You may be aware that GA House Speaker Glenn Richardson wants to gut the Georgia tax system, based on a theoretical whim.

Radical Georgia Moderate reports this “money quote” from a recent interview with Richardson:

But you have to also remember that their [Local Governments] power to tax has been used at a rate about 30 points higher than personal income has raised in Georgia in the last 15 years.

A clarification is in order.

I’m going to copy a comment I posted at RGM:

That may be one of those “damn lie” “apple-orange” statistics.

And let me stress “may.” Because I don’t know what he’s referring to.

Does he mean tax revenues went up faster than gross domestic income, or does he mean tax revenues went up faster than gross average income?

If it’s the former, then it may be a fair comparison, depending (at the very absolute least) on the burden of federal unfunded mandates. These mandates have grown over the last 15 years, and they would certainly justify some rise in tax rates. The question is, how much have Georgia’s rates grown as a result of unfunded mandates, compared with other states?

If it’s the latter, then that’s a very unfair comparison because Georgia’s population grew tremendously over the last 15 years. Growth in average income is different than growth in gross income. And it would be fair to ask for a clarification from Mr. Speaker about what sort of comparison he’s really making.

So is Richardson making the claim that tax rates went up, or just revenues? I would certainly hope Richardson is capable of understanding the difference. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Yesterday evening, after spending the day cleaning the condo and catching up on some work, I decided I needed to get out. And I knew I had some grocery shopping I needed to get done. So I took my bike — grocery bag panniers and all — to the local Trader Joe’s.

Celery. Check.
Butter. Check.
Bread. Everything expires tomorrow or the day after. Skip.
Sugar. Check.
Flour. Check.
Ok. They have flour. Where’s the yeast? Not next to the flour.

But they do have gelato! Yum! The package says I should wait ten minutes after taking it out of the freezer before eating. Once I grab it from the freezer section, it will take me ten minutes to get through the register and take my tasty treat home.

But back to the yeast. I searched high and low all over the store.

There is no yeast.

I grabbed the gelato and headed for the register. The cashier asks me if I found everything I was looking for. I hesitated a little, “Eh… Just about.” He asks me if there was anything he could help me find. I told him that I couldn’t find any yeast. Clearly, there was flour, but there was no yeast.

The guy wasn’t sure if Trader Joe’s sells yeast. He asks the guy at the next register. The guy at the next register says, “Yes, but only seasonally.”

I’m dumbfounded. There’s just nothing to say to that but to chuckle laugh out loud. My cashier says, “Ha! I didn’t know there was a yeast season!”

The two of us are laughing together at this concept. Maybe yeast grows best at certain times of the year? Maybe it just sells better at certain times of the year. Like there’s some particular Christian holiday associated with making bread, and that’s the only time Trader Joe’s sells yeast?

Ah, well. There’s no use in pondering. At that point, I paid for the groceries, went home, and noshed on some delicious gelato.

The end.

It’s true. Perhaps.

According to the Energy Information Administration, Carbon Dioxide emissions decreased by 1.3 percent in 2006, even as GDP grew by 3.3 percent.

But there is another press release. Imagine the implications: world energy use is expected to grow by 57 percent between 2004 and 2030. Check out the line graph marked as “Figure 2″ in that release. Apparently, humans have made more use of renewable energy than nuclear energy for quite some time.

Even so, break out your global warming blankets. Coal’s share of the world energy market is expected to grow faster than any other source of energy between now and 2030.

h/t: ScienceDaily.

I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be out of commission. I don’t want to post much (not that I normally post much anyway) while I begin a possible transition to a new host.

So in the meantime, watch this video from StreetFilms. Sam Schwartz discusses some solutions for curbing traffic in New York. As long as developers are going ga-ga over Public-Private Initiatives, could someone in the Atlanta area hire this guy? Certainly his firm could come up with better solutions than a brainless think tank.

Certainly it’s better than doing nothing, and pretending that’s a solution. (h/t Doug)

Sorry for the lack of activity here lately. There is too much for me to blog about, and no time to write any of it.

I recently walked around Midtown just to take photos, and play around with the manual setting on my camera, and was pleased by the results. Oooh…. pretty pictures!

Meantime, one of the Streetsblog authors recently visited downtown Atlanta and gave this rather accurate assessment:

It wasn’t anything human that felt menacing to me, however. It was the ponderous architecture, the windswept, empty plazas, the planned environment in which nothing is on a human scale and in which no organic human interaction can easily take root. How sad that this is the face Atlanta’s civic leaders have chosen to show to out-of-towners.

Too many people are concerned about availability of parking in the in-town grid. This is the natural result, prime real estate that receives hardly any use at all:

The good news is I got to wash my hand. That felt great.

The bad news is the fracture has not yet healed. That’s not so great, and it means I’m in a cast for another month. Again, the doctor (a hand surgeon) offered to do what is supposed to be a quick surgery that will fix the fracture. It involves drilling a tiny hole in my hand, inserting a small screw, and patching the hand back up. No thanks, handyman. As a general rule, I say if surgery is not necessary — that is, if there are alternatives — then surgery is not necessary, and I’ll take the alternative.

With apologies for not posting more often, not much has happened in the past couple of weeks that I’ve been able to blog about — or wanted to blog about.

A few noteworthy items:

• I’m about halfway through The Power Broker, which I started reading back in October. It’s a hefty, but remarkable look at the life of Robert Moses.
• It is official that I really did break my wrist. It’s non-displaced, which means nothing moved around. So, it takes less time to heal. My cast will come off in t-minus seven days and counting. I can’t wait to be back on the bike.
• I’m still drafting a response to Rusty’s post about PR/Social Marketing trends. Whether I’ll eventually post it may be another story.
• The SMARTRAQ presentation on Friday included a lot of information I already believed about the market for dense, walkable, urban living. More on that later. The SMARTRAQ site, apparently is undergoing revision. I don’t know if they mean to do this, but there are now a lot of documents you can download if you want ‘em.

That’s it for now. In the meantime, I only have so much time left over before I can use an injury as my excuse for not blogging more.

How many metros have I been on?

Got at b3co.com!

The Art Leadership League of GA will be presenting a forum for this year’s candidates for GA School Superintendent. It will take place this coming Monday, October 23, 7:00 p.m. at GA Tech’s Ferst Center for the Arts.

The facts about the benefits of arts education are well-documented. Show up and show your support for arts education in Georgia’s public schools!

When I disabled comments earlier, I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to post to the blog if no one could respond. So there.

But now I’m back, and with Word Press. I took someone else’s template and heavily modified it to look a little more like the old look I had before. So hopefully, you agree that the look looks good. Now the fun part is getting folks to adjust to the new RSS feed address. I’ve set up a redirect for the server to take care of that for now.

Suggestions, comments, criticisms… speak now or forever hold your keyboards.