UM Student Dies

December 6, 2010 Leave a comment

There are two factors at play.

First, drivers in Coral Gables and Miami do not respect pedestrians.  In many other cities, a pedestrian in a walkway means STOP.  When you are driving it is your responsibility to watch out for the pedestrian.  For example, there is a flashing activated by pedestrians on Ponce de Leon in front of a series of doctors’ offices that drivers simple do not respect by slowing down or stopping.

Let’s face it, Miami is more like Santo Domingo than it is like Washington, DC.

Second, UM and other students walk around with their heads buried in their iphones and blackberries with total disregard for the traffic around them.  In fact, on the UM campus students just cross in front of you assuming that traffic will stop.  Many times a student has wondered in front of my car while talking or texting without lifting their eyes.

You will not change the drivers in Miami; UM  better reeducate their students, staff and faculty.  (And this is not a judgement on what may or may not have happened in the two recent sad and unfortunate deaths of UM students.)

University of Miami sophomore was killed early Sunday after being hit by a car near the Coral Gables campus, marking the second student within weeks to die from a crash.

via Crash claims life of another UM student – Miami-Dade – MiamiHerald.com.

Filed under Community, Coral Gables, Miami-Dade County

US Inequality–Latin American Model?

December 3, 2010 Leave a comment

Highly unequal countries tend to become unstable and dangerous places. How unequal do you want the United States to become?

via Fixing The US Budget – Straightforward Or The Hardest Problem On Earth? « The Baseline Scenario.

Our country  is gradually imitating the Latin American model of development with the latter’s great inequality (perhaps the worst region in the world), a huge gap between the few at the top of the income and asset pyramid and the mass at the bottom, accompanied by a fairly small middle.  In the US the middle and bottom have access only to increasingly poor education, restricting opportunities to lower paying jobs and not ability to accumulate capital (worse after the housing crisis) during their lifetime.

In the US the chance of progressing, related to education and opportunity, is rapidly narrowing for the middle class in the current unemployment crisis.  There seems to be little political desire to change the system.

The pure capitalist system works now for a few and, unless there is active government intervention to protect the low and middle income people, there is little prospect of changing these trends.  Things will get worse if the US extends income tax reductions permanently to the high income groups.

 

Filed under Coral Gables, Economy, National

Please Face Economic Reality Coral Gables: A Note From a Taxpayer

December 1, 2010 Leave a comment

More views for us that we are years away from reducing unemployment [these are the people that consume things], from a recovery in housing and from rising property values [also, years ahead, if at all].  Will the city government of Coral Gables, its commissioners and city manager face economic reality, or will they continue to hit taxpayers with ridiculous annual tax increases [of course, Miami-Dade county is worse and its mayor may soon find out about citizen unhappiness].

It could take years for the millions of people once employed by the housing industry — from construction workers to real estate agents — to find new careers or return to their former careers when and if a strong housing market returns.

“I think we also have a bubble in the labor market for state and local government employees,” he said, “and over the next two years we might see as many as one million of these employees lose their jobs.”

via Some Very Creative Economic Fix-Its – NYTimes.com.

Filed under Coral Gables, Economy, Miami-Dade County

Coral Gables: Looking for Good Economic News and Real City Financial Policies

December 1, 2010 Leave a comment

I continue to look for an analysis that leads me to think that we will soon see an economic recovery lead by consumer spending and private business activity.  But I keep finding solid evaluations that lead me to believe that it will take many years for unemployment and the private economy to respond.

I mention a.  Basically, he reminds us that the Obama Administration and the Congress have failed to provide enough government stimulus, have failed in fixing the billions of dollars of underwater mortgages and threw all of the cost of the financial debacle on taxpayers (rather than on the owners of the banks and investment houses who speculated in mortgages).  Basically, this is a failure of Obama, the Congress and the Fed.

He concludes that

…the future looks bleak. The last two recessions before this one–the early 1990s and early 2000s recessions–both had a financial crisis component. And after those recessions there were no visible signs of the magic of the market returning the economy to full employment through the economy’s natural processes, at least not until something else new came along. In the case of the 1990s the new thing that came along was the dot-com bubble and the technology explosion. In the case of the 2000s the new thing that came along was the housing boom and the coming of mortgage securitization.

Thus I can see no reason to believe that there will be substantial private sector forces to push the employment-to-population [ratio] up anywhere toward normal over the next several years. And we have shot ourselves in the head with respect to expansionary government policies. I see no possibility for any such on a large scale [recovery] for the next two years, and possibly for longer.

Message for the city government of Coral Gables:  you need to plan for the future and you should find a better balance of sacrifice between government, its employees and taxpayers.

Filed under Coral Gables, Economy, Government

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