Thank you very much to the dozens of readers who responded to my question about when Utah Policy Daily should be delivered. Most of you said time of delivery isn’t a big deal, as long as it’s not too late in the morning. Several said earlier is better. We’re going to try to e-mail it most days around 6 a.m. (8 a.m. Eastern time).
Updated State Portal
The state’s official Web site has a new look and feel. Check it out at www.utah.gov.
Blog Watch
Since it’s always raining outside and nothing else to do, Utah bloggers are writing up a storm:
-- Rep. John Dougall has been a very busy blogger. Utah’s newest legislative blogger has covered a wide variety of topics in the last few days, including the new BYU-Idaho president, interest rates, the value of college, tax reform, and more.
-- Charley Foster links to a Rocky Mountain News columnist who says prospective Supreme Court nominee Michael McConnell “deplores the court's 19th-century decision that upheld the banning of Mormon polygamy” . . .
-- Phil Windley’s Utah Politics blog features guest posts on compliance with GRAMA and Gov. Huntsman’s willingness to “look at” raising the minimum wage.
-- Internet entrepreneur Paul Allen tells why all CEOs should become bloggers.
-- Wilf Sommerkorn, in Utah Planners’ Corner describes why Utah policymakers need to think regionally, and not just locally.
Prestigious Conference Invites Huntsman
A press release on PR Newswire says Gov. Jon Huntsman -- the only U.S. governor fluent in Mandarin Chinese – has been invited to deliver closing remarks this week at the Ninth Annual Global Chinese Conference on Computers in Education. BYU-Hawaii is hosting the conference, the first time the conference has taken place outside Asia. Conference participants will include more than 250 academic leaders in educational/instructional technology, including professors, department chairs, deans, researchers, government education officials, school teachers, and school administrators, representing China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other Asian countries. In the past, this conference was held at prestigious universities in Asia. Among the conference's corporate and education sponsors are Microsoft, Dell, Brigham Young University, and Utah State University.
Reader Response
Another View on Toll Roads
(Conservative activist Gordon Jones responded to an early UPD piece on how tolls, if applied to new roads or highway lanes, can benefit everyone.)
One underappreciated aspect of prices (and a toll is simply the price one would pay for using a road) is that they allow us to measure demand. Right now, we have no very good way to measure the demand for highways between, say, Layton and Salt Lake City because the use of I-15 is a "free" good. True, we pay for the road through gasoline taxes, but those payments don't distinguish between driving around in our neighborhood and using the commuter arteries into the city.
In that way, I-15 can be thought of as a "commons," where the marginal benefit accrues to the individual user and the marginal cost is imposed on everyone (in the form of lost time, primarily). Every common is susceptible to overuse, and this one is no exception, leading to the "tragedy" of the commons as outlined by Garrett Hardin in his famous essay (though on a somewhat different subject).
A "commons" is owned by everyone, and so is owned by no one. No one has any incentive to manage it properly, keep it maintained, provide for its expansion or replacement.
We use government to try to perform these functions, and while they do a better or worse job depending on many factors, they are unable to replicate the most vital function, which is measuring demand. If I-15 were privately owned, its owner would charge for its use, setting the price where it would "clear." We can only speculate where that price is, or how much car-pooling it would encourage, or how much additional revenue could be captured by building parallel roads. We also can't measure how much money could be saved by avoiding new construction by installing new lanes, or variable-priced lanes, or peak pricing, or any of yet unimagined alternatives that private entrepreneurs are so much better at coming up with than transportation bureaucrats.
So by all means, let us experiment with toll roads, but not solely to get the revenue to build new roads, but even more importantly to take advantage of the market's solution to the "knowledge problem."
National Politics
Dean Throws Gasoline on Fire
(National Journal’s Charlie Cook writes about Howard Dean’s job performance. Below are some excerpts. Sign up for the column here).
It wasn't hard back in February to find conservatives and Republicans turning celebratory cartwheels when former Vermont governor and 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The expectation on the right was that Dean would be making outrageous statements daily and letting out primal screams every Sunday on the political talk shows.
Initially, Dean kept a low profile. He spent his time traveling, particularly to "Red States" carried by President Bush last year, in an effort to figure out why Democrats have been losing the South and border South and much of the West, as well as small towns and rural voters in almost every region of the country.
But lately, Dean has been giving fodder to Republicans and conservatives. Last Thursday, for example, he committed the political equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire. He noted that many Americans had to wait in long lines to vote in 2004, then added [PDF], "Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives." The comment enraged some Republicans and reminded some Democrats why they were not so enthusiastic about this idea from the beginning.
This was not the first time as chairman Dean has upset the right. In March, speaking to a group of Democrats who lived overseas, he called Republicans "brain dead."
In April, he mocked conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh for his addiction to painkillers in an effort to show the host's hypocrisy. And on NBC's "Meet the Press" last month, he did not back off his claim that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, was going to jail for his ethics problems.
National chairmen and their committees are charged with raising money, managing the party's organizational apparatus and hopefully helping (and helping fund) the various state parties' organizational activities.
They also are charged with laying the groundwork for managing the presidential nomination process and running a convention every four years.
On the money front, the jury is still out on Dean, but clearly he has his work cut out for him, as the money is not exactly pouring in so far.
In the first quarter of this year, the DNC raised $14.1 million, far below the Republican National Committee's take of $32.3 million. To make matters worse, according to an article in the June 6 edition of Business Week, the RNC gained 68,000 new contributors this quarter, while Dean's DNC picked up only 20,000.
To be fair, Dean is trying to raise money on a more grassroots level than did Terry McAuliffe, his predecessor, and that takes more time to build up, so we should give him a bit more time. But so far, he is not getting the job done.
On the organizational side as well, it is too soon to judge Dean's effectiveness -- and hard to tell from the outside.
During the 2004 election cycle, each side, including the so-called 527 groups and their look-alikes, compiled an amazing amount of data from their telephone and door-to-door canvassing, electronic data mining and use of the Internet.
The job for each side now is to aggregate, organize and keep this data updated, so that it can be put to use in the 2006 midterm elections and in 2008.
In short, while it is too soon to say Dean is failing, if he does not watch what he says a bit more carefully, the patience of Democratic elected officials, many of whom were unenthusiastic about him to begin with, will soon run out.
In some ways, these comments are a bit like "the scream": They might have been appropriate in a locker room at halftime, or at a closed-door pep rally, but not in public and not with cameras running.
Sometimes a politician will say or do something that will stimulate the base but really antagonize others; those words or actions are best handled privately.
Unflattering things that national party chairmen say and do, while maybe not terribly important, are definitely heard and read and can very often be counterproductive.
RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman and his team are going to jump on anything even remotely contentious that Dean says, and the question is just how much ammunition will he give them?
In the end, the upcoming midterm election is much more likely to be about DeLay than Dean, but for that very reason, Dean has to remember that his job is to keep the spotlight on Republican-caused problems, not create more for his own side.
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