Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Mark Green: Do You Deny The Existence of Gene Therapy?

Conservative Wisconsin Republican Congressman Mark Green is running for governor on an anti-stem cell platform.

The devout people I know believe that medical breakthroughs in science are a gift from their god. I am not going to argue theology.

No matter where it came from it is a gift. And it took dedicated researchers, great public institutions, a government commitment, and a belief in the scientific method.

What do you have to say Mark Green?

Scientists use gene therapy to destroy tumours

For the first time scientists have destroyed cancer using genetically-engineered cells from a person's own blood.

Researchers took normal cells from the immune system and altered them so they would hone in on cancer.

After giving them to two men who were dying of skin cancer, they found their tumours began to shrink.

Two years on both men are still cancer-free...

I wonder if Green was diagnosed with Melanoma, the most aggressive skin cancer, if he would ask for this treatment and support the research?

Update 7:57 am: In a comment below, Chris correctly notes the distinction between embryonic stem cell research and gene therapy using the individual's own cells.  If I have not been clear, let me restate that I challenge Mark Green to prove he supports cell therapy research and development in that field.  His legislative record demonstrates a disregard for:

dedicated researchers, great public institutions, a government commitment, and a belief in the scientific method.

Those are critical elements common to work in both fields which Green has universally rejected. The break though in gene therapy would not have come without government support.

Lueders: "wild boars eat your face"

Bill Lueders, the Isthmus writer, with whom I have had more than one tense moment, wins top honors and gets off the best one-liner of the political season.  With all due respect to Xoff, this will be tough to beat:

AG Candidates Size Each Other Up. Their Conclusion: You Suck

...If you should ever be given a choice between watching Paul Bucher and J.B. Van Hollen debate each other, or having wild boars eat your face, go with the boars. They are gentler and less disagreeable...

Also, Bill gives a "fun fact" about each candidate.  Just when you thought there could be no more JM jokes:

Paul Bucher
Age: 51
Fun fact: Married to Jessica McBride, the Milwaukee radio host and blogger.

Frank Lasee Hates Wisconsin

Frank Lasee, who represents Wisconsin's Second Assembly District hates his state. No member of the legislature has bashed Wisconsin as much as Lassee.  Before we look at Lassee's latest rant, lets look at Wisconsin as others see us.

• The Milliken Institute which ranks the cost of doing business in each state ranks Wisconsin 21st. (Highest is the worst.) They measure the cost of wages, taxes, electricity, and real estate. We are closer to 43th than to tenth.
• The Council on State Taxation in its 2005 report ranked us 30th on business taxes as a percentage of private-sector Gross State Product (4.5%). Important note: Wyoming was the worst at 9.5%.
• The Beacon Hill Institute ranked Wisconsin 16th (#1 is the best) overall in its State Competitiveness Index, 2005

So along comes Lasee trumpeting the Forbes Magazine Best State For Business Ranking. Lasee says:

...Forbes Magazine, an international business publication, released its first “Best States for Business” study last week (access it here). Not surprisingly, Wisconsin ranked near the bottom of the list. We were 39th overall among the 50 states...

... Wisconsin underperformed badly in nearly every category. We ranked 42nd for regulatory environment, 39th for economic climate, 38th for growth prospects, 30th for labor, and 27th for business costs...

Lasee is a traitor to Wisconsin, which he calls his home:

• He never trumpets the far more credible studies noted above which rank Wisconsin highly.
• He never challenges the biases and prejudices in the Forbes Study (Low environmental regulations receive a higher score. Corporate lawyers view of tort laws determines 'business friendly.')
• He never looks at the obvious contradictions: Forbes ranked Wyoming as the best state for business costs, while the Council on State Taxation said it was the worst.
• Economic climate is a measurement of tax giveaways to business!

Lasee never defends Wisconsin when we are trashed by these highly biased surveys.  Lasee even ridicules our quality of life ranking, a lofty 6th place:

Our quality of life was ranked 6th in the nation. Had this category been removed we would have been even lower on the list.

At the time I am writing this post, Forbes is conducting an online poll of its readers as to which factors they consider the most important.  Even among Forbes' prejudiced readers, the survey tonight shows that when responding to: What’s most important when considering relocating a business?

Quality of life(16%) beats out all categories except for business cost (19%)

Lasee is either working for Illinois or Iowa; Minnesota wants no part of him.

Tom Reynolds, Xoff, and The Whole Mishpoche*

Last week Wisconsin State Senator Tom Reynolds imploded, cowardly running from a public debate .

Today Xoff launched a clever post catching the very essence of the crusader against both HomoFascism and IslamoFacism. Bill captured a summary of all the other lads and lasses who took up the challenge of exposing the self-righteous Reynolds who asks prospective employees questions usually reserved for lecherous internet chat sessions:

Reynold's bomb-throwing Fruitcake Brigade

State Sen. Tom Reynolds and his band of merry henchmen continue to spread wild charges about everyone in Wauwatosa in hopes of confusing and obscuring the real issue in Reynolds' reelection campaign.

