the three stores we have, let alone build two more?’ ” Mr. Evans said.
Mayor Muriel Bowser said she was “blood mad” about the store cancellations, but she shares the blame as a proponent of raising the minimum wage. Perhaps she understands this better than she lets on, as she has declined to endorse the proposed increase to $15.
In the face of increasing competition from online retailers such as Amazon, traditional stores like Wal-Mart are minimizing expenses to stay competitive. Substantial minimum-wage increases make the belt much tighter. But businesses that fail to adjust to a changing environment might cease to exist or shrink to mere shadows. This is a reality that progressive groups and legislators may choose to ignore, but businesses do so at their peril.
Jobs, salaries and benefits increase when businesses thrive. If you want to give working-class Americans a path to the middle class, adopt policies that free up the businesses who want to hire them. Otherwise, you’ve merely priced people out of a job.
As long as those artisan messenger boys are drinking my whiskey, I don’t care.
http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/10k-reports/fy2015.pdf
Congress must have forced the USPS to file financial statements. They are piling up losses and unfunded liabilities in the form of retirement healthcare liabilities.
But they are saved by the fact that they can issue debt straight to the Treasury Dept, and basically pretend that someone else (the US taxpayer) will pay for these retirees’ healthcare.
“Liquidity Concerns
The Postal Service is constrained by laws and regulations which restrict its revenue sources, and, as noted above, it has reached the maximum borrowing capacity under its statutory debt ceiling. Although cash balances have increased from 2014 amounts,
they remain insufficient to support an organization with approximately $74 billion in annual operating expenses. The Postal Service incurred a net loss of $5.1 billion for the year ended September 30, 2015, and has incurred cumulative net losses of $56.8 billion since 2007. As a result of these losses and its liquidity concerns, the Postal Service does not have sufficient cash balances to meet all of its existing legal obligations, pay down its debt and make all of the critical investments in its infrastructure that were deferred in recent years.”
Fight for $15…..because poor people need to eat less?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/10210327/McDouble-is-cheapest-and-most-nutritious-food-in-human-history.html
Stephen Dubner, who co-authored the best-selling book, hosted a debate on his blog after a reader suggested the McDouble packed a better nutritional punch for the penny than is often assumed.
The double cheeseburger provides 390 calories, 23 grams of protein – half a daily serving – seven per cent of daily fibre, 19 grams of fat and 20 per cent of daily calcium, all for between $1 and $2, or 65p and £1.30, The Times reported.
Kyle Smith, a New York Post columnist, threw his support behind the McDouble’s nutritional value for money.
“For the average poor person, it isn’t a great option to take a trip to the farmers market to puzzle over esoteric lefty-foodie codes”, Mr Smith wrote.
“Facts are facts – where else but McDonald’s can poor people obtain so many calories per dollar?”
Mr Dubner added: “The more I thought about the question, whether the McDouble is the cheapest, most bountiful, and nutritious food ever, the more I realised how you answer that question says a lot about how you see the world, not only our food system and the economics of it, but even social justice.”
A 2007 University of Washington survey found that while junk food costs as little as $1.76 per 1,000 calories, fresh vegetables and healthier foods can cost more than 10 times as much.
In the online debate, some farmers suggested the McDonalds burger deserved more credit for feeding the poor cheaply.
Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, said: “The biggest unreported story in the past three quarters of a century [is] this increase in availability of food for the common person.”
But Tom Philpott, a campaigning organic farmer from North Carolina, said there were many more nutritious ways of feeding people cheaply.
“You can get a pound of organic brown rice and a pound of red lentils for about £1.30 each”, Mr Philpott said.
“A serving of each of those things would be around 48 pence.
“In order to present to us all that burger, you’re talking about a vast army of working poor people.”
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Sweeney, Greenwald & Norcross Announce Joint Federal-State Effort for 15 Dollar Per Hour Minimum Wage http://senatorsweeney.com/press/sweeney-greenwald-norcross-announce-joint-federal-state-effort-for-15-dollar-per-hour-minimum-wage/ …
Rags, I’m all for technological progress. At the same time, what’s the point of having some super tech device in the future if no one can afford it? What is the purpose of tech if it puts the consumer in the position to have no means to purchase this new tech? You have to have a balance.
