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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (135020)	3/27/2001 8:43:30 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571689

"There are bad traffic jams all over the US." LA is bad. Ok, Atlanta is worse, but not by much. It is almost as bad as Houston during Boom Time, and Houston has only just gotten ahead of things at the peak, some 20 years afterwards. It takes a long, long time to budget, plan and actually build roads. If California does not have a separate Highway Fund (like we do in Texas), then the shortfall in road construction matches up pretty well with Prop. 13. "And in 78 there was not any place where things where breaking down in CA?" Maybe not. In 1978 California was a long way from any type of reality check. They were doing far better than the rest of the country and had every reason to believe that it would always be that way. Of course they were wrong, but there was no proof, other than the fact that you cannot make linear projections into the future.

To: TimF who wrote (135020)	3/27/2001 10:42:48 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571689

Tim, I'm not saying it is necessarily unreasonable for you to dispute the importance of certain facts or statistics, but your argument basically just boils down to personal impressions which are hard to debate rationally. I think if you had been to LA ten years ago and then visited now you would not consider them personal. I have not been to DC in ten years but some of the breakdowns in infrastructure that I have read about there are common to as well. LA on a bright, warm sunny day in winter still has the magic and you can ignore the craziness. But I can assure you that it is not the LA of 22 years ago. You list two posibilities. I also mentioned a third. I consider that fiscal mismanagement...when the need is in one dept and you spend it on another foolishly or not foolishly, that to me is fiscal irresponsibility or mismanaged money. It didn't intentionally short its highway dept so that there would be horrendous traffic jams. There are bad traffic jams all over the US. Not like LA...LA is the worse city for traffic in the country..that's a fact based on a recent study and not my personal observation. Forget the freeways, day or nite, its rush hour and that includes the early morning hours of 3 or 4 AM. Its not uncommon at an intersection of two commercial streets to wait 3 turns of the light before going. Every freeway is metered and waits for the light to turn green could run up to 5-10 minutes. Near the end of my stay there, rarely did I use the freeways for commuting to and from work.....I used the surface streets especially residential ones to get home. It was faster than the freeways. LA needs mass transit badly.....and its building as much as it can afford. But funds are limited to a special law passed in the early 90's, I think, and monies they can get from the feds. Every penny of state revenues allocated for transportation is needed to complete the freeway system, for quake reinforcement of the freeways and for correcting deferred maintenance on the freeways. I think this could be slightly reduced by more (and better directed) highway spending but I can't see how this would reasonably considered a result of proposition 13 (I don't think the property taxes even went to highway spending). Once again do you think the politicians are shorting the transp. budget so there can be more traffic jams? And in 78 there was not any place where things where breaking down in CA? Their is reality. The reality is that CA spends an enormous and rapidly growing amount of money. I am sure there were problems in '78 but nothing like they are now. Back then, LA's residential real estate had just started a new boom, according to an LA housing analysis of the last 50 years of the century....and for the first time in its history, the median sales price on houses started to exceed the national median. Up to that point, housing had been fairly inexpensive. The increased prices generated greater amounts of tax revenue and the people didn't think that the level of taxation was reasonable.....but instead of making a rational and fair cut, they went for the jugular. And of course, the impact of what they had done did hit until 10-12 years later. That's because CA was in pretty good shape when Prop 13 was passed. Another example of the moral decay in CA is the incredible strength, power and wealth of their gangs. This is not something unique to CA, or to gangs from CA, or to the western states. Spending on law enforcement has gone up a lot in CA, and across the country. Maybe it should go up more, maybe it should not, but either way the gangs did not spring up, or grow rapidly because of low spending on law enforcement. They didn't, then why did they? I guess this may come as a surprise to you but good and strong law enforcement reduces crime. They would not go away and probably would not shrink much if law enforcement spending in CA doubled. When alcahol was illegal it funded a lot of gang activity. With narcotics illegal the gangs sell them and make a lot of money. Personally I would make the drugs legal which would dry up the money for these gangs and free police, court, and prison resources to deal with them and other crime problems. It would also end the incentive to kill over drug sales. The incentives to kill are many, drugs is just one of them. Tell me why LA for several years was the murder capital of the country, worse than even DC, Detroit and Gary? Why was it the bank robbery capital for most of the 90's? For three years after the riots, gun shots could be heard all over the city every nite......now its less frequent. Why is LA one of the major cities in this country for laundering drug $$$. Why was LA virtually the only city to riot in the early 90's? For the first five years of the 90's, 1 million people left the area. People left knowing they did not have a job waiting for them in the place to where they were going. Why? The only reason that LA was not permitted to turn into a city like Detroit or Gary or East St. Louis, oddly enough, is because the film industry is centered there. The federal gov't used the need created by the riots and then the earthquake to spend billions there. Other then electricity supply is CA really that much worse then New York or many other areas in the country? All the people I know who have spent a lot of time there (most particuarly in ths bay area and in San Diego) seem to like it there. Like everywhere, there are some really nice places in CA and the weather is incredible. I don't know N. CA very well so I won't comment, but with S. CA the problems are serious and they are spreading. In the early 90's, you rarely saw graffitti and other evidence of gang activity in Orange County, a county that separates LA from San Diego. Now its become much more common....and the other problems in LA are surfacing there on a more frequent basis. My educational background is in urban planning and public administration. While I don't practice in the field, my real estate projects require that I keep abreast of what's happening in our cities. You probably are familiar with the term anomie....specifically, urban anomie...it means social instability, alienation, isolation.....its probably greatest in a city like LA. People come from all over and they are accountable to no one.....standards and values are much different there. Its amazing how a little family life chills a guy's activities...and without it, how chaos can erupt. Egocentrism and eccentrism rule. You put all of this together and then take away the money to run the place adequately and you have problems. LA's impact on this country is big and its not necessarily all good. ted Enter symbols or keywords for search: QuotesStock TalkChartsNewsPeople Symbol Lookup