Facing Red Wing’s Reality

What is often called “optimism” is often delusion. In the case of the city of Red Wing, Minnesota the city’s historic planning for spontaneous, prosperous and strong growth has been a city delusion almost since the city’s founding. The Prairie Island Nuclear Plant went online in 1973. As you can see by the city’s population history, the city’s population jumped by about 30% between 1970 and 1980; mostly fueled by the power plant employees’ inflated salaries. The two reactors are slated to go off-line in 2033 and 2034, since Xcel has no plans to renew the 60 year licenses. The Treasure Island Resort and Casino opened in 1983, which provided another smaller spurt in the city’s population. Since 2000, the town’s population has been, essentially, flat at about 16,000 people and the city only added about 1,000 people between 1990 and 2000.

However, the city’s optimism has been fueled by drunken sailor optimism since the city’s inception in the 1850’s. In 1995, the city built a 222 acre high school complex capable of housing a lot more than the current 1,000 8th-12th grade students. Current demographics and population growth trends indicate that considerably less of the facility will be needed or used in the next few years. The city just finished “investing” $3M in the Sheldon Theater, a show place that has no more chance of providing taxpayers a return on their investment than Donald Trump has at competently reading a teleprompter. This past year (2017), the city council voted to add a 2^nd fire station to the west side of town, where it is desperately hoped the city’s growth might happen due to the minuscule commuter advantage to the Twin Cities. Over the past two decades, there have been several attempts to encourage some population growth on the west side of town with minimal results. You would think that a growth plan would assume and encourage some kind of mass transit to the Cities, like rail, but the city and Goodhue County both assume similar or increased car traffic in spite of obvious trends away from single-passenger vehicle commuting. When the Prairie Island power plant begins to shut down, it is reasonable to expect that a population roll-back similar to the 1970’s growth will occur and the city will be stuck with several expensive, oversized facilities and a drastically reduced tax base.

In an effort to reel-in as much property tax as possible, this tiny town has incorporated 41.19 square miles of the Mississippi River valley. As Google Maps aptly illustrates, very little of the City of Red Wing is “city.” About 6.6% of the city is water and at an average of 475 inhabitants per square mile practically a ghost town. If the city were as dense as the Twin Cities, one of the least dense cities in the nation, we’d be at around 1,800 people per square mile and would need only about 9 square miles of that 41.19 square mile city; which means at least 32 square miles is largely unoccupied but still requires the city services and resources.

All of that acquired territory was gathered when a small portion of that real estate (Prairie Island) brought large tax revenues. Fairly regularly, Xcel and the NRC do a little song and dance around the illegally stored spent fuel cask inventory and nuclear facility re-licensing. Some part of that dance routine occurs every seven years, with the latest one in 2015. Xcel does an ROI analysis at each approval, inspection, or maintenance interval with political, economic, and risk assessments at each turn. Renewables are becoming a large part of the company’s income with considerably less downside at risk. It shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that Xcel decides to begin to decommission Prairie Island rather than invest the millions necessary for the next refueling. The company has clearly stated that it “has no intention” of asking for another NRC license extension in 2033. Somewhere between now and 2033, 40-70% of Red Wing’s property tax base will vanish and with it a fair number of the highest paid residents in the area. Unless there is some miracle replacement for that revenue, property taxes will either skyrocket or Red Wing’s city services will take a huge hit along with the higher-than-typical city and county employee salaries.(Update: Looking at the 2020 Red Wing Salary Compliance Notice, you can choke on that evidence. ". . . effective January 1, 2020: City Council Administrator $148,616, Administrative Business Director $121,326.40, and Public Works Director $121,326.40." The Minnesota governor's salary is $127,000. It is more than safe to assume there are several >$100,000 salaries downstream for those top three.)

At the risk of being accused of being alarmist, I think Prairie Island’s closing is going to be an unrecoverable hit to the city of Red Wing. Based on the city’s sudden growth when the power plant was first installed, this chart is my estimate of what will happen to the population of Red Wing, Minnesota; depending on when Xcel decides to start shutting the plant down. This estimate only considers the effect on the city if just Prairie Island closes. (If you have Excel, you can play with my data on this spreadsheet.) Odds are, as the city’s tax base gets kicked in the ass by the largest property taxpayer the city will first try to shift the burden to other local industries. If that happens, more than just this one critical employer could vacate the premises. If that happens, those nasty looking downturns beginning around 2022, 2029, or 2033 will look a lot worse. If Xcel is followed out the door by BIC, Red Wing Shoes, or any of the other major employers the city could even be forced into bankruptcy.

