Tag Archives: economy

Quote of the Day: Debt? What Debt?

by RJVAshely22 Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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From Donald Trump, on his plans to run up the deficit in order to rebuild infrastructure:

I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts. I’ve done very well with debt….Now we’re in a different situation with the country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal. And if the economy was good it was good, so therefore, you can’t lose.

There you have it. If Trump crashes the economy, he’ll just default on our sovereign debt. Easy peasy. Why is everyone so worried?

POSTSCRIPT: This is a pretty good example of the Trump Dilemma™. Do you ignore this kind of desperate plea for attention? Or do you write a long, earnest piece about just why it’s a very bad idea indeed? You can hardly ignore it since it’s now coming from the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. But giving it oxygen just gives Trump the free media he was angling for in the first place. In this case, I’m semi-ignoring it. Josh Marshall takes the opposite tack here. Decisions, decisions.

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Quote of the Day: Debt? What Debt?

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Here’s how to spur more investment in clean energy

by PattiIBRGhendz Posted on April 13, 2016

Here’s how to spur more investment in clean energy

By on 13 Apr 2016 2:31 amcommentsShare

Next Friday, dozens of world leaders will gather in New York to officially sign the U.N. climate deal they hashed out in Paris last December. But the Paris Agreement will have only limited impact unless the world figures out a way to pony up the money necessary for a global transition to clean energy. Analysts put the price tag around $1 trillion annually through 2050.

The researchers behind the New Climate Economy, an initiative of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, think they know how to get those ponies in line. In a report released Wednesday, they write that the key to generating investment in clean energy is making the investments less risky; not digging up new money per se. There’s plenty of private investment money that could be channeled toward clean energy — hiding anywhere from pension funds to insurance companies’ portfolios. National governments, multilateral development banks (MDBs) like the World Bank, and others just need to figure out how to steer it in the right direction.

Part of the challenge is that many investors currently think of renewable projects the same way they think about fossil fuel projects, write the authors of the report. Investing in the energy sector is investing in the energy sector, the logic goes. But because fuel is free for many types of renewable energy, up to 90 percent of the costs for these projects are borne up front, and that makes them fundamentally different investments from other types of energy infrastructure.

“Renewables have often been penalized because the financing structures are geared toward fossil fuel projects,” Helen Mountford, director of economics at the World Resources Institute and program director of the New Climate Economy, told Grist. And that means we need new models.

One of the solutions is to get national governments and MDBs directly investing early in renewable projects, which then makes it less risky and more appealing for the private sector to come in with additional dollars. The New Climate Economy authors write that for every dollar invested by MDBs, up to 20 can flow in from the private sector. A core question, then, is how to convince players like the World Bank to invest more in sustainable infrastructure.

John Roome, senior director of the World Bank Group’s climate change program, argues that the MDBs are already heading in that direction. “We believe this is critical for our poverty alleviation mission,” Roome told Grist. “I think there is significant demand out there” for decreasing carbon footprints and increasing climate resilience, he continued, and the Bank views the main challenge as one of implementation.

Last week, the World Bank released a new climate action plan that promises increases in climate-related funding, which Roome and his team believe will lead to more mobilization of private finance. The plan has the Bank supporting 30 new gigawatts of renewable energy capacity over five years, but “a lot of that is not necessarily directly fully financed by the Bank,” says Roome. Instead, it will come from the private sector. The action plan claims that the World Bank “will aim to mobilize $25 billion of commercial funding for clean energy over the next five years.”

Governments will also need to shift their policies to encourage private sector investment in clean energy. “National governments have a huge responsibility to get the policy framework right,” says Mountford. “We’re underpricing carbon. In most cases we’re pricing it at zero or pricing it very low.” Carbon taxes and carbon-trading systems could do a lot to spur investment in renewables, since taking the environmental and social costs of carbon into account helps keep renewables cost-competitive.

We also need to stop using public funds to support dirty energy, says Mountford. “Globally, there are something like $600 billion going to fossil fuel subsidies. That’s the wrong direction,” she says. The G20 alone spends $450 billion annually subsidizing fossil fuels.

