Maybe I'm too jaded and cynical, but I don't respond well anymore to symbolic political gestures:
The Paula Hughes campaign says, “Stop that car!” The mayor's take-home city car, that is.
In a Wednesday news release, Hughes said she would sell the city car now used by Mayor Tom Henry and use her own transportation to get to work and to conduct city business.
Don't get me wrong. I like Paula and think she's running a good campaign and presenting a credible conservative alternative to the Henry administration. But, come on. Who cares if she uses her own car instead of a city car? This "I will lead by example and do more with less" stuff is just cheap theatrics designed to get the attention of
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Indianapolis used to let cops take their marked cars home with them, and use them for personal matters.
I thought it made a lot of sense. Cop cars spend most of their time sitting with their engines idling. By the time they get 70,000 miles on them, they are *shot*. Personal errands put miles on the car without putting a lot of wear on the engine. It wasn't free, but it was a nice benefit you could give cops in lieu of higher pay, and by increasing visibility of cop cars on the street, it discouraged crime and traffic offenses.
It got killed as a political gesture. Sometimes, I think the chief requirement of political candidates is a lack of intelligence.
"It wasn
Cities try to steal tax base by giving tax incentives, and it doesn't work, because what you can easily gain, you can easily lose. Win Moses gave a bunch of money to a company that made industrial-grade PCs. The company went under before they ever moved to Fort Wayne.
And Philadelphia didn't steal Lincoln by offering tax incentives. They got it by offering a community that the president's wife was willing to live in. They said it was something about financial markets, but sheesh, dollars travel electronically across the globe more easily than they travel physically across the lobby.
Are teachers underpaid? Half of them quit the occupation within five years of getting their teaching license. I'm not sure that raising pay would fix that, nor that it's something we want to do, even if it would. Effective teachers are the ones that are doing a job they want to be doing, not ones that are mercenaries. If teachers are leaving an occupation they love because their families deserve better, that is probably something we want to do something about, but I'm not sure what statistical metric would tell us that.
As a rule, when you can spend pennies to add something that your negotiating partner values at dollars, it's a smart move. If they value it at pennies, and it costs you dollars, it's an incredibly dumb move.