Thanks in part to our current Bankruptcy King/President, we have a model of this kind of community catastrophe. In 1930, Atlantic City had a population of 66,000 citizens. In 1976, the voters legalized gambling. By 1990, the city had lost 28,000 citizens and after a brief faux-boom the city’s casinos (including Trump’s) began to close their doors, declare bankruptcy, and default on owed property taxes. Residents were left holding the bag and many of them were forced out of their homes by the city’s attempt to avoid defaulting on local government pensions, reducing costs, and downsizing the bureaucracy. If you don’t think this could happen to Red Wing and you are a local resident, you will keep your eyes tightly closed and wish for a miracle. If you are a realist, you have to be worried about the county and city’s extravagant spending habits and exorbitant civil service wages (and the resulting pension expenses).

What kind of “miracle” could prevent this small town exodus and economic downturn? I can’t think of an industry that could replace Xcel and Prairie Island, but it’s not hard to imagine a combination of Red Wing’s strong infrastructure, mass transportation, and internet entrepreneur-ship that could at least stem the tide. Red Wing has affordable 21st Century internet service, which is unusual for Minnesota and the upper Midwest. There is still a train station and AMTRAK service to Red Wing, although it is too unpredictable, slow, and infrequent to be considered much more than a placeholder until (and if) real infrastructure improvements happen.

The real miracle would be a sudden burst of realistic thinking by the City Council, school board, and local residents. The current thinking is “spend it while we have it,” but that’s not what’s happening. The city government is spending a whole lot of money it doesn’t have as most of that spending is financed with bonds and debt and there is little-to-no municipal or county savings for the rainy days that are sure to be coming. It’s easy to imagine that if Red Wing began to build up a reserve of cash for the future, current residents would whine that if the city can afford reserve funds it can afford to reduce taxes. Americans, especially faux-conservatives, are really lousy when it comes to acting fiscally conservative. We are the most timid nation on the planet when it comes to science, rational thinking, education, foreign relations, and pretty much anything that might take more than a sentence to explain, but we are fearless when it comes to long term debt. I can’t decide if its because many Americans either think their gods will save them or if they just don’t care about their offspring; or both. Whatever the cause, it’s not a good trait over the long haul.

They Took Ur Jobs!

Trump promised to bring the jobs he shopped out to China back to the USA. What do you think the chances are that Trump’s hats, shirts, ties, and other cheap shit will come back to US clothing manufacturers? How about zero, unless he can get US wages down to China’s.

The Trumpets wailed about how badly they were being treated, most of whom are living on Social Security and Unemployment and Welfare. These are the same people who elected Reagan and started the transfer of wealth from the US to Indochina and from the working class to the 1%. But they don’t get that, because they are the “uneducated” that Trump loves so much. When Reagan took his dribble-down axe to the federal tax code and made “unearned income” (interest and investment income, rent, income received from the ownership of natural resources, inheritance: aka “passive income”) more profitable than active income, any chance of US jobs expanding died and has almost no chance of ever returning. Trump is a prime beneficiary of this tax/social engineering plan and if you think Donald Trump has ever done one thing that didn’t benefit himself over every other person on the planet, you are one of his beloved “uneducated.”

For example, the unemployed (probably for decades) steel workers who campaigned and voted for Trump are great examples of uneducated voters without a clue. What could Trump do to bring steel production back to the US? He doesn’t even us US steel in his own casinos. The problem is on multiple levels: 1) the US tax system does not reward capital investment, 2) even if someone were insane enough take on creating a modern steel production facility, it wouldn’t employ uneducated, unskilled labor and would be highly automated, and 3) the US hasn’t invested in manufacturing and engineering education for so long that the country doesn’t have the talent to build a competitive steel production facility. Financial services has siphoned off at least two generations of the nation’s most talented people to the point that 45% of US STEM undergrads are foreign students who intend to return home with their US-subsidized education and skills. Our manufacturing economy is so weak that 74% of US STEM grads work in non-STEM related jobs. And why not? Engineering is complicated, competitive, and constantly demanding new skills. Finance is barely any different today than it was in the early 1980’s, when the Reagan Administration decided to blow-off enforcing Glass-Steagall. To become a finance millionaire, all you need is ruthlessness, a total lack of morality, and a little luck. You actually have to have talent, education, and perseverance to be Elon Musk.

