Neil deMause

For the latest installment of my Baseball Prospectus column “Payoff Pitch” (free to non-subscribers this week!), a brief history of baseball revenue sharing, and why it’s neither evil socialism nor, um, good socialism:

A little over a week ago, Yankees president and designated apoplectic pit bull Randy Levine decided to divert attention from his team’s pitching woes by going after a new target: Rangers owner Chuck Greenberg. Five days earlier, the Texas honcho had asserted that it was his team’s efforts to sign Cliff Lee that had stalled the Yankees long enough for the Phillies to enter the picture with their ultimately winning bid. Levine, hearing these as fighting words, lashed out by calling Greenberg a welfare case… [read more]

My first biweekly (semiweekly? I can never remember which is which) column for Baseball Prospectus is up. The column is titled “Payoff Pitch,” and will cover all things baseball and economic; today’s is about the never-ending saga of the Oakland A’s attempts to move to San Jose, and why it may never end:

It has been almost a year since I last checked in here on the Oakland A’s long-running game of footsie with San Jose, where owner Lew Wolff has been dreaming of moving the franchise seemingly ever since he bought it in 2005. At the time, a three-man task force appointed by Bud Selig to decide the team’s future was entering its 12th month of deliberations. Selig promised that their report “will be coming in the near future.”

A’s fans will be forgiven for wondering if Selig meant a near future in geologic time… [read more]

The Bloomberg Administration prides itself on basing its policies on hard data. But in the case of welfare policy, an analysis of new city documents (and conversations with city staffers) shows that it’s been picking and choosing which data to keep tabs on:

In last week’s State of the City address, Mayor Bloomberg pointed with pride to the fact that despite the economic downtown, his administration has “kept the welfare rolls at historic lows.” Over the past 15 years, cash assistance rolls have shrunk from 1.1 million to barely 350,000—a figure that conveys the city’s commitment to “work first” policies that began under Rudy Giuliani and have continued under the current administration.

But documents released to City Limits reveal that even under the famously data-driven Bloomberg, there’s much that the city can’t answer about who’s applying for welfare—and what happens to them when they do. …[read more]

The Washington Post, transcribing a quote about the surveillance camera footage of the Tucson shooting:

Another law enforcement source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, said the footage shows the shooting “in grizzly detail.”

Omigod — it’s Sarah Palin’s fault after all!

Today’s PR email subject line of the day:

Many Teens Ignoring Parents’ Facebook Friend Requests

And as if having a press release headline that looks like it should be a fake Onion story teaser weren’t bad enough, it turns out that this is only a survey of Kaplan Test Prep students. So it’s statistically worthless.

Public relations professionals, John Lennon would like a word with you.

You may have noticed the recent spate of articles on the Census Bureau’s decision to replace the old “poverty line” with a spate of different alternative measures of poverty, in hopes of eventually settling on one that makes sense. I’ve written before about why this is a good thing to do — more interesting at the moment is the Economic Policy Institute’s take on what the new numbers mean.

What EPI has done is sliced and diced the poverty figures to show how the poverty rate changes as you account for various government programs. (The official poverty line counts welfare and other cash transfers as income, but not food stamps or the earned income tax credit, which is one reason why people want a new poverty measure.) The upshot of their analysis: “Social Security is the most important anti-poverty program in the United States.” To wit:

There are other interesting takeaways from this chart, not least of which is that without government programs, nearly one American in four would be living in poverty; and that, even if you count government-supplied medical care as cash income, still more than one American in ten counts as poor. But “Social Security is the most important anti-poverty program in the United States” is a pretty good start — especially given some of the rumors floating around.

We already used “Snowmageddon” last winter, and “Nor’Beaster” doesn’t seem to be catching on. Anyway, here are some photos of snowlocked Ditmas Park, circa 11 am the morning after.

Cars on Rugby Road near the corner of Newkirk:

See more photos…

A multi-year campaign to require that all employees in New York City receive paid sick time (which I first wrote about last fall) was quashed in October by city council speaker Christine Quinn. What happened, and what does it mean for worker rights and the city economy?

Last winter, it seemed all but inevitable that New York City would become the latest city to pass a law mandating that all city businesses provide paid sick leave to their employees.

A coalition of worker-rights groups, including Make the Road New York, the Working Families Party and the legal advocates A Better Balance had lined up to push for the legislation; a veto-proof majority of 37 city councilmembers had not just endorsed but co-sponsored a bill that would require at least five days of annual leave for all workers. And with the nation in the grip of swine-flu panic, visions of restaurant cooks showing up sick for work had even some small business owners admitting that some kind of sick-leave law was probably inevitable… [read more]

If you can’t be bothered to read Atlantic Yards Report’s crazy-long FAQ on its even crazier-long series on Bruce Ratner’s still crazier green-cards-for-financing schemes, you can now read my Cliff Notes version instead. (Not nearly so crazy, but with more Jackie Chan jokes.)

The ever-epic Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report today closes out his epic series on Bruce Ratner’s bizarre green-cards-for-financing scheme with a (wait for it) epic FAQ on exactly how the New Jersey Nets Brooklyn New Yorkers co-owner plans to take advantage of an obscure federal job-promotion program to save himself a jabillion dollars… [read more]

Earlier this month, the owners of Coney Island’s Luna Park announced they’d be booting out eight boardwalk businesses because they didn’t fit their image of a “year-round” Coney. That’s been the stated dream of city planners for years now — but is it a realistic one?

For Zamperla, the acclaimed developers of Coney Island’s new Luna Park, the honeymoon didn’t last long. Just five months after opening Coney Island’s first new amusement park in half a century, the Italian-based amusement-ride company came under fire for announcing early this month that it would not renew leases for eight of the 11 businesses occupying the boardwalk properties that it leases from the city. Gone would be Ruby’s Bar & Grill, a Coney institution dating to 1934, as well as several other food vendors and the popular Shoot the Freak game. Only a Nathan’s satellite store and two souvenir shops would survive. … [read more]