New York Daily News publisher and Boston Properties Chairman Mort Zuckerman takes to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal today and unloads this gem:
Obama and the ‘Competency Crisis’
Like many Americans who supported him, I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country.
Boston Properties’ credit rating?
Maybe that’s why the Journal identifies him solely as “chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.”
— The Nation takes a look at the ongoing scam that is pro sports teams getting taxpayer money to build stadiums and therefore subsidize outlandish salaries and team profits.
It’s an old story, sure, but one that unfortunately keeps on happening over and over again. I had no idea, for instance, that the St. Louis Rams are trying to get taxpayers to pony up for a new stadium. They just opened their last dome in 1995. And the Atlanta Falcons are trying to get corporate welfare to replace the Georgia Dome, which opened in 1992.
Despite recession-strapped state budgets and the fact that most teams occupy homes that are less than twenty years old, there appears to be no end in sight to the stadium-subsidy game. Teams that have recently received new stadiums have begun to go around to the back of the line for still newer ones. Latest on the list are the Atlanta Falcons (housed in the Georgia Dome, built in 1992 for $214 million in state money) and the St. Louis Rams (in the Edward Jones Dome, opened in 1995 for $280 million). The Rams are threatening to use Shaw’s “state-of-the-art” clause to move if they don’t get their way.
And this is interesting, however unlikely (emphasis):
For Baade, the only answer is for local elected officials to start standing up and saying no to all demands for sports subsidies. “I think cities need to band together and say, Look, we’ve got some countervailing power, we’re simply not going to compete with one another for a professional sports presence.” (A bill briefly proposed by US Representative David Minge in the late 1990s would have forced localities to end the “economic war among the states,” as a Minneapolis Federal Reserve vice president called it, by slapping an excise tax on any subsidies designed to benefit individual corporations; the legislation died without a whimper.) “If they do that, then pro sports leagues that hold the ultimate negotiating card—‘We’re going to leave if you don’t give us what we want’—will have no place to go.”
Remember that some people actually think this race to the bottom is a good thing.
— Watch the Financial Times’s Gillian Tett explain why the European crisis is only going to get worse:
Boston Properties is not the United States government. BBB for the former and AA+ for the latter is a non sequitor. Chittum should know better. Zuckerman's take down of the president is appropriate. Obama campaigned like a mighty ocean and he is governing like a dry creek. I voted for him in 2008 and sent him 2 checks. I may have to vote for him again in 2012 if the Republicans nominate one of their many cretins -- but Obama will not see me open my check book again.
#1 Posted by Mike Robbins, CJR on Fri 26 Aug 2011 at 10:55 PM
Businesses should make risky investments.
Governments shouldn't.
Ryan and his commie/liberal brethren will never acknowledge this distinction.
If a business makes a risky investment and it pays off, then these commies will insist that the profits are ill-gotten gains, stolen from the hands of the proletariat.
On the other hand, if a businesses loses money on a risky investment, then the commies will cry "fraud" and spin up the turbines on their Black Helicopter anti-corporate conspiracy theories.
Earning money on a investment is greedy theft.. Losing money on an investment is criminal fraud.
These guys won't be happy until the government runs everything, because for some ridiculous reason, and against all the uncontroverted evidence to contrary, they really do think that the government can conduct business better than the private sector can.
I've asked these liberals over and over again exactly why it is that they think the government can elevate society better than the private sector can, and in response I get nothing but juvenile dodging and name-calling.
#2 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 28 Aug 2011 at 09:19 AM
Is there a bell in the CJR offices that you guys ring? "OMG! Somebody said something bad about Obama!"
It's gonna get pretty noisy over there.
#3 Posted by JLD, CJR on Sun 28 Aug 2011 at 07:39 PM
"Businesses should make risky investments."
No, they shouldn't, idiot. They should make sound and competent investments with their own money and pay the price if they did not invest diligently.
Businesses should not make risky investments with my pension dues. You people have perverted accountable and responsible capitalism into a high stakes casino.
"Governments shouldn't."
Hope you're not typing that sentence on a computer over the internet. Without government investments you would not have your computers and you would not have the open protocols they thrive upon.
Man, pygmy monkeys appear to know more about basic economics than you. Embarrassing.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 29 Aug 2011 at 03:33 AM
Nothing brings out the juvenile ad hominem faster than shining light upon the commie/liberal stupidity.
Risk is associated with every investment. And risk is proportional to reward. PERIOD. ECON 101.
Thimbles spews the typical commie/liberal nonsense: "Businesses should not make risky investments with my pension dues."
padikiller responds: If you don't want your pension money invested.... Don't put your money in a pension that makes investments, Thimbles! Put your money under your mattress and see how that works out for you... YOU choose to invest in a pension, after all, thereby "perverting accountable and responsible capitalism", right?
Jeesh, the commie/liberal nonsense is so shallow!....
The simple fact of the matter is that government is not (and should never be) in business for profit in a free society.
The internet, the space program, stealth fighters, GPS, interstate highways, etc.. were not conceived as investments.... They were expenses as far as the government was concerned. They were all initially justified as defense expenditures and they all came at a huge expense to the taxpayers. Their present economic worth lies in the adaptation of these projects for commercial purposes by private industry who took great risk in developing them.
What risk did the government take in funding DARPA? None. What risk did Netscape take in developing the web? Complete risk that led to its explosive growth and ultimate demise.
This is just the R E A L I T Y. Sorry, dude. NIce try, but no cigar. Better luck next fairy tale.
#5 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 29 Aug 2011 at 07:57 AM
"Nothing brings out the juvenile ad hominem faster than shining light upon the commie/liberal stupidity."
Sigh.
If ad hominem is such a big deal to you, don't use it in the same sentence, pretty please. There's really no point in carrying on a lengthy discussion with a person demonstrating this level of intellectual calibre.
Especially with one who defends the banks and business at all turns, making him one of the people who have perverted accountable and responsible capitalism and turned it into a high stakes, publicly* subsidized, casino.
And yes, the government does invest and nurture technologies along which would not be profitable within the acceptable time frame of the market nor marketable to the acceptable swath of consumers.
There isn't a big market for pictures of the hubble ultra deep field or maps of Cosmic background radiation
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/060915/060915_CMB_Timeline150.jpg
Not big enough to justify the expense, but we are better off as a people for the government investments in those projects. And it beats throwing trillions into speculative bubbles run by inside traders who provide no social value whatsoever.
Moron.
*as in the money for the bets comes from the public itself and the money to bail out the bookies comes from the taxpayer.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 29 Aug 2011 at 07:09 PM
Thimbles wrote: There isn't a big market for pictures of the hubble ultra deep field or maps of Cosmic background radiation...
padikiller agrees: Ergo... There is no "investment" in these endeavors. These are "expenses" and there is NO RISK to the government.
We're talking about RISK - the distinction between government and private sector credit ... Where is the risk to the government in spending money? There isn't any.
Comparing the credit rating of a business charged with making risking investments to credit rating of a government that can raise revenue at gunpoint is nonsensical.
When a business spends money, it expects to earn more money than it spends. Such is not the case with the government, as any (reasonable) person can plainly see...
And since when is "commie/liberal" an insult?
#7 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 29 Aug 2011 at 10:07 PM