Why tax incentives for jobs fail

Minnesota has a program to create tax-free "Job Zones (JOBZ)" to give an incentive to companies to create more jobs in distressed areas. It seems to work as well as most corporate welfare. Here's a story on the report from the Legislative Auditor and here's a brief summary of the boondoggle:

• There is no formal mechanism within JOBZ for evaluating whether a subsidy is needed, and, if so, whether a more limited subsidy could achieve the same business expansion.
• Within the business subsidy agreement itself, there is no deadline for creating the promised jobs, and no requirement to maintain the jobs through the life of the tax forgiveness.
• Using state unemployment tax data submitted by the firms benefiting from the program, the auditor's office found that the increase in employment at JOBZ businesses was 20 to 30 percent lower than what DEED was reporting.
• Although JOBZ was supposed to target economically distressed areas for business tax relief, need has not been a factor in designating JOBZ zones

Flushing good money after bad

With the U.S. supposedly teetering on the edge of recession, Congress is preparing an "economic stimulus" package to [help prevent recession/slow the progress toward recession/make the recession less severe]. Unfortunately, Paul Krugman (economist) notes that most of the stimulus isn't going to those who will actually spend it. Which makes it a pretty expensive ($150 billion) "not much of a stimulus" package.

Water in the news

Two items on my RSS reader feed today look at the scourge of bottled water. The first repeats the debunking of the "8 glasses a day" myth and the second explores the environmental impacts of producing tons of plastic for bottled water.

You can read previous MoldyBlue coverage of bottled water, including the revelation that most of it comes from the tap and the ridiculous price markup (a few thousand percent).

The Story of Stuff

An insightful, clever video on the cost of consumer society.

The "worth it" moment? For every pound of trash you toss, 70 pounds were created to make that product or packaging.

Damn.

Where does your tire tread go?

From the expert at AskPablo, pretty much everywhere:

Well, some of it ends up in the air as PM10 (particulate matter that is 10 microns in diameter) which we might breath in. Some of it ends up as that dark grime on your rims (although some of that is brake pad dust) and windshield. The rest waits by the side of the road for the next rain storm to wash it away. Once in the storm drain the little rubber bits probably make their way to the ocean where they happily float around.

Unfortunately for the little critters in the ocean these little bits look a lot like food. In fact in some areas of the oceans man-made particles outnumber plankton and other microscopic critters by an order of magnitude! When these bits make their way into an animals belly they don't break down and can't be digested. This means that they accumulate, leading to eventual starvation. If a larger fish eats it first the rubber may than accumulate in its belly until it is eaten by a seabird or mammal, and so on...

The idiocy of designer thirst quenching revealed

Thanks to public pressure from organizations like ThinkOutsidetheBottle, Pepsi Cola will now add this statement to their crystal clear, mountain-scape Aquafina label:

From a public water source

Translation: tap water.

Aquafina isn't the only company charging you 6,000 times more than your local municipality for identical water. Dasani by Coke is also tap water. Other bottled waters aren't much more up front. Poland Spring isn't tap water, but it's not from the actual Poland Spring in Maine, which dried up in 1967. It's well water.

I blogged previously about other side effects of drinking bottled water, from the rising incidence of cavities when kids stop drinking fluoridated tap water to the exorbitant cost. The Natural Resourced Defense Council has more on the lower health quality of bottled water (bacteria?) and the different levels of federal regulation of municipal (lots) and bottled (little) water.

A summer week roundup

I've been doing a lot of "spending time outside" in the all-to-brief northern hemisphere summer, so that's why the posting volume has decreased here at the Moldy. Anyway, just to keep you interested, here's some quick looks from around your world.

1. The Chinese keep finding new ways to innovate when it comes to food processing.
   

Baozi are a common snack in China, with an outer skin made from wheat or rice flour and and a filling of sliced pork. Cooked by steaming in immense bamboo baskets, they are similar to but usually much bigger than the dumplings found on dim sum menus familiar to many Americans.