Reynolds and his brain trust -- to use the term very loosely -- would like it to be a referendum on IslamoFascism in Wauwatosa, or something of the sort. But the questions before the voters in November are simple ones:

Does Tom Reynolds deserve to be reelected? Is he competent to serve? Does he represent your opinions?

There is a lot of evidence to the contrary, some of which is listed by Carrie Lynch at What's Left. She wonders whether he is even competent to vote, let alone hold office.

Gretchen Schuldt wishes he would just go away.

A lot of reasonable conservatives do, too.

Reynolds is an embarrassment to the Republican Party and the conservative movement in Wisconsin. Even Republican radio host Charlie Sykes has publicly taken him to task for his association with anti-Catholic bigots.

* family (from Yiddish משפּחה mishpokhe)

Another Fraudulent Study: Trashing Wisconsin Schools

Xoff, Rating the raters: Fordham gets a D and In Effect, The Misapplication of State Standards smothered another bogus right wing 'study.'  The Fordham Foundation trashed Wisconsin education.

As Seth Zlotocha reports:

Wisconsin was given a D- in the Fordham study.

Yet, when we take a look at the NAEP reports (here, here, and here) on student performance for 2005, Wisconsin ranks higher than all of the nine states listed above except Massachusetts (Wisconsin is tied with Virginia for second place, and, just as a note, NY doesn't participate in the NAEP analyses).

So while the Fordham study alleges Wisconsin has low expectations because of its broadly written standards, the NAEP reports show the Badger State has far better student performance than the states Fordham found to have high expectations.

Something's not right there -- and by something I mean the Fordham study.

Most troubling, as Bill Christofferson notes:

Woe is us! Today's topline Journal Sentinel story says Wisconsin schools get a bad grade, a D:

The report being released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington uses harsh terms in critiquing the standards that are intended to guide instruction in Wisconsin schools.

Aside from a one liner, "Fordham is politically conservative," the story gives no background on the group.

Bill alludes to a much more serious problem. A responsible newspaper like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel accepts this stuff and publishes it without any hint that it is so biased, lame and distorted. The MJS headline says it all: State lags in learning standards. The headline should read: Right Wing Pundits Smear Wisconsin Education.

A Study You Can Trust

As the Labor day weekend approaches, we get this report from the Economic Policy Institute:

Wealth inequality is vast and growing

As the figure indicates, wealth inequality has not only persisted, but also grown much larger over time. The richest 1% of wealth holders had 125 times the wealth of the typical household in 1962; by 2004 they had 190 times as much or $14.8 million in wealth for the upper 1% compared to just $82,000 for the household in the middle fifth of wealth.

For those depressed by the news, there is this burnt potato morsel to feast on:

Poverty rate unchanged at 12.6 percent

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's poverty rate was essentially unchanged last year, the first year it hasn't increased since before President Bush took office.

The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that 37 million Americans were living under the poverty line last year -- about 12.6 percent of the population. That's down from 12.7 percent in 2004, but census officials said the change was statistically insignificant...

...However, the number of people without health insurance increased to 46.6 million in 2005. About 45.3 million people were without insurance the year before.

The last decline in the poverty rate was in 2000, during the Clinton administration, when it dropped to 11.3 percent.

(yes, my emphasis)

The Big Lie: "Tax Cuts Created Irish Economic Success"

I've read many stories about the success of the Irish economy since they cut taxes over twenty years ago.  The party line is that the Irish reduced taxes, which boosted private investment, which resulted in a booming economy.

Every time I read these articles, mostly from right wing commentators, something did not ring true. The thesis violated every study and conclusion about what happens when governments try to induce private investment with tax cuts and tax breaks. (It is government spending on public infrastructure that primes the pump for private investment but that is for another day.)

Not knowing the answer, I remained silent.

I am silent no more.

Last week The New Yorker had the story.  The magazine that provides the astute commentary of Henrick Hertzberg and the timely and accurate revelations of Seymour Hersh, published The Risk Pool, by Malcolm Gladwell:

The key to understanding the pension business is something called the “dependency ratio,” and dependency ratios are best understood in the context of countries. In the past two decades, for instance, Ireland has gone from being one of the most economically backward countries in Western Europe to being one of the strongest: its growth rate has been roughly double that of the rest of Europe. There is no shortage of conventional explanations. Ireland joined the European Union. It opened up its markets. It invested well in education and economic infrastructure. It’s a politically stable country with a sophisticated, mobile workforce.