MDBs, too, will need to move away from supporting dirty energy. The World Bank, for example, still hasn’t committed to halting funding for fossil fuel projects. While Roome says it hasn’t funded a coal project in five years, natural gas projects are still on the table (and in rare situations, developing countries can still qualify for coal funding). He sees these projects as a necessary evil of sorts. “If you look at heating in Eastern Europe, a lot of that heating is currently generated from coal,” he says. “If you want a central heating system, it’s pretty difficult to run that off the back of renewables. Gas, in that environment, is not only the cheapest and gives people the benefits of a heating system, but it has a much lower carbon footprint than the alternative.”

Overall, the plummeting cost of clean energy promises to help the world edge toward that $1 trillion annually, “but it’s not enough on its own,” says Mountford. “We have to get the financing right.”

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These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

by KayleighPlain Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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In late November 2015, New Orleans police arrested a man named Joseph Allen for attempted murder in relation to one of the bloodiest nights the city had seen in years. Shots had broken out at a party in Bunny Friend Park, wounding 17 people. Allen was the first of several suspects to be detained after an eyewitness named him as a shooter.

Except that Allen hadn’t been in town at the time. Within a week of his arrest, his private attorney had tracked down footage of the 32-year-old shopping for baby clothes with his pregnant wife at three stores in Houston, Texas, putting him far from the crime scene. A week or so later, Allen learned that no charges would be filed against him—he was released from jail the next day.

In his office down the street from the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, chief public defender Derwyn Bunton couldn’t help but think about what might have happened to Allen had he ended up with a public defender. In the wake of a budget crisis that had ravaged the Orleans Public Defenders Office several years earlier, Allen would’ve been lucky even to talk with one of the office’s overworked lawyers—there were 42 at the time—within any reasonable time frame. Only then would one of the office’s eight investigators have received a request to look into Allen’s case.

Bunton suspects his investigators wouldn’t have made it to Houston in time to obtain the store security footage that exonerated Allen. “I’m not going let people believe that everything is okay, that they get assigned a public defender and we’ve got that kind of resources,” Bunton told me, adding that two of the 10 Bunny Friend Park co-defendants are being represented by his office. “We don’t.”

Here’s how one Florida public defender’s office turned things around. Tristan Spinski

This past January, with more budget cuts looming, Bunton’s office did something drastic: It began turning away clients. The American Civil Liberties Union quickly responded with a federal lawsuit against the Orleans Parish defenders and the Louisiana Public Defender Board that oversees them. The suit alleges that rejecting new cases amounts to leaving people languishing in jail without counsel in violation of the Constitution. Late last month, Bunton told the Times-Picayune that his office cannot afford to represent itself in the lawsuit.

“The lawsuit itself can’t change anything,” concedes Brandon Buskey, an attorney for the ACLU. “The political actors in Louisiana have to step up. The lawsuit can put pressure on them. It can point out that the system is unconstitutional. But if the state wants a better system, it has to fix it.”

In a court filing—and an interview with Mother Jones—Bunton denies that his actions were unconstitutional. “Is it better to violate the constitution by being incompetent and ineffective?” he says. “I think where we would be violating the Constitution and ethics and professional standards would be to continue to take on cases we don’t have the resources to handle.”

Bunton’s move was just the latest in a string of decisions since last July designed to keep the lights on at the struggling defenders office, which represents more than 80 percent of New Orleans’ criminal defendants. It has been a rough turnabout for an office that as recently as five years ago was cited by the Southern Center for Human Rights as “an inspiration” for its “vigorous client-centered representation.” Even then, the office was looking at a shortfall for 2012 and had begun to cut back on staff. “Louisiana is an extreme at this moment,” says Marc Schnidler, executive director of the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute. “How they got to where they are—that tells the story of indigent defense in this country.”

Like many of their peers around the nation, the Orleans Parish public defenders are saddled with massive caseloads on a shoestring budget. In 2014, the office’s 51 attorneys juggled more than 22,000 cases—a whopping 431 per lawyer—which included nearly 8,000 felonies and nine death penalty cases. And while rejecting clients was seen as a last resort, Orleans is not the only one doing it. Fourteen of the state’s 42 judicial districts have cut back on their defender services and six have stopped taking certain cases, according to James Nixon, chair of the Louisiana Public Defender Board.

