News & Politics

Georgetowner • September 7, 2011

I want to alert my constituents about the alarming decline in sworn officers in the District’s Metropolitan Police Department. As of earlier this week, the force was down to 3,818 officers, very near the 3,800 number that Chief Cathy Lanier identified as the threshold for real trouble. With an attrition rate of around 15 officers per month, we could be in the neighborhood of 3,750 sworn officers by the end of the year. How did this happen?

I introduced a bill in April that would require the District to maintain a minimum staffing level of 4,000 sworn officers at all times. This was not meant to be a statement that 4,000 is some magic number that will eliminate all our public safety concerns. Rather, it would force the Mayor and the Council to fully fund 4,000 officers and not play around with the money. As we went through the 2012 budget process, I advocated for budgeting a dollar amount for MPD that would allow the Department to increase officers at a rate to get us above 4,000 by the end of 2013, which would enable Chief Lanier and MPD to continue to fight crime and meet the community’s expectations for service.

While the Mayor had asked for 120 new officers in his 2012 budget request, the equivalent of ten per month, these do not even account for the total number of officers who leave every month. Further, there is a substantial lag time of six to seven months between when a new recruit is hired and when he or she is on the street. To make matters worse, 1,100 officers will be eligible for retirement in the next four years. Many of these officers will leave as a result of proposals to cut police officer pensions. This will effectively double the current rate of attrition, but the budget does not contemplate this dramatic shift. Numbers are too low already, and for the foreseeable future we will only be hiring one new officer for every two who leave. I don’t use this word lightly, but I think it is fair to call this situation a crisis.

At one time, MPD had over 5,000 officers. When I first joined the City Council in 1991, we had 4,500 officers. I have seen a decline in officers year after year and have attempted to slow or stop this situation from continuing. There were supposed to be 30 officers in the police academy beginning in June. Currently, there are none.

While the Council added $10.8 million to the 2012 MPD budget, ostensibly to fund new officers, these numbers fail to take into account this acceleration of attrition and historic unrealistic budgeting by the Mayor and the Council. $10.8 million in new funding doesn’t go very far if there is a $7.9 million “spending pressure” in 2012, as there was in 2011. Spending priorities must be established and in my opinion, hiring more policemen and women should be the top priority.

If decisive action is not taken when the Council returns from recess, our worst projections will become reality. My goal is to raise awareness of the dire situation facing the residents of the District while we can still correct it. My hope is to motivate the Mayor and the Council to develop a plan to fund the Department adequately. With an appropriate budget in place, MPD can reverse the trend of dwindling numbers and reach a staffing level of over 4,000 sworn officers by the end of next year. 

David Post • August 25, 2011

Are we in a double dip recession?

Economists hedge their bets using percentage. Most suggest a 30 percent chance we’ll go back into a recession though some go out on a limb and peg the odds at up to 50 percent.
The better question is whether we are out of the one we entered three years ago. Unemployment rose from 5 percent to 9 percent and has not come down since.
I’m not an economist, so what do I know? But the answer is Yes. 100 percent. We are in a recession. My money says the Labor Department will confirm this after it accumulates and analyzes the data in 45 days.

A recession occurs when a country produces less than it did for two prior quarters. Production declines when people stop buying, and the U.S. economy relies upon the consumers buying 70 percent of production. Another 30 percent comes from federal, state and local governments.
Congress is locked in a death spiral to cut federal spending. Federal discretionary spending – dollars not on auto-pilot – will be the lower as a percentage of the economy in over 50 years.
Entitlement spending – those dollars on auto-pilot like Social Security and health care – is rising. Most of entitlement spending is merely a transfer of money from one taxpayer to another. For example, social security takes money from current workers and transfers it to retirees. That’s government spending, but not production.

Increased Medicare, Medicaid, and military health costs are rising because of we are getting older, poorer, and wars have hidden costs.

The federal government’s stimulus two years ago – a continuing source of political warfare – was very small and mostly offset by spending cuts by state and local governments. Teachers, policemen, firemen, and government employees were fired. School budgets and local governments have reduced services. Highways and bridges and other infrastructure needs are not being built or fixed. In the end, the net additional government spending was close to zero.