But, as the Harvard economists David Bloom and David Canning suggest in their study of the “Celtic Tiger,” of greater importance may have been a singular demographic fact. In 1979, restrictions on contraception that had been in place since Ireland’s founding were lifted, and the birth rate began to fall. In 1970, the average Irishwoman had 3.9 children. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, that number was less than two. As a result, when the Irish children born in the nineteen-sixties hit the workforce, there weren’t a lot of children in the generation just behind them. Ireland was suddenly free of the enormous social cost of supporting and educating and caring for a large dependent population. It was like a family of four in which, all of a sudden, the elder child is old enough to take care of her little brother and the mother can rejoin the workforce. Overnight, that family doubles its number of breadwinners and becomes much better off.

This relation between the number of people who aren’t of working age and the number of people who are is captured in the dependency ratio. In Ireland during the sixties, when contraception was illegal, there were ten people who were too old or too young to work for every fourteen people in a position to earn a paycheck. That meant that the country was spending a large percentage of its resources on caring for the young and the old. Last year, Ireland’s dependency ratio hit an all-time low: for every ten dependents, it had twenty-two people of working age. That change coincides precisely with the country’s extraordinary economic surge.(emphasis added)

By the way, the main focus of the Gladwell article is to show why Walter Reuther was correct fifty years ago, and America's corporate leaders were wrong in setting up the now-failing pension plans.

Green Deceives by Omission and Misses the Point

Last week, WaxingAmerica dismantled the bogus nonsense about a Honda plant coming to Wisconsin: WMC Blows Honda Deal; Blames Rep. John Lehman. (Wednesday, August 23, 2006) 

Monday, August 28, 2006, Republican candidate for governor Mark Green perpetrated the fairy tale: Green Unveils Sweeping Plan to Create Good Jobs with Good Wages to “Keep Our Kids in Wisconsin”:

HONDA: GREEN SUPPORTS CORPORATE TAX GIVE AWAYS

Indiana recently made a similar transition and credited the move with helping to land 2,000 manufacturing jobs at a new Honda Motor Company assembly plant - a plant that Green said he would have “fought to bring to Wisconsin.”

Facts:

• But as Tom Daykin reported on June 17, 2006, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

  ...Thomas Klier, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said Wisconsin's chances of landing the Honda plant are "close to nil."...

  ...Honda generally wants its assembly plants to be within 60 miles of its engine plant, said Klier, who has studied how automakers locate their manufacturing operations.

  Given that tight radius, Klier expects the new Honda assembly plant to be built in either Ohio or Indiana.

• From the Fort Worth newspaper:  Indiana offered $141.5 million in incentives to the company, which included tax credits and abatements, training assistance and a promise to expedite a long-sought interchange upgrade at U.S. 421 onto Interstate 74, state officials said.

Green fails to disclose the cost to Indiana taxpayers, and the fact that Wisconsin's distance from the existing Ohio engine plant rules us out of any serious consideration.

GREEN SUPPORTS ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION:

This kind of deception by omission, this failure to fully disclose, is repeated in another section of the press release:

Other parts of Green's plan include tax relief, incentives for investing in new companies and reforms to Wisconsin's regulatory and legal systems.

Green fails to disclose that when he speaks of 'reforms' to Wisconsin's regulatory system, that he is talking about increasing Wisconsin water and air pollution.  He specifically wants to resurrect failed legislation to cut back on state laws that control industrial air emissions and water pollution.

GREEN: TAX THE MIDDLE CLASS

Finally Green repeats the old homily about Wisconsin being a high tax state:

Green pointed to statistics showing Wisconsin to have one of the highest tax burdens in the country, wages 3 percent below the national average...

It is well documented that because Wisconsin is a progressive state with some semblance of fairness in its tax system, the state relies on taxes more than fees when compared to other states.  Wisconsin could 'lower' its taxes and join other states in moving cost to special fees.  Of course, these fees shift the cost from the the rich to the poor.  When combined, taxes and fees in Wisconsin put us in the midpoint when compared to other states and put us in line with our incomes.

Time for the myth busters with a good dose of reality:

• Wisconsin relies more on taxes because it tries to avoid regressive user fees. When taxes and fees are combined Wisconsin is just about in the middle.
• Of the 50 states Wisconsin is 15th in terms of revenue per capita and 19th in terms of expenditures per capita. U.S. Census Bureau. 
• "According to UW-Madison economist Andrew Reschovsky, who actually completed a formal analysis of the Wisconsin situation, our state ranks 23rd in the nation in terms of revenue collections in relation to personal income." (from In Effect)

Crime in Madison: Better or Worse? Worse.

A few weeks ago, Brenda Konkel argued that crime in Madison is not any higher than it was in 1991. She took the 1991 and 2005 data and asserted:

In the past 15 years we find these relevant statistics:

In 1991 there were 15, 053 Part One Criminal Offenses (Homicide, Forcible Rape, Aggravated Battery, Robbery, Motor Vehicle Theft, Larceny, Arson and Other Assaults including Simple Assaults). That was 7769.9 crimes per 100,000 people. ...