The way the state funds defense for its poor is deeply flawed, criminal justice experts agree. Louisiana is the only state where public defenders rely heavily on income sources that fluctuate significantly. In its 2015-16 fiscal year, Orleans Parish got just 40 percent of its budget from the state—which faces a new shortfall of at least $800 million for the upcoming fiscal year. The rest of the money had to be found locally. Nearly 40 percent of the defenders budget relied on local court fines and fees. But according to a state Supreme Court report, the number of traffic tickets filed in Louisiana courts—already low post-Hurricane Katrina—has dropped by 29 percent since 2009. This has translated to a shortfall for public defenders. “What you have is a local funding crisis,” Nixon told me.

The chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court noted in a recent annual report to the legislature that numerous defender offices could face insolvency. “We’re funding public defenders offices off the backs of folks who can’t afford a lawyer,” explains Clarke Beljean, a Plaquimines Parish defender who worked at the Orleans Parish office for six years. The Defender Board’s 2014 report called the situation “unstable, unreliable, and untenable.”

And this system was supposed to be an improvement.

Prior to Katrina, impoverished defendants in Louisiana didn’t even have access to full-time public defenders. Instead, parish-level defender boards enlisted private lawyers to handle those clients. New Orleans was served by the Orleans Indigent Defender Program, which consisted of 54 attorneys with a slim $2 million budget, working part time out of a room in the courthouse.

The hurricane disrupted everything. In Katrina’s wake, according to a 2012 evaluation, only six attorneys were left to handle more than 6,000 open cases in Orleans Parish. The local defender board resigned, a new reform-minded group took over, and the Indigent Defender Program became the Orleans Public Defenders office. In 2006, it won a $3 million Justice Department grant for rebuilding efforts and to fund 40 positions for two years. New lawyers were recruited, salaries were increased, and the original lawyers were told to give up their private practices and focus on public defense. The office, which was adorned with donated furniture and equipment, found new digs and shifted its philosophy to a client-based model, meaning that public defenders would now be connected with defendants within a day of their arrest and stick with them throughout their case—instead of being assigned to a courtroom and handling whatever cases came through in a given day. In 2007, the legislature established the state Public Defender Board to oversee similar district offices.

Bunton was named Orleans Parish chief public defender in late 2008. Bolstered by grants and city and state funding, the office grew into a 72-attorney shop with 20 investigators and a $9 million budget. “If we were a stock, we were trending up,” Bunton says. But four years later, the office was hit with large cuts at both the state and local level—including a drop in traffic-ticket revenue. Bunton tearfully broke the news to staff: He would have to lay off 27 people.

The remaining attorneys, who already worked 60- to 80-hour weeks, had to pick up the slack. “It’s like, you’re already trying to keep your head above water while holding however many pounds of weight on your back and then they throw you a baby. You’re like, ‘What do I do?'” says former Orleans defender Clarke Beljean, who survived the cutbacks that day. “And then they throw you another one. And then they throw you a few more, and they’re like, ‘What do you mean, you can’t hold these seven babies above water?’ Honestly, that’s the feeling.”

Bunton’s lawyers routinely exceed the maximum recommended caseloads that many experts view as excessive. In 2015, the office had four attorneys handling roughly 9,500 misdemeanors—a rate nearly six times the recommended limit of 400 per lawyer. The offices’s 55 felony defenders had 7,705 cases that year, which falls within the 150-felony limit, but the office recently lost more lawyers, including veterans whose high-level cases had to be redistributed. Three months into 2016, the office projects that the 39 remaining felony attorneys are already exceeding the 150-case limit, its spokeswoman told me. As of April 3, the office had refused 53 cases and put another 56 on a waiting list.

A 2009 Department of Justice report noted that, to properly defend 91 percent of the city’s indigent defendants—private attorneys working pro bono would presumably handle the rest—the Orleans office would need an $8.2 million budget and 70 staff attorneys. In real life, Bunton’s office is projected to end up with just $5.9 million—$1 million less than it expected. About 30 percent of the shortfall is expected to come from subpar revenue from fines and fees. Meanwhile, the office has one-third fewer attorneys than the DOJ recommended, and about half as many as the DA’s office employs.

