How Low Can You Go? Dead-Last If You Live In Texas!

The Biennial Follies (aka the Legislative Session) just ended in Austin and the boys and girls did themselves proud. Texas leads the nation in executions and at the same time, when it comes to per capita spending for all public services: health, education — yada yada yada — the Lone Star State is the bottom-feeder of the Land O'The Free and The Home O'The Brave. Texas is so far behind the other states, the damn fools who sit in the State Capitol every two years think that they're in first place because the front-running states are about to lap them. This blogger heard of a Texan who was called an asshole by someone. The Texas wit replied, "If you're gonna be an asshole, be the best you can be." That wisdom passes for Texas public policy today: if you're gonna be a failure, be the best you can be. If this is (fair & balanced) shame in Austin, so be it.

[x Waco Fishwrap]
Yee Haw — Texas Is Last, And Dropping
By John Young

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ahead aid away balanced billion brags budget business capita children created cuts dewhurst dollars done dropping face federal frail governor highways hole increase lawmakers lieutenant likely million nation needs pageant passage per percentage perry private reform republican road school services shapleigh shortfall spending state tax texas thanks wince years yee

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Upon Senate passage of the state biennial budget, the well-attired David Dewhurst was busting his buttons.

The lieutenant governor praised a state budget “that meets the needs of our growing state.”

State Senator Elliott Shapleigh, D-El Paso, had a different take: With this budget, the gorgeous state of Texas once again is jostling for the crown in the Miss False Economy Pageant, likely again to spend less per capita on human services than any other state.

“What’s the cost of being last?” Shapleigh asked.

What Shapleigh didn’t point out was that wherever Texas ranks, it is certain to fall further in the biennium ahead because it has clothed itself in policies that have put tax cuts ahead of obligations like schools, highways and preventive health care.

Governor Rick Perry, who looks good in any suit, hitched up his designer tie and bragged that Texas was alone among states in cutting taxes during a recession.

He spoke of a $172 million measure that increased the numbers of businesses exempt from the state business tax.

It’s as if the state won’t be needing that money down the road. But, of course, it will. Right now? Thanks to $12.1 billion in federal stimulus dollars, this budget holds the rate of spending increase to under 2 percent, below inflation and population growth.

Guilty pleasure: federal dollars

What will happen when those federal dollars go away is likely to make even the most hardhearted conservatives wince.

Remember, the state faced a $9 billion shortfall before Barack Obama rescued it.

Denouncing him all the way, our Republican leaders then set out to patch holes in the rotting life raft that we in Texas call state services.

Shades of 2003: That year Republicans, newly in control of the Legislature, went on a budget-cutting, privatization fest. But when it came down to certifying the budget as balanced, it was only a last-second infusion of $1.6 billion in federal aid that allowed lawmakers to say they had done their jobs under the law and balanced their budget.

Since then, our intrepid scofflaws have done much to make sure that Texas has a fiscal hole that one day will cave and collapse upon those who most rely on state services.

This was preordained with the bill that in 2005 misleadingly was framed as “school finance reform” but was really all about property tax cuts Texas couldn’t justify.

Because lawmakers committed themselves to a one-third property-tax cut over four years, and because the business tax they created was not sufficient from the start to replace the lost revenue, they created a structural deficit that would have come into play this session if not for the big bucks from Washington.

Now watchdog groups from the left and right are projecting that in two years, Texas could face a shortfall of $13 billion to $15 billion and no escape hatch except to butcher state programs for the frail, infirm and mentally disabled.

Schools and highways? Maybe we can just do without. Can’t private enterprise educate our children? Don’t big-butted pickup trucks and off-road SUVs obviate the need for roads in the 21st century?

When those federal dollars go away, we will see what shreds are left of the fine threads our governor and lieutenant governor model today.

In the meantime, consider some brags.

Texas is last in the nation in per capita spending.

It has the highest percentage of uninsured children in the nation. It is last in the percentage of residents with high school diplomas. It does, however, lead the nation in executions.

Perry and Dewhurst believe that cutting taxes that are already 49th lowest nationally per capita is how we address our needs.

Chides Shapleigh, “Those who value tax cuts over children . . . have put Texas at risk in her ability to compete and succeed.”