Maybe we are getting to the point where we need to have some new kind of economic system that makes up for the lack of demand in human labor. Everyone must some how have a stake in the economy for the system to work. If people don’t have money or a job, how can they participate in the economy? You can’t just replace a consumer with a machine and think everything will be okay. There are serious consequences on the economic system. How will this consumer have the means to consume if the machine took away the means “to consume”? Will the machine shi! out money so that the worker who lost his job can continue participating in the economy? That’s the big question you always miss with your obsession with efficiency. When you eliminate a job without replacing it, you just took away that consumers ability to participate in the economy. You mine as well shoot them in the head.
Ragnar says:
February 9, 2016 at 2:41 pm
Pumpkin,
Why do you hate workers so much? Please use the most labor intensive method possible to communicate with us in the future, and spare no expense.
You are killing jobs by using a computer rather than hiring dozens of messenger boys to communicate your idiotic opinions, written with artisan-crafted fountain pens on handmade parchment .
Why do you keep shooting your messenger boys in the head?
We are Japan.
For the first time ever, the governing agency and U.S. central bank is requiring banks to include, in a round of stress tests commencing this year, to prepare for the possibility of negatively yielding Treasury rates. A source familiar with the tests told CNBC.com that the scenario is purely hypothetical and not a forecast.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/09/from-zirp-to-nirp-whats-the-feds-next-move.html
Economic decisions like min wage are best left to localities and states. Benefits and burdens are borne by those who vote for it and are affected by it.
Closures and relocations, and higher costs, are well known to supporters of these measures. They choose them and that’s fine; I just don’t want them choosing for me.
Dumb question: what government or semi-government run organization is run profitably?
What your answer change if you don’t consider unfunded pension obligations?
Beueller, Beueller …and who names their child Ferris?
DIS reports earnings after the bell today. Twitter, Tesla, and Whole Foods after the close tomorrow. I think it should get interesting. Glad to see T and VZ selling off today. Just to show how overbought T and VZ are, consider this. IYZ is an all telecom ETF. Almost 25% of the portfolio is T and VZ, yet IYZ is headed down the tubes so much that even T and VZ can’t hold it up.
http://www.etfinvestmentoutlook.com/etf_holdings.php?s=IYZ
“The bureau reported the nation’s 65,040 postal clerks overall averaged $52,860,”
Not bad, considering the benefits. It’s a healthy job with little environmental risk and incredible job security. It really should be performed by those with disabilities.
You are not listening to me. We are heading towards a world where there will not be anywhere close to enough jobs, and under these conditions, capitalism no longer works. Not bashing capitalism, I’m just trying to make sense of how we can continue to use it if technology moves at the pace it does.
Technology has always created more jobs, but you think this will keep up? You are going to get to a point where a machine can do anything a human can do, but better. The only advantage the human will have is creativity. So where are all these people going to work if you have machines doing a better job? The reason technology has always increased jobs in the past 200 years is because of the nature of the application. They drastically increased production of menial labor. A machine that can pick cotton with such efficiency leads to more jobs being created by the increase in cotton produced. Industries adopted and created many new jobs as an offset to the increase in production of cotton. We are passed that. Menial jobs have almost all been eliminated. So new technology is not really creating new jobs in the sense that it was in the past.
The new machines are taking higher and higher level jobs that don’t lead to the creation of new jobs and that’s a fact. Demand for human capital has been going down, not up. So what happens when get to the point that is fast approaching where we don’t need 5 billion people to be workers, the machines simply do it better. How long before we don’t need accountants? How long before we don’t need doctors? How long before we don’t need lawyers? There will be programmed machines for all of this that will do it for cheaper and better.
So how do we keep the economy going with most humans beat by better machines for jobs? The machines can do it better and cheaper, so now the human is out of the job. Without a job, how do you participate in a capitalist economic system? How do you signal demand to businesses if you don’t have money to purchase products?
Ragnar says:
February 9, 2016 at 3:36 pm
Why do you keep shooting your messenger boys in the head?
How many people lost it in the post office and went postal? Great job.
Libturd says:
February 9, 2016 at 3:55 pm
“The bureau reported the nation’s 65,040 postal clerks overall averaged $52,860,”
Not bad, considering the benefits. It’s a healthy job with little environmental risk and incredible job security. It really should be performed by those with disabilities.
So you think if they were paid more they wouldn’t go postal?
re # 94 – “purely hypothetical” Sure it is Sub-Zero is the case for nearly 1/4 of the worlds GDP today.
Japan EU, Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden all have negative rates, about 23.1% of Worldwide GDP.
The ECB and BOJ together are responsible for around 21% of global GDP. Swiss, Swedish and Danish GDP add up to less than 2.5% of the global total.