In a letter to city and state officials last June, Bunton outlined a cost-cutting plan he said would “likely cause serious delays in the courts and potentially constitutional crises” for criminal justice in New Orleans. A month later, his office imposed a hiring freeze. To make ends meet, the defenders office even resorted to crowd-funding. In September, after the comedian John Oliver did a segment about the problem on his HBO show, it raised just over $86,000 to help the office narrow its budget gap. At a November 20 hearing, Bunton asked the courts to stop sending his office new cases. In January, hoping to stave off further hardship, the New Orleans City Council shelled out $200,000 for the defenders. Jo-Ann Wallace, executive director of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, says that Orleans Parish’s decision to turn away clients as a last resort is consistent with “their ethical obligation to provide zealous representation.”

On the state level, the Public Defenders Board is facing cuts that could range from 30 percent to 62 percent, Nixon told me. Under the latter scenario, two judges wrote in an op-ed, the board could “force the complete elimination of juvenile defense services statewide.” A final budget is due from the legislature in July.

As the Orleans office waits for the ax to fall, Bunton is ethically torn about the choices he’s been forced to make. “It sucks,” he says. “I don’t do this job to tell people no.” In fact, he’s embraced the ACLU lawsuit as a way to pressure state officials. Indeed, over the past decade, deluged defenders’ offices in Florida, Missouri, and Montana have turned away clients as a way to get legislators’ attention. It has worked, too. In 2013, Florida’s Supreme Court ruled that Miami-Dade County’s efforts to turn down cases was justified.

But what to do with those defendants in the meantime? Last week, private attorneys assigned to represent seven poor clients in Orleans Parish filed court motions requesting compensation—or permission to withdraw from the cases. Tulane law processor Pamela Metzger told CityLab that the clients in custody should be released: “You can’t make lawyers do this for free, or ask them to spend out of their own pocket for overhead and costs.” Assistant DA David Pipes countered, “It is their job to protect the rights and interests of their clients in their individual cases…If that means that a private lawyer must defend the poor without the certainty of knowing they are going to be paid, that is preferable to seeing justice denied, criminals turned loose, or victims and defendants languishing in uncertainty.”

On April 8, New Orleans Judge Arthur Hunter ordered the release of the seven clients, concluding that their rights to an effective attorney should not rest on “budget demands, waiting lists, and the failure of the legislature to adequately fund indigent defense.” He added,› “We are now faced with a fundamental question, not only in New Orleans, but across Louisiana. What kind of criminal justice system do we want? One based on fairness or injustice, equality or prejudice, efficiency or chaos, right or wrong?”

“There’s no such thing as Cadillac justice and Toyota justice. There’s justice, and there is injustice,” Bunton says. “And we are not going to be complicit in any injustice.”

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These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

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Women’s Soccer Is Raking in Cash. Why Do US Players Get Embarrassingly Low Pay?

by Brendaea Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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The latest labor dispute between the World Cup-winning US women’s national soccer team and the US Soccer Federation has illuminated an issue for workers throughout the country: the gender pay gap. On Thursday, five high-profile players filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the soccer federation of gender-based wage discrimination.

“This is the strongest case of discrimination against women athletes in violation of law that I have ever seen,” Jeffrey Kessler, the players’ lawyer, told the New York Times.

Numbers cited in the EEOC filing show just how vast the divide is. Despite projections that the women’s team will bring in $5 million in profit in the coming fiscal year and nearly $18 million in revenue, the players allege that they are paid four times less than their male counterparts. If the women win 20 exhibition matches, the minimum number the team is expected to play annually, they would earn $99,000 each. Men’s team members would earn $352,500 for doing the same—and would earn $100,000 even if they lost all 20.

US Soccer told the Times that it hadn’t seen the complaint and was “disappointed” by the players’ actions.

“It’s just completely unbalanced,” goalkeeper Hope Solo, who has signed on to the action, told Mother Jones in December. “The argument is, well, women should not get paid as much as men, because they don’t bring in as much revenue. We hear it all the time. Our argument back is that we have the best television ratings between the men’s team and the women’s team, and had we gotten more marketing dollars, we would have more ticket revenue.”

Here’s a look at the gender pay gap between the men’s and women’s national teams, according to the players’ complaint.

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Women’s Soccer Is Raking in Cash. Why Do US Players Get Embarrassingly Low Pay?

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There’s Still Slack in the Labor Market—But Not a Lot

by RudolfMazza Posted on March 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Brad DeLong looks at a chart showing the employment rate of prime-age workers (ages 25-54) compared to January 2000 and says:

Without nominal wage growth of 4%/year or significantly rising inflation, no way I am going to believe that the U.S. economy is in any sense at “full employment” with an essentially zero output gap right now.