As anyone who read Freakonomics knows, as anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, as anyone who has read crime statistics since the 1960's knows, the most determinative factor in crime rates is demographics.  The greater the population between the late teens and early thirties, the higher the crime rate.  After that, poverty and unemployment will explain a lot.  Then comes local strategies designed to prevent crime.

Here are some things to think about when reviewing crime data:

• When law enforcement is more effective and commits to cracking down, crime rates actually increase.  That is because, confident that the police are doing something, victims are reporting more crime.
• In communities like Madison, rape will appear to be relatively high compared to comparable sized cities.  That is because the support services for victims is superior to most other communities and so rape is more likely to be reported.
• Using 1991 for baseline data is using the most misleading year.  1991 was the peak of crime in the United States, Wisconsin, Madison and almost every other community since data collection and reporting were unified in 1984. (That is why the claim that Guiliani was effective in NYC is nonsense.  Every large US city experienced the same declines.)
• A city like Madison may be making inroads in crime fighting, but that may be undone if the demographics change.
• In the 1990's, black gangs trying to take control of the Madison market were responsible for most of the hard drug trafficking.  Consequently they showed up disproportionally in arrest statistics.  This is a hard reality for liberals, especially whites, to swallow.  There are two ways of making this problem go away.  One is to ignore it and stop the arrests. (Yeah, that really solves the problem.)  The other is to deal with the fundamental nature of the market place and reduce the number of young black men that see this as the most rational means of economic gain and to discourage the participation of buyers.
• If a community has an influx of young men living in poverty, that may be a greater determinative in crime rates than anything else.
• Annexations and municipal mergers will have an impact on crime rates.
• The type of violent crime makes a difference. When the victim and assailant do not know one another, the danger to the community is greater. As the Wisconsin State Journal noted on Sunday, UW, Others Act in Wake of Muggings  :

The pattern of attacks on students is part of a larger trend in increased crime citywide. For the first six months of this year, Madison saw a 76 percent rise in robberies of all kinds compared with the same period in 2005.

• I do not have the access right now to present a comparison to the data that Brenda Konkel relies on which would be Madison, U.S., and Wisconsin figures for all violent crimes against persons and property but I can assure you that what it shows is that:
  • all three have declined since 1991.
  • that Madison has declined at the least rapid rate.
  • that Madison, for the first time in history, will have a rate that approached or exceeds the national rate.
• Here is a chart of one kind of crime (violence against persons, but not property through 2004) that makes two points: you have to look over a long period of time; you have to look at trends.

New Jersey To Study School Funding; PA To Follow

New Jersey:

Panel eyes how states fund education

The special legislative committee considering how to revamp New Jersey public school funding will start by looking at how other states pay to educate children. The panel hopes to learn what works best elsewhere as it develops ideas for reducing New Jersey's heavy reliance on property taxes.

The school funding committee is among four formed by the Legislature to recommend ways to cut New Jersey's highest-in-the-nation property taxes.

New Jersey public schools are largely funded through property taxes, which have increased about 7 percent annually in recent years. About 55 percent of property tax money goes to schools, and about $10 billion of the $30 billion spent every year by the state goes toward school operations.

The average New Jersey property owner now pays about $6,000 a year, or twice the national average, and Gov. Jon S. Corzine wants to cut property tax growth by 20 percent by 2010.

The school committee has until Nov. 15 to submit recommendations. It plans to delve into state funding for the poorest city schools, special education expenses, superintendent salaries and making annual school taxes more predictable.

I am curious to see if New Jersey, as a Blue state, looks at the income tax or the sales tax.  Both are more progressive than the property tax, so long as there are sales tax exemptions for shelter, food and health care.

Meanwhile, nearby Pennsylvania:

School funding system critiqued by time-honored education expert

For years, Ron Cowell has been on the public circuit connecting the dots between the high property taxes homeowners pay and the way Pennsylvania finances public education.

"The property tax problem is really a symptom of the ineffective school funding system," he said in an interview last week. "When the state is cheap, there's more reliance on property taxes."

...Cowell's premise is that a rationale funding system wouldn't have disparities in what schools spend per student on education and would steer state money to the poorer school districts more effectively, provide predictable levels of aid and count student enrollment from the start as a factor in distributing aid...

...He attaches importance to a new law directing the state education board to conduct a "costing-out" study to determine how much it costs to educate a student to meet Pennsylvania's academic standards, no matter what school he or she attends.

The study will provide concrete information that should compel lawmakers to respond, says Cowell. The education board is expected to produce an interim report that will be out in time to influence the 2007-08 budget debate

Some people understand that the wealth of a community and education expeditures cannot be linked.