Neal Peirce / Sep 10 2011
For Release Sunday, September 11, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
There’s lots of talk these days about the aging of America. My demographic group — people 65 and older — topped 40 million in the 2010 Census, but those numbers will rocket up soon with arrival of the massive “bulge in the python.” Those are the baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964.
But here’s the question: Will all us varieties of oldsters leave a robust, growing America that’s planning its future creatively? Or will we just defend our Social Security and Medicare benefits, and figure that schools and infrastructure are someone else’s problem? Will we figuratively tell today’s youth to fend for themselves?
If we do, the results could be alarming. America is moving fast to an ethnic profile light years removed from the Norman Rockwell vision of lily-white historic Main Street America we grew up with.
Census results are proving it. From 2000 to 2010, Hispanic and Asian populations each expanded by 43 percent. The African-American population went up 11 percent. And the number of whites in America? It increased just 1 percent.
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Neal Peirce / Sep 03 2011
For Release Sunday, September 4, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Is Amazon.com “America’s #1 Tax Evader,” undercutting the vital interests of states and localities as they try to meet the needs of their people in recession-wracked times?
That’s the assertion of former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Marty Manley, writing on his “JamSideDown” web site. And Manley is hardly alone. The Wall Street Journal, in a story by correspondent Stu Woo, recently identified “extreme measures” of the massive retailer to avoid charging state sales taxes on its on-line retail transactions.
Based on a 1992 Supreme Court decision, Amazon and other nationwide sellers are currently exempted from collecting sales taxes in states where they don’t have a “bricks and mortar” presence. Currently Amazon collects these taxes only in Washington State (its headquarters) and four other where it has offices or another physical presence — Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota and New York (and it’s suing New York to avoid collecting there).
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Neal Peirce / Aug 25 2011
For Release Sunday, August 28, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
What if all America were like Las Vegas, with gambling as near as the closest convenience store? Or if states offered blackjack, poker and other casino-style games on-line, as accessible as your personal computer?
That’s the intriguing question that struck me while reading journalist (and self-confessed gambling addict) Sam Skolnik’s new book, “High Stakes: The Rising Cost of America’s Gambling Addiction” (Beacon Press).
Currently, the Washington, D.C. government hopes to install an Internet gambling hub by the end of this year. California and Massachusetts have bills pending. Other states are watching with interest to see if the federal Justice Department chooses to enforce existing law which seems, at face value, to prohibit on-line wagering.
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Neal Peirce / Aug 19 2011
For Release Sunday, August 21, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Maybe you’ve seen the headlines — “Engineers Warn Infrastructure Crumbling” — accompanied by stories saying it’s imperative we spend billions, sometimes trillions to fix America’s deteriorating roadways, bridges, water and sewer systems.
I’ve written some of those stories myself. And there’s no doubt — keeping public infrastructure in shape, like fixing leaks and keeping a house’s roof in decent condition, is the essence of common sense.
But which spending, and how? Especially on the roadways front, it’s time to think again, asserts Charles Marohn, a civil engineer and conservative Republican and founder of a “Strong Towns” website.
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Neal Peirce / Aug 12 2011
For Release Sunday, August 14, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Each year, Americans travel some 3 trillion miles in their autos and trucks. Four million miles of roadways have been built for our vehicles.
We drive practically everywhere — to work, to school, to health care, recreation, much more. Cars and truck fleets are a huge part of the American economy.
So what’s not to like about all this motorized world?
One answer: our overwhelming dependence on foreign oil that depletes our cash reserves and entangles us in trouble-plagued regions of the world.
But we pay an even bigger personal price for a motorized world. It’s our health; it’s our longevity.
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Neal Peirce / Aug 05 2011
For Release Sunday, August 7, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
A perfect storm, triggered by shortages of dollars and skilled personnel, faces the city and county governments of America. But a small, promising flame of reform has been lit. Its aim is to draw in highly skilled young college graduates on a “Teach for America”-like formula.
For local governments, the personnel crisis has been building for years. Cities perform vital services that impact citizens daily, from public safety to clean water to safe streets. Yet they face an avalanche of retirements among the many professionals who joined their workforces from the ‘60s and ‘70s. And among skilled young college graduates, there’s generally little interest in succeeding them; typically young people associate local public service with being a politician or getting stuck in an inflexible bureaucracy.