It’s not that I disagree, but I think that choosing January 2000 stacks the deck. That’s the absolute peak of the dotcom boom, and there’s no reason to think we’re going to replicate that anytime soon. A better comparison would be the mid-90s, when the economy was strong and growing but not at the peak of a bubble. Here’s what that looks like:

We’re still not at full employment. But we’re getting there: the unemployment rate is low; the expanded unemployment rate is getting close to low; and wages are increasing a bit. Additional inflationary pressure would be yet another sign of a tight labor market, but we haven’t seen that yet.

We still have work to do to get to full employment—and it’s possible we’ll never get back to 1990s levels. That depends a lot on precisely who’s dropped out of the workforce and why. But we’re getting close.

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There’s Still Slack in the Labor Market—But Not a Lot

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Huzzah! The economy keeps growing while energy emissions stay flat

by CoralLeahy Posted on March 16, 2016

Huzzah! The economy keeps growing while energy emissions stay flat

By on 16 Mar 2016commentsShare

Uncork the champagne: We solved that whole carbon emissions thing. The International Energy Agency (IEA) announced Wednesday that 2015 saw global energy-related emissions stall for the second year in a row, despite continued 3 percent growth of global GDP. Zooming the lens in, the same was true of energy powerhouses like the U.S. and China, which both reported a drop in energy-related carbon emissions over the same time period.

International Energy Agency

The flattening of energy sector emissions can largely be attributed to an expansion in global renewable capacity, suggests the IEA. Renewables accounted for about 90 percent of all new electricity generation last year, and wind energy alone accounted for more than 50 percent of this figure. With global GDP growth continuing to hover around 3 percent, the numbers appear to confirm what coalitions like New Climate Economy have long argued: There’s no such thing as a tradeoff between the environment and the economy.

Energy-sector emissions have only declined three other times in the past 40 years — see the highlighted time-points in the chart above — and each of those were during an economic slowdown. Two years of flat emissions means we’re getting somewhere.

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Of course, this is the real world, and nothing’s quite so black and white. You’ll notice some intentional phrasing here: “energy-related CO2 emissions.” The energy sector will always be a big slice of the carbon-pollution pie — the biggest! — but it’s not the only slice. What about all the other emissions; say, from the agricultural sector? From land-use changes? From landfills?

While we won’t have up-to-date information on a lot of these other indicators for another few months, we do know that deforestation, El Niño, and rampant wildfires have already lent themselves to spikes in atmospheric CO2 levels. In Indonesia, for example, emissions due to October wildfires often eclipsed the average daily emissions from the entire U.S. economy. Land use in Indonesia accounts for more than 60 percent of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

And while energy-related emissions may have fallen in China, they have increased in the Middle East and Europe.

So yes, the IEA figures are reason to celebrate (go ahead, take a sip of that champagne), but they’re also a reason to double down on renewables.

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Donald Trump Might Be Single-Handedly Ruining the Economy

by JonathaPFX Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Companies and things Donald Trump has started boycotting in the past few months:

  1. Oreo cookies
  2. Carrier air conditioners
  3. iPhones and all other Apple products
  4. Starbucks
  5. Macy’s
  6. The Republican debate, for a while anyway
  7. Traveling to Mexico
  8. HBO
  9. Univision

Typically, the reason for the boycott is some kind of personal feud (5, 6, 8, 9); companies making things overseas (1, 2); companies doing things he disapproves of (3, 4); and countries doing things he disapproves of (7).

In fairness, he’s on the business end of plenty of boycotts too. He might personally be responsible for last quarter’s lousy economic growth.

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Donald Trump Might Be Single-Handedly Ruining the Economy

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Sanders and Clinton Disagree on Climate. Why Won’t Debate Moderators Ask Them About It?

by VivienMcLendon9 Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If human civilization were facing a potentially existential threat, you’d probably want to know about what our leading candidates to run our country thought about it, right?

There was no question on climate change during Thursday night’s PBS-sponsored Democratic debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This, despite the Supreme Court dealing a meaningful, though likely temporary blow to the centerpiece of Obama’s climate policy on Tuesday and a defiant President Obama including a sweeping set of proposals to transition the nation’s transportation sector toward fossil-free sources of energy in his annual budget proposal on Wednesday.