Must be nice to get laid and paid…..
American Pharoah’s Second Life as a $200k-a-Night Stud
Herein lurks tension and peril. When one 1,300-pound animal climbs on top of another, both sacrifice their natural sure-footedness for about 20 seconds of knee-buckling magic. Necks can be bitten, causing legs to kick and prompting centers of gravity to shift.
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-american-pharoah-at-stud/
re # 100 – so why aren’t you working there Cliff Claven?
How many private businesses and industries would go under if the govt was not run this way? The waste of the govt is a direct result of the private sector. They are one in the same. All a part of the same economic system. So the govt tightens its’ belt, and runs on no debt; how many private businesses will go under due to the tightening of the belt? The govt’s money is the private sector’s money. The govt doesn’t take your money and put it in bank, it’s transferred immediately back into the economy. The banks are the ones in charge of the money and there is no such thing as a govt bank. Only thing govt can do is make laws that people must follow, that’s why you have to be careful with so much private money going to govt elections and politicians. They then shape the laws for themselves, which is what you all complain about. So why not vote Bernie or trump?
FKA 2010 Buyer says:
February 9, 2016 at 3:55 pm
Dumb question: what government or semi-government run organization is run profitably?
What your answer change if you don’t consider unfunded pension obligations?
Beueller, Beueller …and who names their child Ferris?
re # 103 – TAPIT made $35 million in stud fees last year, 135 times last year alone, has been at it for a decade and is good for another decade. He might beat Wilt the Stilts record.
They should change the name from “minimum wage” to “child wage” just so we’re clear on what it was and what it should be. Let each state raise it or lower it to whatever level they want, but it’s all free market for adult wages, 18 and older. If you’re 25 and you really want a non-management career at McDonald’s then go ahead, undercut the 16 year old and take his job.
No, nothing to do with pay. The nature of the job does it. It’s repetitive and your job never ends. Get rid of mail today, and it comes back again tomorrow. Then you get to walk in the same steps in the snow, over and over again. Top it off, have to go out rain, snow, or heat wave. You know how cold their fingers must be in 15 degree weather (they can’t have gloves cover the tip of their fingers because they need to finger the mail)?
I would never want that job. Appreciate their hard work.
Libturd says:
February 9, 2016 at 4:05 pm
So you think if they were paid more they wouldn’t go postal?
“Dumb question: what government or semi-government run organization is run profitably?’
Answer: pretty much every municipal court in New Jersey.
No need for daily mail, every other day is fine, optimize the routes, shut down branches as mail volume has been reduced. If I want mail on an off day I can go to the PO and pick it up. In the 21st century the need for mail is greatly reduced and instead of pretending that it isn’t the case the Postal service needs to adapt and need to adopt a business model that makes sense. Parcel delivery is an area that is in great demand, and what has happened is that logistics companies have moved to use the postal service as a last mile provider which cannot be good for the bottom line.
Couple years old, but it’s good. Maybe does a better job of explaining it how govt and private sector are one in the same.
“Productivity increases have meant that, since the early 20th century, the private sector alone has been unable to generate sufficient opportunities for employment to hire everyone who is willing to work–despite our ability to produce plenty of output for them. Capitalism can do a decent job in terms of allocating resources, creating new technologies, developing innovative products, et cetera (not that it always does, of course, but that’s a different discussion). But what it is incapable of doing is generating sufficient employment for all those willing to work. It will do so in spurts, but that’s it. We are just too damn productive which means that we don’t need to hire everyone who wants a job in order to create sufficient output for them. This is the key issue we face.
The severity of this problem has been greatly diminished by the fact that WWII, which effectively ended the Great Depression (and left us with far more debt that we have today, incidentally), led to growth in the government sector that only slightly reversed itself once peace came. This created an automatic counterbalance to the fluctuations in investment that I am saying are so important. Consider the following: when the economy slumps, this lowers tax revenues (because people have less money) and raises, without any legislation being necessary, government spending (because, with the lower level of economic activity, more people qualify for unemployment and income assistance). Since investment is a major driver of the business cycle, look at what happens:
fall in investment => fall in GDP => increase in government spending
The last entry at least partially compensates for the first, which makes recessions less severe and lengthy. This has dampened, if not eliminated, the effect of the private sector’s instability since WWII. And it works in reverse, too:
rise in investment => rise in GDP => decrease in government spending
Hence, as the economy grows, so the government budget tends toward balance (as it did at the end of our longest peacetime expansion in the 1990s).