The media has decided to blame Trump on liberals who, supposedly, ignored the “plight” of the poor white man. The reality is that the poor white man has always had the tools he needed to crawl out of poverty and step into the middle class: public education and white entitlement. The problem is these are the same poor white men who were easily distracted by the 1% aiming them at poor blacks, Hispanics, and every other ethic immigrant with a work ethic. The one skill poor whites will always have is an innate capacity for hate and violence. Otherwise, their claim of “white supremacy” is disproven by their existence.

There is, as best I can see, no fix for massive unemployment in the unskilled labor demographic. The best this lot can hope for is decent healthcare, available education for the small percentage with the values to work for it, tolerable housing, and the usual distractions of sports, religion, and guns. Preying on this crowd with easy credit and heartless bankruptcy laws is the Republican tactic and, so far, telling these nitwits that Democrats and liberals and immigrants are to blame has worked. It doesn’t make their lives any better, but it does keep their capacity for hate and violence in play.

Trump’s Election Upside

Buying local is expensive and a hassle. Most conservatives don’t bother with spending their welfare and social security money on local produce or on local products or services. Without progressives, liberals, and moderates there wouldn’t be any local businesses outside of second hand stores.

In 2016, 1,322,891 Minnesotans voted for Trump and 55% of Goodhue County residents voted for everything Minnesota Nice was supposed to oppose. There were worse places in the state, some voting as high as 74% for Trump (Morrison County, where 32,000 barely-educated, 97%-white, timid Fox News-misinformed souls live in rural isolation) and many of the non-urban counties citizens voted Trump in 60% or greater numbers. Morrison County is typical of those outstate Minnesota ungrateful wretches, where unemployment fell from 12% in 2009 to about 4% in 2016. “Thanks, Obama,” said no one while they voted for a guy who relished their displacement and economic destruction in 2009.

So, when I go to buy groceries, household products, building materials, appliances, furniture, services, or anything locally, I have to think, “I have a 60%-or-better chance of subsidizing a Trump nutjob with my money.” Obviously, if I buy from Target or Wal-Mart there is a 100% chance that I’m handing my money to a corporate fascist but I’m spending considerably less money (For example, $0.89 for eggs vs. $4+ for locally grown eggs). The premium I am paying might be for the expectation that I’m buying chemical-free produce, but I wouldn’t trust a Trump supporter to be half-honest as an organic food supplier. I wouldn’t trust a Trump supporter not to be a slave owner, for that matter.

This puts local suppliers in a tough position. They advertise they are not Republicans or Trumpeters and alienate 60% of their neighbors but self-identify with 90% of their customers? They don’t advertise their political positions and people like me assume they are part of the 60% and we pass on gambling that they might be sentient humans? Not my problem. My job is to avoid the Trumpeters as much as possible and that means I either go with known quantities or avoid local producers because they are expensive.

#148 Coming to America (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

A lot of young, smart, hip, politically-alert United States citizens are thinking about immigration.  Some are considering the effects of uncontrolled, irrational over-population of an already resource-crowded nation, some are trying to find a sane political system, some are convinced that the United States is about to go on a fascist witch-hunt and don't want to be "the last Jew looking for transportation out of Germany."  Maybe more than any time since the Civil War, there are more good reasons to leave the United States than there are to stay.  These are terrifying times and most of the terrorist forces are internal.  The possibility of Orwell's 1984 becoming a reality have never been more likely. Vancouver is being overrun by immigrants from the United States and housing prices are reflecting the cash those immigrants are moving from this country to Canada.

The problem with Americans immigrating outward is that most of the countries we'd consider immigrating to don't want us.  Our limited educations have limited our options.  We only speak pidgin English with a variety of accents, only a few of which are intelligible to folks outside of our regional neighborhoods. Rarely does a US citizen offer the receiving country the advantage of competency in the local language.  Many of us are not particularly talented, technically, socially, or politically.  Our education system has short-circuited our natural abilities to learn complicated disciplines and techniques, which suggests to the immigrating country that we may be a liability on their carefully designed economic systems.  So, those countries design restrictive immigration policies that require huge non-interest-bearing bonds (the most desirable European destinations ask for nearly a million dollars in non-interest-bearing bonds), long periods of unemployment designed to prove self-sufficiency, and have installed a huge variety of minor violations that will result in instant deportation (and loss of those security bonds).. 