This isn’t the first time moderators have ignored climate change. Back in December, just a few days after world leaders achieved the first-ever global agreement on climate change in Paris, Democratic debate moderators were silent. By my count, moderators have asked substantive questions on climate change in only half of the first six Democratic debates. That’s better than nothing, but given how consequential and urgent the topic is, I expect more.

Apparently, so do voters. In a Quinnipiac poll released on the day of the Iowa caucuses, 11 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers ranked climate change as their top issue, third only to the economy (36 percent) and health care (22 percent). Climate change ranked higher than terrorism, immigration, and gun policy combined. And caucus-goers who listed climate as their main concern broke for Sanders by a whopping 66 to 30 margin, almost certainly making the race there closer.

Perhaps one of the reasons climate doesn’t come up more in the debates is the conventional wisdom that Clinton and Sanders basically agree on the issue. But that’s simply not true. There are substantial differences between the two candidates.

Both agree that climate change is real and not a massive conspiracy between scientists and the government so that nerds can get rich stealing tax dollars. Both want to cut subsidies to fossil fuel companies and shift the country toward renewable energy (though neither to the level scientists say is necessary). At this point, these are basic staples of Democratic Party orthodoxy—and what casual observers already know.

Their differences, though, are substantial: Sanders’ climate plan is much more comprehensive than Clinton’s and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a faster rate. He’s forcefully linked climate change and terrorism. He’s staunchly opposed to continued fossil fuel exploration on public lands and has vowed to ban fracking outright, a stance Clinton doesn’t share. His focus on ridding politics of corporate lobbyists is a swipe against Clinton, whose campaign has taken money from fossil fuel companies. On the flip side, unlike Clinton, Sanders wants to phase out nuclear energy, a position that many scientists and environmentalists increasingly don’t share, given the need to transition toward a zero carbon economy as quickly as possible.

As for Clinton, though her presidential campaign was launched with a historic focus on climate, when she talks about climate change, it often feels like she’s playing catch-up. In recent months, Clinton has shifted her position to be more hawkish on Arctic drilling, the Keystone pipeline and on restricting fossil fuel exploration on public lands, likely in response to pressure from Sanders and voters.

When Sanders won New Hampshire this week, he devoted a big chunk of his victory speech to climate change. When Clinton conceded, she didn’t mention it once. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the New Hampshire winner (Donald Trump) is a climate conspiracy theorist. People often ask me if I feel hopeless about climate. Only when it’s not taken seriously.

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Sanders and Clinton Disagree on Climate. Why Won’t Debate Moderators Ask Them About It?

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Your City Will Never Get Rich Hosting the Super Bowl

by Lashawnda45U Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, right in front of the restored Ferry Building, a fan village known as Super Bowl City is expected to draw at least a million visitors this week. Super Bowl Host Committee officials project that not only will San Francisco finish in the black after the nine-day event, but that it also could generate anywhere between “a couple hundred million to $800 million” in economic output for the city. What’s more, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study projected that the Bay Area could see at least $220 million in direct revenue from business during the Super Bowl, the most ever.

But where do those numbers come from, and how accurate are they, really? We reached out to two economists who study the impact of mega sporting events, and their assessment was less than rosy. Here are some takeaways:

Every year, the same studies come out. Every year, they’re wrong. When the NFL and its host committee estimate the event’s economic impact, they tend to forget how the city operates before the event, says Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College. For example, San Francisco’s hotel occupancy rate typically has hovered around 90 percent in February. So when Super Bowl fans flood area hotels, they’re likely just filling spots that would have already been filled. Additionally, residents can be reluctant to visit the Super Bowl City area over fear of traffic, congestion, and increased security, displacing typical economic activity and leaking money out of the city. Notably, on Super Bowl City’s opening day, only 7,000 people showed up.

“I’m expecting next year they’re going to come out and say the host city is going to turn into New York City. Not really. It’s silly,” Zimbalist says. “Every year they come out with the same stuff. The studies that they do are based on a false methodology and unrealistic assumptions.”

The host city’s Super Bowl committee usually keeps quiet about the projected economic benefits to the host city or the region. Previous analyses by university researchers, in partnership with the NFL and host committees, have measured the gross economic benefits anywhere between $400 million and $700 million. For instance, researchers at Arizona State University found that last year’s Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona, brought $719 million of total economic impact to the state.