A fired teacher who starts a new lawn care or babysitting business earns less and buys less.
Consumers buy less for many reasons. Wages haven’t grown in 30 years. Increased gas prices and food costs mean more money goes to the same quantity of goods, so fewer dollars are available to buy other consumer goods needed to pump up the economy.

Home values have declined 30 percent and demand has declined even more. Sellers are receiving less for their property and have less to spend after they sell. New construction is almost non-existent, so construction workers have had not work for years.

Foreclosures are four times higher than just a few years. Banks are nervous that flooding the market with almost 2 million foreclosed houses will push values down further. If that happens, more banks risk becoming insolvent and being taken over by the government.
History teaches that recovering from a recession doesn’t happen when real estate values decline. Jobs cannot grow without a stable real estate market which pulls construction, manufacturing, banking, furniture, materials like steel and concrete and aluminum, and so many other industries with it. These industries that feed construction are suffering. The real estate industry is in tatters – probably the equivalent of a depression.

Banks are nervous about lending because they are afraid they won’t get paid back. Even with historically low interest rates, lending standards make it more difficult for borrowers to qualify for loans to buy a house or start a business. Consumers are buying fewer new cars.
Fewer consumers are using their credit cards that allow them to buy-now, pay-later. For years, economists have scolded consumers for using their credit cards and told them to save more. Nervous consumers are paying down their credit cards and using them less. Fearful about an uncertain future, consumers are saving more.

Stock markets have lost 15 percent of their value – trillions of dollars – in a few weeks. Retirement accounts are lower. Consumers are scared. The U.S. public and world markets have lost confidence in the U.S.’s ability to govern itself. Other countries worldwide have their own economic problems, so they are buying less.

If we’re not in a recession, that is merely a technicality. We went into a recession when unemployment rose from 5 percent to 9.8 percent. Because 90.2 percent of the workforce doesn’t produce and buy what 95 percent of the workforce would, the new goal line for determining growth became the 90.2 percent. So if unemployment drops to 9 percent and the economy rises to 92 percent of full production, that’s about 1 percent growth, though lower than the 95 percent production before the recession began. Only an economist could call that growth.

Are we in a recession? Absolutely. Have we come out of the past recession? No. We all know this. Only the economists don’t.

Gary Tischler •

Last week, I saw a headline in one of the few remaining daily newspapers left in the whole wide world which indicated that the reptile house in Washington would be renovated.

Naturally, I headed to Capitol Hill to see what was going on in Congress. Turns out nobody was home. The guys are out of town, on vacation or running for president. Or just running.

But you know it’s been a weird summer. Heck, it’s been a weird year. Just plain everybody is still embarrassed and ticked about the way our resident politicians from the president to congress to tea party-ers to the media dealt with the debt crisis, which went from a routine yearly thing to political Defcon 3 in about the time it takes John Boehner not to return a call.

Was that a mess or what, and now you know why Eric Cantor was smiling. He for one is not running for president, but the dean of the GOP Young Guns is aiming straight at the speaker’s job. Squeaky wheel, indeed.

The Chinese are mad at us, so mad they picked a fight with the Georgetown University basketball team in China on a good will game tour.

The S&P is mad at the country because of the way Washington—that would be the fools on the hill and at the White House—handled the whole debt mess, so much so that it lowered our borrowing rating to AA, a low-light battery if there ever was one.

The media seems to be mad at Obama along with any number of people who are unhappy about him vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard with rich people. Did you expect him to vacation, I don’t know, Detroit, maybe or on the Texas-Mexico border with the drug lords?

