Local Government Financing Shortfalls

 My letter to the local public media news publishers abridged@kvie.org

Hello,

I read your story about the financial troubles local governments have been facing lately. You have a few significant omissions. 

For example, there's a loophole in Prop 13 for commercial property that costs the state an estimated $12 billion annually. Prop 15 was narrowly defeated when it attempted to close the loophole. Did local politicians lobby for passage? Not that I could detect.

Then there's all the land speculation that could have served the public, but largely ends up in private coffers. 

Speculators bought, or more likely optioned, North Natomas farmland for roughly $2K per acre. It was cheap because it was 20' underwater ag land surrounded by weak levees. It was so unsuited for development that a federal grant to expand capacity included a $6 million penalty if local governments used that capacity to serve the North Natomas development.

The speculators went all the way to then-vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush and got that prohibitive, up-front penalty transformed into a pay-as-you-develop fee...oh yes, and they got $43 million to improve the levees to pre-Katrina standards.

After getting the entitlements to develop, they sold those acres to builders. Winncrest homes bought at $200K / acre. If your calculator isn't handy, that's a 10,000% (gross) profit...and I promise you that's after tax if they exchange out of the purchase.

Germany requires developers to sell outlying ag land to the local government at the ag land price, then repurchase it at the development land price. All that egregious profit inures to public benefit. And they have terrific benefits, including single-payer healthcare, excellent infrastructure, and free college tuition. The arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the National Endowment for the Arts for the US of A.

Finally, you didn't mention that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme. Outlying development is roughly twice as expensive to maintain as infill. So has that stopped the locals from approving more and more edge-city development? Nope.

All you're doing is documenting the fact that those maintenance costs are finally catching up to the locals. 

--Yours truly,

--Mark Dempsey

The destination of prosperity

From a tweet by Rutger Bregman:

Wrote this 12 years ago, in Utopia for Realists. I didn't realize at the time how soon this scenario could play out: 'For us today, it is still difficult to imagine a future society in which paid labor is not the be all and end all of our existence. But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change. In the 1950s we couldn't conceive that the advent of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and, above all, washing machines would help prompt women to enter the workplace in record numbers, and yet they did. 

Nevertheless, it is not technology itself that determines the course of history. In the end, it is we humans who decide how we want to shape our destiny. The scenario of radical inequality that is taking shape in the U.S. is not our only option. The alternative is that at some point during this century, we reject the dogma that you have to work for a living. The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. If we want to hold onto the blessings of technology, ultimately there's only one choice left, and that's redistribution. Massive redistribution. 

Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots. As far back as the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when everybody would benefit from intelligent machines that were "the property of all." Technological progress may make a society more prosperous in aggregate, but there's no economic law that says everyone will benefit. 

Not long ago, the French economist Thomas Piketty had people up in arms with his contention that if we continue down our current path we'll soon find ourselves back in the rentier society of the Gilded Age. People who owned capital (stocks, houses, machines) enjoyed a much higher standard of living than folks who merely worked hard. For hundreds of years the return on capital was 4–5%, while annual economic growth lagged behind at under 2%. Barring a resurgence of strong, inclusive growth (rather unlikely), high taxation on capital (equally improbable), or World War III (let's hope not), inequality could develop to frightening proportions once again. 

All the standard options – more schooling, regulation, austerity – will be a drop in the bucket. In the end, the only solution is a worldwide, progressive tax on wealth, says Professor Piketty, though he acknowledges this is merely a "useful utopia." And yet, the future is not carved in stone. All throughout history, the march toward equality has always been steeped in politics. If a law of common progress fails to manifest itself of its own accord, there is nothing to stop us from enacting it ourselves. Indeed, the absence of such a law may well imperil the free market itself. "We have to save capitalism from the capitalists," Piketty concludes. 

This paradox is neatly summed up by an anecdote from the 1960s. When Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company's new, automated factory, he jokingly asked, "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?" Without missing a beat, Reuther answered, "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"

The Trump Effect (Pay attention Elon!)

 

A preview of what Trump is doing to the rest of US foreign sales.

— Warren B. Mosler (@wbmosler) January 27, 2026

Michael Parenti explains political right vs. left, "free" market power

 

pic.twitter.com/7MPd3gmKLd

— Pontius Pilate (@aggholamyy) January 25, 2026

ICE is more of the Obama legacy

 

And Obama’s ICE director, Thomas Homan, is now Trump's border czar. Under Obama, Homan introduced the idea of taking children from parents as a tactic to discourage migration. Obama gave Homan a presidential award saying, "Thomas Homan deports people. And he's really good at it." https://t.co/T5W8xx04JZ

— Hampton Institute (@HamptonThink) January 8, 2026

 

Update: Obama’s ICE director, Thomas Homan, is now Trump’s border czar. Under Obama, Homan introduced the idea of taking children from parents as a tactic to discourage migration. Obama gave Homan a presidential award saying, “Thomas Homan deports people. And he’s really good at it.” 

The Best Laid Plans

 

🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/a9Wb5F7yaw

— The Best (@Thebestfigen) January 20, 2026

Mark Twain's comment on current events.

“There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.” -Mark Twain, on the U.S.-Philippine War (although he could have said it about many other wars)