The National League of Cities is holding its 92nd annual summit in Pittsburgh through Saturday. More than 3,000 elected and appointed leaders from around the country are in town.
A group official says the conference is about “solutions,” “learning” and “advocacy on the issues that are impacting cities.” Indeed, such meetings are a wonderful way to explore cities’ mutual challenges.
Here’s hoping, however, that the summit is open minded enough to recognize what hasn’t worked in cities — decades of one-party rule and command economics, to name two.
What does work? Getting government out of the way and embracing market economics.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission says growing financial concerns won’t put the kibosh on its many projects in progress. Among them, the much-debated Mon-Fayette Expressway.
More’s the pity. For the expressway, whose final northern leg from Large to Monroeville is moving forward, is a road in search of economic development — not economic development in search of a road.
That said, a large part of the turnpike commission’s woes are not of its own making. There’s simply no rational public policy reason for a state law that forces the commission to pay the commonwealth $450 million annually to the state Department of Transportation — money that’s then funneled to public transit.
That “deal,” set to expire in 2023, has led to large and continuous increases in turnpike tolls. They are hikes that surely keep limiting the turnpike’s attractiveness as a traveling option.
Talk about being sold a pig in poke. In city after city (after city) across America, taxpayers are being forced to subsidize airlines for the “privilege” of gaining new routes.
Pittsburgh is among them. Two airlines will be paid $1.2 million over the next two years for service to Iceland and Germany. Backers see this as a wonderful opportunity to expand service and local economic growth.
As market perverting as these subsidies are — turning taxpayers into venture capitalists — even worse are some of the pronouncements of those benefiting from the public’s largess.
Take, for instance, Titus Johnson, spokesman for Condor North America, which will milk Keystone State taxpayers for $500,000 over the next two years.
He told the Post-Gazette that each time a Condor airline will touch down in Pittsburgh, it will inject at least $300,000 into the local economy. Let’s see the calculations, please.
For this sounds like The Great Stadiums Debate of two decades ago, does it not? Manifest benefits, fueled by fantastical multiplier effects, for as far as the eye can see. (A recent Brookings Institution assessment yet again debunked that notion.)
Well, if these deals are generators of such wonderful economic benefits — and, it would follow, profits for those who provide the service — why are public subsidies needed?
We are told, again, “this is the way business is done.” Indeed it is — among those who think they know better than the marketplace and regularly lose the taxpayers’ shirt in their conceit.
The election of Donald Trump as president, following his campaign calls to ease the Regulatory State of America, has sparked hopes that the onerous Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 will be repealed.
Indeed, financial regulation has become a complex morass of rules in search of a problem or, worse yet, rules enacted to cover up the lie of government intervening in markets. Think of the mortgage meltdown that precipitated The Great Recession.
But writing in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, Peter Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, perfectly distills what turning out Dodd-Frank would mean on Main Street:
Paraphrasing here, small banks, the credit sources for small businesses and startups, no longer would face costly regulations that required them to hire compliance officers instead of lending officers.
And to quote Wallison directly, “With a Republican House and Senate, President-elect Trump has an opportunity to eliminate many of the regulations that have held back economic growth.”
It’s a public policy that everyone should support.
And finally, this note about statistics:
Statistics play a critical role in shaping public policy. They are the hard numbers on which public policy should be formulated. But when statistics are politicized, public policy and the public suffer.
An offshoot of this malady can be found in the “argument” that Donald Trump, though he won the Electoral College, won’t have a “mandate” because he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
But as John Merline, deputy opinion editor at Investor’s Business Daily, points out, “Hillary’s lead in the popular vote is entirely due to her oversized margin of victory” in California.
Furthermore, Merline notes that, as of this week’s latest count, Trump has won the popular vote in 29 states to Clinton’s 20 states.
And those are the statistics that are the baseline for Trump’s mandate.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