On top of all that, today’s recession-impacted economy is inflicting dramatic budget cuts on local governments. Thousands of posts are going unfilled. A major talent gap is opening, even while public service is demonized by the anti-government rhetoric thrown up by Tea Party-like extremists.
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Neal Peirce / Jul 21 2011
For Release Sunday, July 24, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
NEW YORK — For years debate about cities has focused on the economic side — steps they are urged to take to attract capital, recruit new businesses, lure creative professionals.
But what about justice?
Will our cities and metro areas, asks Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas, “live up to the aspirations of all residents, or just the privileged few?” Can we achieve “just cities, shaped by fairness, opportunity, a commitment to shared prosperity?”
It’s an appropriate point for the foundation whose dollars, starting in the 1960s, were critical in launching the community development movement with its boost for hundreds of grassroots housing groups in and for hard-pressed neighborhoods.
Again, the foundation seems to be moving ahead of the game, to important new ground. In the midst of uncertainty about the country’s future, our prevailing politics focus only tangentially on income disparities between our wealthiest income earners and the rest of America, and how those gaps have hit historic highs. And there’s a surfeit of anti-government rhetoric, even as poor and working-class Americans face exceedingly tough economic odds.
Can we then have a “Just City”? The Ford Foundation made this theme the center of a celebration this month marking the 75th anniversary of its founding. And its guests took up the challenge with gusto.
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Neal Peirce / Jul 16 2011
For Release Sunday, July 17, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
An ugly row over federal funding for America’s transportation needs is convulsing Washington.
On one side, Rep. John Mica, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is proposing a six-year surface transportation bill that at $210 billion represents a deep drop (roughly a third) from recent federal support for road, bridge, transit and related construction across the country.
But fear not, says Mica — the reduced dollars can be stretched into dramatically expanded results by encouraging public-private partnerships, consolidating or eliminating roughly 70 separate federal programs, and letting state transportation departments spend the federal funds pretty much as they will. One example: new highway projects along existing rights-of-way would be exempted from mandatory environmental review.
Predictably, it’s not just fiscal conservatives who like parts of Mica’s formula. Many state highway directors anticipate more freedom in how they dispense funds. Plus the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center, its transportation committee headed by former Transportation Department official Emil Frankel, praises Mica’s initiative for endorsing a range of long-overdue transportation system simplification and performance-based reforms.
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Neal Peirce / Jul 07 2011
For Release Sunday, July 10, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
CHATTANOOGA — A handsomely made, people-friendly Riverwalk runs along the Tennessee River, tied to the old Walnut Street Bridge that’s been painted a deep happy blue and is now reserved for walkers and bikers. The Tennessee Aquarium features freshwater fish. Electric, fare-free buses run up and down Broad Street. There’s lots of art, outdoor sculpture included.
From a smoke-clogged industrial disaster a generation ago, Chattanooga has come a stunning distance, spurred on by organized citizen action and generous local foundations. It recently garnered national attention by attracting Volkswagen’s new $1 billion LEED-aggressive assembly plant.
But all’s not well. The downtown has an empty feel — in fact 1 million square feet of vacant office space. Relations remain strained between the city and the rural Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama counties that surround it. Education levels still lag seriously.
So what’s next? It’s a mix of bytes and bites, or put another way, fast gigabytes and slow food. That’s the fascinating mix for this decade that Chattanooga political and business leaders had to tell a meeting of the Citistates Group (which I chair), meeting here late last month.
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Neal Peirce / Jul 01 2011
For Release Sunday, July 3, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
The population of Planet Earth is now projected to pass the 7 billion mark this October — up from just 2.2 billion in 1950. One study shows that if today’s explosive birthrates in developing nations continues, the African continent alone, by the end of this century, could have 15 billion people — twice the population of the world today.
That won’t happen. As populations age and urbanize, today’s fertility rates — in many poor nations an average of five, even six children for every woman — are bound to recede.
But the speed of the decline depends significantly on whether women have access to family planning and contraception services. Plus legalized abortion. Unwanted pregnancies and abortions are actually declining in countries which have made abortion legal, according to the the Guttmacher Institute. Yet it notes that 70,000 women across the world die each year from illegal, often seriously botched abortions.
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