Already, the media is in a kind of frothing frenzy about the GOP primary race, especially now that Texas Governor Rick Perry is in the race. Michelle Bachman won the straw poll in Iowa, whatever that gets you, Tim Pawlenty dropped out, Ron Paul finished second and Newt Gingrich, living up to his first name, finished behind but stayed in for reasons that defy logic, common sense, and Murphy’s Law.
Perry, the dark-eye-brow man who looks like and drawls like a Texas gunslinger, all ominous and mouthy, made his announcement in South Carolina, where all common sense takes flight to destinations unknown. Or as someone said, in South Carolina, Yahoo is a state of mind not a search engine. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, and Perry is the only current GOP runner who thought that might be a good idea.

So far Perry has called the Chairman of the Federal Reserve a traitor, and reiterated that global warming is a science community plot to get grants, or something like that. He’s easy to mock if you’re one of those soft liberal commentators, or Bill Maher, but he’s also serious. I’m guessing he’s a pretty good poker player. Bill Clinton called him a handsome rascal, an odd choice of words which indicate he reminded him of another handsome rascally Southern governor of yore.

Almost everything that could happen this year, happened: Japan, the Middle Eastern spring turned into violent summer, the death of Bin Laden, the heightening casualties in Afghanistan, the debt ceiling fiasco, the shootings in Arizona, strikes by high paid athletes, horrible draughts, fires, tornadoes and heat waves, a stock market operating like a whiz bang, atrocity in Norway, the Kardashian wedding.
It’s nice to still be able to feel safe in our own neighborhoods. I mean, it’s not like we could get hit by an earthquake or something.

Oh wait. That happened. Just now, or less.

Cans flew off the shelves in the Adams Morgan Safeway, where a counter girl was in tears. Cars shook on the street; a chimney fell off an apartment building as a 5.8 or 5.9 quake hit the East coast, specifically Virginia. The Pentagon was evacuated. I was walking on 18th street and felt nothing. But the folks at the post office were a little off, feeling dizzy and everyone felt and sometimes saw buildings shake.

Well, there goes that.

A hurricane is coming, and it’s Hurricane Perry.

Georgetowner •

I thought I had written my last Georgetowner article about the 2012 budget last month.

Unfortunately, the Council was taken by surprise by the pocket veto from Mayor Gray and will have to revisit some of the problems that we had just worked hard to solve. Of particular note was the proposal to retroactively tax interest earned on out-of-state municipal bonds all the way back to Jan. 1, 2011, which I have been advocating strongly against. You may recall that the Council passed an amendment on July 12 to push the implementation of this new tax proposal on municipal bonds back to cover only earnings from Jan. 1, 2012 and beyond, giving everyone a little more time to make responsible changes in their investment portfolios and tax payment schedules if needed. Now that the Mayor’s veto has undone the Council’s solution, I will be working again with my colleagues to come up with creative new ways to postpone and then repeal this tax, which disproportionately impacts retirees. It is absolutely irresponsible for Mayor Gray and the Council not to grandfather in existing bondholders, as has been done in every other state without exception. Three of your at-large Councilmembers – Phil Mendelson, Michael Brown and Vincent Orange – do not support grandfathering unless the income tax is increased. This is another bad idea which will harm our city.

I also wanted to briefly address the iGaming proposal that is currently under consideration by the District’s Lottery Board. In case you are not familiar with the concept of iGaming, the idea is to offer internet games such as Texas Hold ‘em Poker on computers in yet to be determined locations within the District. In response to concerns from community members at a Finance & Revenue Committee hearing I chaired, I asked the Lottery to schedule a number of community meetings to receive input on iGaming before moving forward with enabling these games in any neighborhoods. I subsequently requested that the Lottery move to further accommodate community members by postponing meetings originally scheduled for August to more convenient times in mid-September and October, and am pleased that they have done so. This change in the schedule will allow more residents to return from out of town summer trips and be engaged in the community meeting process.

Finally, Advisory Neighborhood Commission redistricting is well underway. The neighborhood-based subgroups of the Ward 2 Redistricting Task Force have been checking in with my office regularly, and I look forward to seeing their final recommendations in the near future. Please feel free to contact Ruth Werner at rwerner@dccouncil.us or Kevin Stogner at kstogner@dccouncil.us, both in my office, to be added to the redistricting distribution list, or to answer any specific questions you have.