The simple fact is, even for the best of our best, as immigrants United States citizens are not particularly welcome anywhere outside of our own boarders.  An even more discouraging fact is that most nations would rather suffer Islamic fundamentalist immigrants with no skills of any sort, no interest in fitting into the local culture, and a tendency toward violence at the hint of any perceived slight toward their native superstitions.

On the other hand, our government is particularly interested in maintaining low labor costs.  You can jabber about cynical humanitarian reasons for maintaining high immigration rates until you are almost liberal, but we all know our government represents our ruling class.  That group of anti-patriots doesn't want to pay a living wage for the services they fancy.  Have you noticed how many wannabe high government officials have lost their jobs when someone found that they had hired undocumented house-help?  This isn't a trend, it's the way of our world.  Actually, it's their world; the rest of us just rent a space in an unwanted corner.

The cool thing, for the low-brow ruling crud, about wanton immigration is that they don't have to pay for . . . anything.  They can de-fund education, because there is no shortage of desperate mid-tech refugees from totalitarian third world nations who will self-educate themselves, to the point necessary to fill the shrinking technical requirements of US jobs. Instead of paying a living wage to current citizens, the management class can pay a subsistence wage to a desperate immigrant.  Better yet, they can pay a fraction of a living wave to an illegal immigrant under threat of deportation if the employee complains. 

I want be perfectly clear about this.  It is not rational to consider illegal immigrants as criminals.  In a moral society, it is irrational to criminalize an effort to improve your life, to attempt to ensure a better life for your children, to leave a corrupt political system to immigrate to a more democratic place.  We can only call this “illegal immigration” because it violates our laws, not because it violates natural law.  The most damning thing we can say to the immigrant is, "Sorry, you'll have to go back home, fill out the correct paperwork , meet the requirements of this country for immigration, and please try again.  Thanks for taking an interest in the United States.  Have a nice trip back to where you came from."

The real criminals, the only immigration criminals, are the United States citizens who hire these immigrants in a blatant, intentional, and treasonous effort to violate the laws of this country.  This specially protected group of traitors and terrorists can wipe out any services the government provides to anyone but them.  They'll convince the uneducated masses that these basic services are "welfare" and convince the drooling middle class that anyone accepting welfare from the state (even if that "welfare" was actually an insurance program paid for by that same group of people) is un-American.  Soon, the only job left for the government will be to suppress populist political movements, to invade foreign countries to obtain natural resources for corporations and their executives, and to manage the distribution of national wealth and resources to the ruling class.  Which, if you honestly analyze the former Soviet Union or the current communist Chinese state, is exactly the practical result of communism.  This class of criminals are our ruling elites; best represented by the current President and his pack of inbred hillbillies.

For the rest of us, the question of immigration should be very simple.  Immigration drives down wages, reduces the opportunities for our children, overpopulates our cities and nation, strains the capacity of social systems, damages democracy by diluting the acumen of the electorate, and increases the power of the elite.

While monkey-boy Bush chatters about "jobs that Americans won't do," it's pretty obvious that he won't work for a pittance.  Our elitist spoiled rich kid President seems to think that his government income barely pays for part-time employment, based on the dozens of extended vacations he takes every year.  The number of jobs that Americans won't do is rapidly on the rise, because jobs that used to be middle class occupations are quickly being shipped to China and India or handed over to third world immigrants at minimum pay or less.  We "won't do" those jobs because they don't pay a living wage.  Americans seem to be doing multiple jobs a lot more often these days. 

Even more obvious, Cheney, the hand that turns the hurdy-gurdy crank for incurious George's dance, won't even work for the hundreds of thousands in salary and perks the Vice President receives.  Cheney still has his fingers and wallet stuck in Halliburton and other corporate and political income sources.  He practically laughed at the suggestion that part of volunteering for public service meant that you have to stop draining the public cash register until your stint of "service" was finished.  Cheney has always had and eaten his cake, from years of employment in corrupt political regimes from Nixon to the Bush family.  If he didn't have to work for only a few hundred thousand in 1972, why should he suffer now?