That’s what being last means. Last and dropping. Ω

[John Young has been editorial page editor and columnist of the Waco Tribune-Herald since 1984. A Denver native, Young was editor of the Valley Courier, a small daily in Alamosa, CO, from 1978 to 1984. His column is carried regularly on the Cox News Service and New York Times News Service. Young’s column appears Thursday and Sunday in the Waco Tribune-Herald.]

Copyright © 2009 Waco Tribune-Herald

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

If This Blog Falls In A Forest, Does Anyone Read It?

Cogito, ergo I blog. Forgive me, for I can do no other. This post, like thousands of others in this blog's bloated archive, rattles around in the vast reaches of cyberspace — largely unread by anyone other than the blogger. 'Tis the virtual equivalent of the Will Smith character ("Robert Neville") in "I Am Legend" (2007), making a daily radio broadcast to a dead city. In the message, Neville offers to meet any other survivor. The reply is silence. So, this blogger — slaving over a hot keyboard — "hears" nothing from any readers. This blog is not alone in the cybersilence. If this is (fair & balanced) happy futility, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest
By Douglas Quenqua

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“HI, I’m Judy Nichols. Welcome to my rant.”

Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother and murder-mystery writer from Wilmington, N.C. Mrs. Nichols, 52, put up her first post in late 2004, serving up a litany of gripes about the Bush administration and people who thought they had “a monopoly on morality.” After urging her readers to vote for John Kerry, she closed with a flourish: “Practice compassionate regime change.”

The post generated no comments.

Today, Mrs. Nichols speaks about her blog as if it were a diet or half-finished novel. “I’m going to get back to it,” she swears. Her last entry, in December of last year, was curt and none too profound. “Books make great gifts,” she began, breaking a silence of nearly a month.

Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

“I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments,” Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. “Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that.’ ”

Not all fallow blogs die from lack of reader interest. Some bloggers find themselves too busy — what with, say, homework and swim practice, or perhaps even housework and parenting. Others graduate to more immediate formats, like Twitter and Facebook. And a few — gasp — actually decide to reclaim some smidgen of personal privacy.

“Before you could be anonymous, and now you can’t,” said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.

Ms. Sun’s posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from “The Simpsons” — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the “best online diary” award at the South by Southwest media powwow.

But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions — wrong ones — about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.

“The Internet is different now,” she said over a cup of tea in Midtown. “I was too Web 1.0. You want to be anonymous, you want to write, like, long entries, and no one wants to read that stuff.”

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”

That’s a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized! This was the catnip that intoxicated Mrs. Nichols. “That was when people were starting to talk about blogs and how anyone could, if not get famous, get their opinions out there and get them read,” she recalled. “I just wanted to post something interesting and get people talking, but mostly it was just my sister commenting.”

Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta, had no trouble attracting an audience to his self-explanatory site, Things My Dog Ate, which included tales of his foxhound, Watson, eating remote controls, a wig and a $400 pair of Prada shoes.

“I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart and another with a company that made dog-proof cellphone chargers. Mr. Goodman posted a video of his dog failing to destroy one.

“I guess the charger wasn’t very popular,” he said. “I think I made about $20” from readers clicking on the ads. He last updated the site in November.

Mr. Jalichandra of Technorati — a blogger himself — also points out that some retired bloggers have merely found new platforms. “Some of that activity has gone to Facebook and MySpace, and obviously Twitter is a new phenomenon,” he said.

Others simply tire of telling their stories. “Stephanie,” a semi-anonymous 17-year-old with a precocious knowledge of designers and a sharp sense of humor, abandoned her blog, Fashion Robot, about a week before it got a shoutout in the “blog watch” column of The Wall Street Journal last December. Her final post, simply titled “The End,” said she just didn’t feel like blogging any more. She declined an e-mail request for an interview, saying she was no longer interested in publicity.

As for Ms. Sun of Cromulent.org, she has made peace with being public. She has a new blog, SaladDays.org, where she keeps her posts short and jaunty, not personally revealing; mostly, she offers up health and diet tips, with the occasional quote from Simone de Beauvoir.

What is she after this time around? In person, she was noncommittal, but that night she sent a follow-up e-mail message.

“To be honest, I would love a book deal to come out of my blog,” she wrote. “Or I would love for Salad Days to give me a means to be financially independent to continue pursuing and sharing what I love with the world.” Ω

[Douglas Quenqua is a freelance journalist and a regular contributor to The New York Times. He also writes for the New York Observer, CNN.com, the New York Press, Fortune, The Advertiser, and Brandweek.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

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