ASU would not release the entire study to Mother Jones under an agreement with the NFL and the host committee. But Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of Holy Cross who examined the study’s summary findings, told Mother Jones that researchers failed to take into account the region’s typical activity. Matheson argues that the true impact for the host city usually falls between $30 million and $120 million.

San Francisco gave up a lot to get Super Bowl City, and still needs to figure out how to pay for it. This year, Super Bowl City is 45 miles away from the actual big game, which will take place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. But San Francisco’s taxpayers are on the hook for at least $4.8 million in city services during Super Bowl week. Why? An independent budget analysis found that San Francisco did not make a formal agreement with the NFL and the Super Bowl Host Committee to receive a reimbursement for those services. Or, as SF Weekly recently put it, “The Super Bowl is here on little more than a handshake deal.”

As Zimbalist notes, $4.8 million is a small number when you consider San Francisco’s $8.96 billion budget. Still, he says, “it’s $5 million not being spent on road repairs and schools.” Or on the city’s roughly 3,500 homeless, some of whom recently relocated from the Super Bowl City area to a growing tent encampment under a highway overpass in the Mission District. San Francisco magazine counted 100 tents in the area, though homeless advocates and officials say the encampment has grown over the course of a few months, even years. A host committee official told Bloomberg News in January that the group would invest $13 million of the $50 million it had already raised in charities addressing homelessness and poverty.

Meanwhile, as part of the Super Bowl bid, San Francisco’s police, fire, and emergency management departments “signed letters of assurance to not seek reimbursement from the NFL” for providing more services during the Super Bowl—an arrangement that Matheson said isn’t unusual. (Last year’s Super Bowl likely cost the city of Glendale at least $579,000 and as much as $1.25 million in security and transportation cost overruns.) Only two departments will earn money back from the host committee—the fire department (a 6.7 percent reimbursement) and parks and recreation (100 percent). Jane Kim, who sits on San Francisco’s board of supervisors and has called the city’s non-agreement “the worst deal ever,” pushed for a last-minute bill to make the city renegotiate with the NFL, less than a week before the events at Super Bowl City were set to start.

The city’s municipal transportation agency and police department will spend a combined $3.8 million for services to Super Bowl 50 events; the transportation department will spend more than $700,000 on additional parking enforcement alone. The city will try to cover this by redirecting funds in different department budgets along with staff time from future projects “to support this extraordinary special event.” For now, some city workers will volunteer their time during Super Bowl week.

All told, it could’ve been worse. Take Super Bowl XLVIII, which left New Jersey residents with a $17.7 million tab. Or last year’s big game, which cost Glendale—a city of 230,000 where more than 40 percent of its debt is set aside to pay off sports facilities—more than $2.1 million to pay for security alone. And while Santa Clara’s taxpayers still have to deal with the public subsidies that helped fund Levi’s Stadium, the city did manage to make a deal to earn back roughly $3.6 million in service costs for the Super Bowl.

“In the big picture,” Matheson says, “this is one of the cheapest for the taxpayers that we’ve seen.”

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Your City Will Never Get Rich Hosting the Super Bowl

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Economic Growth Slows to 0.7 Percent in Q4

by TanishaHod Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yuck. The US economy slowed down a lot in the fourth quarter of last year. GDP growth clocked in at a hair less than 0.7 percent:

For the year, GDP increased 2.4 percent, which is pretty much what it’s been for the past six years. So overall, this isn’t crushingly bad news. It just means the economy continues to putter along without really building up any steam. That’s better than Europe or China can say. Still, in the fourth quarter growth slowed, income growth slowed, and inflation was close to zero. And, as we all know, the stock market has been tanking lately. It’s sure not looking like it was a great idea to start raising interest rates—and if the Chinese economy goes south, it’s really not going to look like it was a great idea to start raising interest rates.

Naturally we want a political spin on all this, and that’s pretty easy: If this is just a blip, and growth returns over the next two quarters, then the presidential contest will remain a close-run thing. But if the economy flags badly for the next couple of quarters, Democrats are going to have a very, very hard time holding onto the White House. Are you ready for President Trump?

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Economic Growth Slows to 0.7 Percent in Q4

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