The rest of us do the suffering for him.  Under the guise of keeping waves "reasonable," Cheney and Bush and the Republican part drag wages below the poverty line and suppress both the economy and our political system.  Hard times are a conservative's wet dream.  When people are scratching for survival and worrying about hanging on to their marginal jobs, they don't worry about fine points like justice, racial equality, the social net, public education, or their children's future. 

When times are bad enough, humans commonly bash in the heads of their youngest children to conserve resources for adults and older, more independent and productive children.  Conservatives seem to put a real premium on the ability to rampantly use capital punishment as long as the criminals are poor people.  Maybe that's the conservative ideal.  Actions always speak louder than words.

January 2006

#198 Our Immigration Anti-Policy

The MSM talking head goofballs are shrieking about an Afghan terrorist cell discovered in Colorado. We're all supposed to be upset about the fact that a collection of Islamic refugees from a conservative loony bin have turned out to be crazy enough to be building bombs and planning mass murder in American cities. If that surprises you, you are exactly the 8-year-old intellectual capacity market the MSM caters to.

The rest of us should be asking, "Why are we still importing Afghan immigrants?"

We're at war with Afghanistan. We didn't import German immigrants during WWI or WWII. We didn't go out of our want to welcome Russian or East German immigrants during the Cold War. Why the hell is our dumbass government even considering immigration applications from Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Russians, Saudis, North Koreans, most of Africa, South America, or any of the places that routinely rant about "evil Americans?" It's not like we need their unemployed, unskilled, uneducated rejects. It's not like the "diversity" they bring to the United States provides the country with anything that will even support itself.

As crazy as it may seem, the United States, like practically every other country on the planet is overpopulated. While Americans have been making something of an effort to control family size, our idiot government has been making up for the "shortage" in idiots-being-born by ramping up immigration from the underclasses of the world. Bush/Cheney saw the Mexican boards swung wide open and more than 20 million illegals poured into and through our southern states during those brain-dead 8 years. If you had the feeling that the national IQ has been dropping in recent years, you might look to the Nation of Babble conditions our school systems are dealing with as the requirements for ESL classes overwhelms those facilities. You can't spend a lot of time on math and science when half of the classroom can't read or write the common language.

For an established nation, immigration should be a tool to temporarily obtain needed skills, technology, and innovation. We don't need more Section 8 "renters" or more Food Stamp consumers. There is a surplus of unprofitable shopkeepers in the inner city. Importing more minimum wage grunts than the economy can employ or moderate-skill workers intended to keep labor prices down is treasonous. We don't need to import intelligent, motivated students to compensate for the fact that our children are drawn to menial "creative" jobs because our corporations and factories are mismanaged by a pack of idiot MBAs who couldn't properly organize a dozen eggs. Like most every other country in the world, instead of exporting discontents or importing the same we need to fix our economy, education system, democracy, and political system before we arrogantly head off to build some other nation.

Yeah, I know, isolationist. I can live with that. I'd rather be isolationist than imperialist. It's hard to create vicious enemies when you are minding your own business.

Our current tax system was designed by idiots who shouldn't be allowed near sharp pencils. A rational system would be rewarding innovation, education, ecologically and economically friendly activities and making the opposite of those activities pay its own way. Our current system rewards speculators, the worst of all economic activities, and punishes innovation. Our system has been designed to protect the least useful of our giant and inefficient corporations--banking and finance--and to repress every industry that has a fighting chance at turning an honest profit.

Where our best companies get hit the hardest is in the talent they can find from our own citizens. Eight years of "No Child Left with a Mind" has decimated the talent pool and it will take at least that long to fix that mess. Fixing the education system could be financed by revising the tax system to encourage corporations to reward employees who upgrade their skills and by removing any corporate tax deductions for salaries and other perks over $100,000. Companies that attract people who are only motivated by money are only hiring mercenaries who will rape and pillage the business as quickly as they would leave for the next company that is foolish enough to hire them. The reward for that kind of stupidity ought to be a rational tax system that discourages idiot activities.

Instead of trying to fill the holes in the workforce with untrained, unskilled, and uneducated immigrants, our policy ought to be one that aims for quality not quantity, with a core desire to improve our own citizens' lives first.