But, and this is terribly important for today, the line of causation does not run in the opposite direction!!! It is not true that lowering government spending has a tendency to increase investment. Unfortunately, this appears to be the basis of a great deal of policy in Washington today (assuming there is any economic logic to it at all). Taking discretionary action to cut spending now will be an absolute disaster. We haven’t even started doing that with any gusto yet, and look at the results from 2011Q1. And, just today, President Obama signed a bill that cut $38 billion from the government budget, while the house passed one reducing government spending by $6.2 trillion over the next decade. This is absolute insanity.
What do these people think is going to happen? Something that appears to be completely lost in this discussion is that every cut in government spending represents a reduction in someone’s income. It has the same effect as an increase in taxes. How is this going to excite entrepreneurs about investing? Interest rates are already ridiculously low and workers come at a bargain-basement price (as they always do when unemployment is high). And yet look at investment over the past few years (even before the run up in oil and commodity prices had hit epidemic levels):”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2011/04/29/why-the-private-sector-needs-the-government-to-spend-money/#53dd6d1413aa
DIS beats on earnings, stock dives. DIS just broke below 90 this minute, trading at 89.76-89.90 right now.
Rags, hope you pay attention to this part. Not everyone can have a job, no matter how hard they work.
“Capitalism can do a decent job in terms of allocating resources, creating new technologies, developing innovative products, et cetera (not that it always does, of course, but that’s a different discussion). But what it is incapable of doing is generating sufficient employment for all those willing to work. It will do so in spurts, but that’s it. We are just too damn productive which means that we don’t need to hire everyone who wants a job in order to create sufficient output for them. This is the key issue we face.”
Over a million shares of DIS dumped since 4:20, 88.30 right now. I told you I wouldn’t touch it, Nom. But then again, I rare buy anything unless it’s 20+ days from earnings.
Bingo, wish people could understand this.
“What do these people think is going to happen? Something that appears to be completely lost in this discussion is that every cut in government spending represents a reduction in someone’s income. It has the same effect as an increase in taxes. How is this going to excite entrepreneurs about investing? Interest rates are already ridiculously low and workers come at a bargain-basement price (as they always do when unemployment is high). And yet look at investment over the past few years (even before the run up in oil and commodity prices had hit epidemic levels):”
Looking forward to weekly tractor production reports from the motherland.
http://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson-2/#calibre_link-31
“Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. ”
…
“The same reasoning applies to civilian government officials whenever they are retained in excessive numbers and do not perform services for the community reasonably equivalent to the remuneration they receive. Yet whenever any effort is made to cut down the number of unnecessary officeholders the cry is certain to be raised that this action is “deflationary.” Would you remove the “purchasing power” from these officials? Would you injure the landlords and tradesmen who depend on that purchasing power? You are simply cutting down “the national income” and helping to bring about or intensify a depression.
Once again the fallacy comes from looking at the effects of this action only on the dismissed officeholders themselves and on the particular tradesmen who depend upon them. Once again it is forgotten that, if these bureaucrats are not retained in office, the taxpayers will be permitted to keep the money that was formerly taken from them for the support of the bureaucrats. Once again it is forgotten that the taxpayers’ income and purchasing power go up by at least as much as the income and purchasing power of the former officeholders go down. If the particular shopkeepers who formerly got the business of these bureaucrats lose trade, other shopkeepers elsewhere gain at least as much. Washington is less prosperous, and can, perhaps, support fewer stores; but other towns can support more.
Once again, however, the matter does not end there. The country is not merely as well off without the superfluous officeholders as it would have been had it retained them. It is much better off. For the officeholders must now seek private jobs or set up private businesses. And the added purchasing power of the taxpayers, as we noted in the case of the soldiers, will encourage this. But the officeholders can take private jobs only by supplying equivalent services to those who provide the jobs—or, rather, to the customers of the employers who provide the jobs. Instead of being parasites, they become productive men and women.”
Rags,
I had never heard of Hazlitt until just now. Thanks so much, I will be reading the whole thing, in fact I am right now.
Pissed-off passenger urinates on fellow flier
A pissed-off passenger who was not allowed to smoke or drink alcohol aboard a Paris-bound plane took out his frustrations on a fellow flier by urinating on him.
The mile-high waterworks forced the Air Meditarranee flight from Algiers to divert to Lyon when flight attendants pinned the shirtless goon after a free-for-all, the MailOnline reported.
Another man involved in the melee also was removed from the Airbus A321 at Lyon, where the charter flight was delayed for about three hours.
