One problem we have in the United States is that so much of public revenue and spending is in the hands of state and local governments who are set up to run strongly pro-cyclical fiscal policies. When times get tough, revenues go down. Thus, instead of increasing spending to help tide people over during the downturn, balanced budget rules force spending to go down which tends to deepen the downcycle. With the downturn in the housing market, we’re seeing a somewhat different spin on this as the mortgage collapse leads to declining property tax revenues. It’s not clear yet to what extent these housing issues are going to spill over into the jobs and income picture — so far a well-timed uptick in exports seems to be keeping people employed — but the tax side is one of several mechanisms by which it threatens to do so, undermining local budgets even in the absence of a recession.

Photo by Flickr user jffmrk used under a Creative Commons license

Via Robert Farley, a brilliant 1863 editorial by The New York Times on what they mistakenly believed to be the occassion of John C. Breckenridge’s death. First sentence: “If it be true, as is now positively declared, that a loyal bullet has sent this traitor to eternity, every loyal heart will feel satisfaction and will not scruple to express it.”

I’m with The New Republic in favoring efforts to make it easier to fire employees at the inept DC Public Schools central administrative office. I don’t, howeve,r see why one would frame the issue this way:

Only three members of the 13-person board–one of them was Marion Barry–sided against Rhee. In short, the sclerotic establishment can no longer count on its old political patrons. And her victory was an important object lesson for other cities: Reformers can now battle the teachers’ unions–and trounce them.

Back in the real world, this was a pretty mild reform limited to non-union employees. The public sector unions are bound to oppose it, of course, but the proposal was designed to minimize opposition, thus maximizing the odds of it passing and something useful actually getting done for DC kids. Framing every reform effort as a death blow to the unions seems like a good way to make sure reform efforts fail. Meanwhile, the reality is that the Washington Teachers Union is a relatively weak union. People know that DCPS is a low-performing system by big city standards, and people “know” that strong teachers unions are responsible for urban school systems being bad, so it just must be the case that DC’s schools are bad because of a super-strong union.

BryklynLibrul demands speculation about the possible impact of a third party wanker ticket: “If this turns out to be serious, who does it help, the GOP or the Dems? Idle speculation at this point, but I’m curious to know what MY and others think.”

The cop-out answer is that it depends on who the nominees are.

But taking a wide-angle view, the rise of a serious third party challenge typically signifies the collapse of the incumbent governing coalition. Certainly Perot in 1992, Wallace in 1968, and Roosevelt in 1912, Van Buren in 1848 fit that pattern, and Strom Thurmond in 1948 probably does as well. But that’s not to say that the third party insurgent always helps the challenger party. The Humphrey-Nixon race in ’68 ended up extremely close and it seems reasonable to assume that the bulk of the Wallace vote would have gone to Nixon (as it did in 1972) had he not been in the race. And it can get even more complicated, as Perot’s presence in the 1992 race probably helped Bill Clinton win the election but there’s good reason to think he could have won even without Perot, and in a one-on-one fight maybe could have secured a majority and thus had a stronger hand dealing with congress in 1993.

Now, of course, the weird thing about Bloombergism is that there’s no sign that he’s filling an open ideological niche. Pat Buchanan, by contrast, drew half a percentage point in 2000 at a time when his campaign didn’t really have much of a rationale. By 2008, immigration is going to be a higher-salience issue, economic populism will have a larger constituency, and nationalist anti-war sentiment will have gone unrepresented in mainstream politics throughout years of failed war-fighting. You could imagine either Buchanan or, perhaps more likely Ron Paul, having a real impact. Otherwise, there’s really nothing doing.