More on Sacramento Basketball & Municipal Policy

It appears that the attempt to build a new Arena to keep the Sacramento Kings is a microcosm for all sorts of consequential policy decisions at the state & local level.


On the "possibly a plus" side, the new arena may be a catalyst for state legislation that restructures the California Environmental Quality Act. The CEQA is often cited as a deterrent to construction in California,  especially in coastal areas, which has helped push up housing costs and contributed to sprawl. Now, it's possible that Proposition 13 is the larger culprit, but there's strong evidence that environmental regulations play a substantial role.

However, in the "total minus" side, Sacramento is going finance a portion of the arena construction costs by borrowing against future parking garage & parking meter revenues. Because the city is still paying off loans associate with those garages, the bond payments will be interest-only payments for almost ten years before the city can begin paying off principal. How this can possibly be a good deal for taxpayers is beyond me.

Overly Honest News Updates

Maybe the next time, the Seattle ownership group should get
Shawn Kemp to be a spokesperson.

"The Committee agreed to force current Kings' ownership to accept a smaller sale price in order to preserve the fiction that professional sports require the construction of stadiums at general taxpayer expense, rather than through raising private funds and revenues stemming directly from the stadium itself."

I'm not a huge basketball fan but I was really looking forward to proof that the NBA could join the MLB and NFL as sports leagues capable of financing stadium construction with substantial contributions from private funding sources. I guess we'll have to wait until the NBA thinks it's politically viable to move the Hornets Pelicans out of New Orleans.

Even Through Rose Colored Glasses, George W. Bush was Terrible

I don't see why we need to say nice things about George W. Bush these days. He presided over a decade of stagnant middle class incomes, the death of 3,000 citizens on US soil, led the United States into two wars which lasted a decade at a combined cost measuring $4 trillion, and left the financial service sector so deregulated that the entire world economy nearly imploded. About the best thing you can say is that in most of these decisions he was within the political Washington's political mainstream at the time. But that's an indictment of Washington, not a sensible rationalization of anything Bush did.

I keep trying to complete the sentence "Bush was the worst President since __________" and finding ways to claim that terrible presidents were better. Richard Nixon flouted the law, but so did Bush (the FISA act pretty clearly states that the entire warrantless wiretapping program is an impeachable offense), and Nixon ceded big chunks of domestic policy to the prevailing center-left mainstream. Warren Harding didn't have much going on, though he at least didn't totally suck on civil rights issues. A number of 19th century Presidents were awful on the issues of slavery, preserving the Union, and Reconstruction (Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Rutherford Hayes), so they might give Bush a run for his money. Lately people have been pouring haterade on John Adams, but pre-industrial America is just such a different place and time that I have a hard time evaluating how much good or bad an administration could do at the time.

Friday Obama Caption Contest & Kitsch Cover

Not many updates to the Whitehouse Flickr account this week.

Original Caption: "President Barack Obama holds a meeting in Situation Room of the White House on the ongoing investigation in the Boston Marathon bombings, April 20, 2013. From left at the table, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director John Brennan, and Lisa Monaco, Assistant to the President of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism."

 Today's Kitsch Cover is Anya Marina performing T.I.'s "whatever you like"

I Can Walk for Miles And Miles And Miles

I'm not surprised that best way to get diners to cut down on calorie consumption is to express menu calories in the number of miles it would take to "walk it off". Without using a pedometer, it's very hard to gauge how much you walk in a day.

I had a Fitbit for a few months until I inevitably lost it, which is enough time to get a good sense for what constitutes a halfway "active" lifestyle by fitbit standards. Fitbit's default goal is to get you to walk 10,000 steps in a day, which is roughly five miles. When I started I thought it would take an serious long-distance run to hit that target. But just a walk from the office to the gym plus 20 minutes of cardio was enough to get to 10,000 step goal. Alternatively, an hour's worth of lighter exercise--something like swing dancing--combined with plus the steps you take walking around a grocery store and the 4000 or so you take in day-to-day-life will get you close to the five mile mark.

Now, it's true that if you drive everywhere and do nothing but watch TV all day, you'll end up with 2500-4000 steps in a day, which is pretty sedentary. But it's very easy to introduce modest levels of activity into your life.