Schools, Quality of Life, Jobs, Economic Growth and Globalization

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Yesterday’s property tax bill (including not small increases in local and school taxes) along with recent articles on the China Price and Milwaukee’s loss of unskilled labor jobs serve to remind Wisconsin residents of the real issues facing our state:

  • Encouraging the formation of more new businesses. I don’t believe the formation of yet another quasi-government organization is the answer. Rather, let’s simplify (and reduce) the paperwork that any organization must support to operate in Wisconsin.
  • Broadband: Wisconsin is stuck with SBC, a telco that has done nothing to offer true, 2 way broadband (100X the speed of today’s rather slow DSL/cable services) to Wisconsin residents. I have not seen any indication that our state’s political leadership has boarded the cluetrain on this one.
  • Biotech certainly has great promise for Wisconsin, however, historically the benefits have generally gone to out of state firms. Perhaps this will change somewhat over time.

Without a strong, growing tax base, we’ll continue to see substantial increases in local property taxes. I don’t believe this is a sustainable strategy.

Baseball’s Steriod Problem: Comments around the Internet

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Unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of comments on this week’s steriod use disclosures by Jason Giambi and a sort of disclosure by Barry Bonds (from grand jury testimony). I’ve compiled quite a few links: Alltheweb | Clusty | Google News | Teoma | Yahoo Search
Michael Hunt pens a refreshing column taking baseball, Bud Selig and the MLB player’s union to task for not addressing the problem. Nice to see a more realistic approach from the journal-sentinel after their strange Miller Park cheerleading.

Barry Bonds Grand Jury Testimony

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Lance Williams, Mark Fainaru-Wada for the 2nd day reveal grand jury testimony in the BALCO case. This time, it’s Barry Bonds:

Barry Bonds told a federal grand jury that he used a clear substance and a cream supplied by the Burlingame laboratory now enmeshed in a sports doping scandal, but he said he never thought they were steroids, The Chronicle has learned.
Federal prosecutors charge that the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, known as BALCO, distributed undetectable steroids to elite athletes in the form of a clear substance that was taken orally and a cream that was rubbed onto the body.

It will be interesting to see how Milwaukee based commissioner Bud Selig deals with this…..

Broadband Shackles, or the power of telco lobbying

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David Isenberg references a broadband report that tells us that Japan, with half the population has about 10 times as many fiber to the home installations as the US.
At the same time, naturally, entrenched telcos are successfully lobbying to kill local givernment’s ability to deploy municipal broadband services. This is bad news all around. SBC certainly has not been rushing to bring Wisconsin broadband services up to 21st century standards. Nope, we’re stuck in the 1990’s here. Jonathan Kim takes a look at the telco lobbying… Xeni has many links on Philadelphia’s plans to offer free or low cost wifi access and the deal that Verizon cut with Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor to give them the right to veto any other municipal broadband plans.