Sound good? Here's what a Beijing TV station found is really being put into your local baozi:

Squares of cardboard picked from the ground are first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda -- a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap -- then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning are stirred in.

Maybe this TV coverage will be the modern-day version of The Jungle?

2. How walkable is your house? This Google Maps mashup finds local hardware, grocery, and dry cleaning stores (and parks and libraries...) and plots their distance to your home, scoring neighborhoods from 0-100. My wife and I life in a neighborhood scoring a not-so-great 37, but they probably don't count the 4-block walk to the lake.
   

3. A fat people, we Americans are finally getting pre-packaged foods in non-obese portions. Of course, this lovely pre-packaging also means a lot more garbage. The following may be good advice, but will many people try it?

It's simple and quick to measure out your own serving sized snack packs. Just take a look at the serving size information found on the nutrition label. If a serving is given as a number of pieces (ex. serving size: 20 pieces), count out that many pieces into a graduated measuring cup. Look to see if the number that you've counted comes to 1/4 cup, 1/3 cup, 1/2 cup, etc., and measure that amount for the rest of your servings instead of counting. If the serving size is given as a measurement, then simply measure that amount. If you're fixing a snack to be gobbled up immediately, eat out of a re-usable dish. If the snack is for later or lunch boxes, use a reusable container or a baggie that can be rinsed out for re-use.

Half a million iPhones means a lot of garbage

What happens when a revolutionary new Apple phone hits the market? A lot of old cell phones hit the landfill. With as many as 500,000 iPhones moved in the first weekend, trash trucks will likely be loaded with several thousand old mobile phones.

"If everyone recycles their phones, close to 1.5 million pounds of cell phones won't wind up in the garbage can," [president and CEO of Materials Processing Corp] said. "It's the difference between everybody saying, 'Who cares?' and everyone saying, 'We can do our part.' It's all about education."

Already the average American has three to five of them lying around, which stacks up to a nationwide total of 750 million unused phones just lying dormant.

The disturbing aspect of the coming disposal onslaught is that - due to the presence of heavy and precious metals - old cell phones are both highly toxic and quite valuable.

Cell phones already are the largest and fastest growing segment of the e-waste world, and keeping them out of the waste stream is becoming more difficult. Consumers, on average, get new ones every 18 months, though many recyclers think the turnover is much faster.

If all the obsolete phones in storage were rounded up and recycled -- some 500 million of them -- the metals would amount to a treasure worth $340 million, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

So when you get your iPhone, take note of the recycling opportunities.

Most are separated into parts that get sold to companies that can reuse the pieces in some way. The cobalt in the batteries is recovered and turned into new batteries. The precious metals in the circuitry are stripped out and, in true cradle-to-grave-to-rebirth fashion, could wind up in your new computer's microprocessing chip

Both Best Buy and Staples provide cell phone recycling on-site, every day. If you'd like a karma boost, consider options like CollectiveGood, where revenue from recycling your phone benefits victims of domestic violence, or animals at the Humane Society. Pick your charity, and don't toss your phone.

A pile of plastic

Americans consume over 200 pounds of plastic per year, and a third of it (60 pounds) is simply discarded packaging. The financial total is equally staggering: 10 cents of every dollar, $400 billion dollars a year spent just to wrap, enclose and seal everything from bread to Batman toys.

The manufacturing industry alone sucks one-third of the energy and 13% of the water supply in the U.S., never mind all the waste -- 7.6 billion tons of it -- that's produced before products even reach our hands. And when those products do hit our homes, what is our first task? To extract whatever it is that we actually wanted to buy.

And what's the result of all this packaging? A tool designed just to help us liberate our consumer goods from the packaging. And you might want it.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, injuries from plastic packaging resulted in 6,400 visits to emergency rooms in 2004.

Hmm. Perhaps I'll go for the "open box" item.