The airline, based in Toulouse, uses Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris as its hub for domestic flights and international routes to the Canary Islands, Greece and Lebanon, among other destinations.
The pee-brain isn’t the first flier to relieve himself outside of an airplane bathroom.
In September, a man was arrested at Portland International Airport in Oregon after he allegedly urinated on fellow passengers on a JetBlue flight from Alaska.
The 27-year-old man, who had been sleeping for most of the flight, stood up and began peeing through the space between the seats in front of him.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/bernie-sanders-regular-luxurious-dscc-fundraising-retreats
More proof that nbc is no less faux than faux news.
Bernie takes $7,500 and Hillary takes 250 million. And nbc finds this as a knock on the Bern. It’s embarrassing that this is the best they can do! It sure speaks to the machine that Hillary represents.
[114] expat
Yeah, thought of your comment. Thankfully I did not put out any orders. I think outs an overreaction to the CBS number. I might nibble here but have to drill down a bit more.
Yes, this is based on primitive technology. Sooner or later, the tech will do a better and cheaper job than any human ever could. That’s a fact. It’s a fallacy to believe that tech won’t eventually eliminate the need for human labor. You will have machines fixing machines. You think there will be human mechanics working on cars? You will bring your car to a lift that will diagnose and fix any problem it finds with your car. Only thing left for humans is creativity.
“Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. ”
You don’t have to worry about the cities. The good ones will fill up and thrive while the bad ones will empty out. Guess where they’ll empty out to? You’ll know the poor have been sent to your suburb when you start seeing 8 cars parked on the lawn of neighboring houses.
[121] Nom – only gamblers buy close to earnings unless it’s a utility stock. Here’s another thing you might see play out tomorrow: Massive drop on the open (market makers taking out all the stop orders) and then the stock climbs until about 10:00-10:30AM, then who knows after that. In fact, if I have a stock that’s already close to a stop in the session prior to announcement, I’ll often cancel the stop-loss order completely, let the drama play out for the next trading session and then I’ll do one of two things by the close: 1. Sell it as best I can if it stays below my stop price for most of the day or 2. Put my exact stop back in after the drama is done if it is above my stop.
Yeah, thought of your comment. Thankfully I did not put out any orders. I think outs an overreaction to the CBS number. I might nibble here but have to drill down a bit more.
[42] Then there’s the criminal stuff too…
Sorry Hillary, your face is just too hateable for you to be president, especially given that your personality, ideas, and cankles are terrible too.
Trump already the projected winner
Christie at the bottom of the 3 governors – time to drop out.
Sanders projected winner for dems.
Fuk de establishment.
Bloomberg is salivating.
Bloomy would split the democratic vote.
rags (25)-
People ignore Stockman at their own peril. He has been eerily correct for over a decade.
I’ll ride Stockman’s predictions until he gets one wrong.
Also love Stockman because he didn’t guzzle the Reagan koolaid and quit when Reagan wouldn’t self-discipline.
I don’t think Bloomberg has the same name appeal outside of New York. His last term as mayor was pretty deplorable. Plus, Bloomberg pretty much represents the same thing Clinton does. The anti-Wall Street message will work just the same.
Feeling the Bern?
Hope and Change … Err Cope and the Same will vote for Bernie?
Economics in One Lesson should not only be required reading it should be re-read every few years.
The Original NJ ExPat says:
February 9, 2016 at 5:00 pm
Rags,
I had never heard of Hazlitt until just now. Thanks so much, I will be reading the whole thing, in fact I am right now.
Geezus the electoral process is a going to be innnnnteresting.
“I will be the greatest jobs president that God has ever created,”- Trump
[136] joyce – I can now concur. It’s amazing that it was written in 1946 is *so* applicable right now. I feel like I got smarter today, like when Nom taught me Occam’s razor.
Economics in One Lesson should not only be required reading it should be re-read every few years.
[131] I concur. Coasts get divided and it’s simple math to figure out how fly-over country would vote given the choice of:
1. Very rich New Yorker, and very white, possibly a Christian.
2. Extremely rich New Yorker, but a Jew.
3. Old poor New York Jew who now lives in Vermont.
Bloomy would split the democratic vote.
Splat,
Stockman’s last book is the most frightening I’ve read in recent years.
Hazlitt’s book was one of the early ones that got me interested in economics. A real gem that nearly everyone can understand. Much more directly relatable to everyday issues than the more theoretical tomes from Menger and von Mises that I read afterward.
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