QUOTE OF THE DAY
WSJ: How Detroit Is Faring on Jobs, Crime, Housing
Friday is the one-year anniversary for Detroit’s bankruptcy, marking a good time to check in on the city’s future, its past and what the saga all means for other struggling big cities.
In truth, it is far too early for a serious analysis of the meaning of the bankruptcy, which is still unwindingwith an August trial date looming. And as Politics Counts noted last year, the story of Detroit’s problems is about a lot more than one formal economic declaration. It’s tied to everything from racial tensions to the decline of American manufacturing.
But when Detroit formally declared itself insolvent last year, the impact on that move on the city’s psychology and fragile economic state were real questions. So how does Detroit in the summer of 2014 compare to Detroit from the summer of 2013? A look at some numbers shows the situation is still not pretty, but there are signs of small improvements – with the real impact of the bankruptcy restructuring still to come.
Daily Journal: Yep, Illinois is near the bottom in job creation
Since the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, the U.S. economy has generated 7.8 million jobs. But the gains haven’t been spread evenly across the country.
Some states have boomed. Others have struggled to add jobs.
North Dakota, benefiting from an oil and gas drilling boom, has created nearly 98,000 jobs over the past five years, a 27 percent increase — by far the best in the country. New Mexico, hard hit by federal spending cuts, is the only state that has lost jobs since the recession ended.
Politico: For bankrupt Detroit, some fixes
Detroit neighborhoods are being relit, its vacant homes are being sold off or torn down, its public transportation is cleaner and more often on schedule and the city has renegotiated some burdensome union contracts.
In the little more than a year since state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr made Detroit the largest U.S. city to seek bankruptcy protection, it has experienced a wide range of improvements that will factor into Judge Steven Rhodes’ decisions during next month’s bankruptcy trial. A major piece of the bankruptcy puzzle could fall into place Monday, with the expected release of the results of a vote by creditors, including more than 30,000 retired and current city workers, on whether to accept millions of dollars in cuts.
When Orr filed for bankruptcy, Detroit’s debt then was estimated at $18 billion, and its revenue streams were too small to keep up with basic city services.
Huffington Post: Constitutional Rights in the Digital Age
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Riley v. California held that the police must obtain a warrant before searching the cell phone of someone who has been arrested. This decision applied the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” — to take account of vast advances in technology since the time the Constitution was written.
What should Riley tell us about how the development of technology affects other constitutional protections? In particular, how does the rise of the Internet affect the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to free speech?
The Court’s decision in Riley rested on a simple premise: Cell phones are different from ordinary physical objects. The latter may be searched following a lawful arrest. The former, after Riley, may not. That is because, to use the Court’s own words, “Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse.”
Here’s the abstract of the research paper “The (True) Legacy of Two Really Existing Economic Systems“:
By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were exposed to socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task. While it was recently argued that markets decay morals (Falk and Szech, 2013), we provide evidence that other political and economic regimes such as socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on individuals’ behavior.
City Journal: The Plot Against Merit
In 2004, seven-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English. For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents—a cook and a factory worker—and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small Laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side. Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.” When he was in sixth grade, he took the subway downtown from his parents’ small apartment to the bustling high school to pick up prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam. He prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the Laundromat—an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true. Ting, now a 17-year-old senior starting at NYU in the fall, says of his parents, who never went to college: “They came here for the next generation.”
New York’s specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and the equally storied Bronx High School of Science, along with Brooklyn Technical High School and five smaller schools, have produced 14 Nobel Laureates—more than most countries. For more than 70 years, admission to these schools has been based upon a competitive examination of math, verbal, and logical reasoning skills. In 1971, the state legislature, heading off city efforts to scrap the merit selection test as culturally biased against minorities, reaffirmed that admission to the schools be based on the competitive exam. (See “How Gotham’s Elite High Schools Escaped the Leveler’s Ax,” Spring 1999.) But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil rights complaint challenging the admissions process. A bill in Albany to eliminate the test requirement has garnered the support of Sheldon Silver, the powerful Assembly Speaker. And new New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria. The mayor argues that relying solely on the test creates a “rich-get-richer” dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation.
Huffington Post: City Rules Lure, Push Away Food Truck Flavors
In Los Angeles, food trucks are heralded as “the new incubators of culinary innovation.”
Vendors line the streets in neighborhoods all over town, offering customers everything from Korean tacos to lobster rolls to wood-oven pizza.
But in other cities, such as Pittsburgh and Chicago, food trucks are marginalized. No street food culture exists, because the people who live there simply aren’t exposed to the possibility of a nontraditional dining experience.
CNBC: After Detroit, another city ponders bankruptcy
As Detroit works to emerge from bankruptcy following a court-supervised overhaul, another Michigan city with strong auto industry bonds could be on the brink of beginning the same process, the latest sign that the spate of municipal defaults may not have ended.
Flint, which was the birthplace of General Motors and once had 200,000 residents, also has suffered a spectacular drop in population and factory jobs and a corresponding rise in property abandonment, much like its insolvent big brother an hour’s drive south.
If a judge rules against Flint’s effort to cut its retiree health care benefits, the city is expected to join about a dozen cities or counties to seek court relief since the beginning of the recession.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
