This week, it is the lottery that the business section contains.  This may reflect an ill-founded hope by the local business community that they, too, will receive some kind of a bail-out from the tax payers.  Of course, PNC got their own sweet deal in the form of massive tax savings for their acquisition of National City bank.  I guess that’s a lottery win right there.  But just as the lottery is a terrible investment for individuals, waiting for a bail out is terrible strategy for local businesses.

I am coming to the belief that this is some secret, deeper significance to these call-out boxes on the Sunday business section of the post gazette and cannot wait to see what they offer next week.

A man who police said stole a car and led officers on a chase that prompted them to evacuate a Wal-Mart store has been caught after spending the night at the home of an acquaintance.
Man accused of fleeing police twice is caught

I’m truly sory to have caused so much trouble. And for those who are asking, no, that is not my hair in the picture.  It’s a wig.

“Todd Underwood, 37, was arrested Thursday after he barricaded himself inside a home near 21st Street and Bell Road around 1 p.m., police said.”

I would further like to apologize for the poor choice in car that I chose to steal.  Next time I’ll pick somethingly classier.  Martin Levy has suggested a Classic Land Rover Series-2.  I don’t know what that is, exactly, but I’ll look into it the next time I need to steal a car to flee the cops.

I’d also like to give a shout out to those two kids, aged only nine and 12, who found me hiding underneath a bed.  If they hadn’t been looking for toys to play with, I would have been scott-free!  Good job, kids.

Finally I’d like to thank Google for their Google Alerts product that enabled my friend Adam to send me this news alert about what we can only hope is my Google Doppelgänger.

She paused for a minute and asked: “Papa, is Mars the god of George Bush’s war or the god of all wars?” After snorting behind my hand for a second, I calmly told her that I was pretty sure Mars was the god of all wars, not just our current president’s ill conceived adventure. That seemed to make sense to her.

Where the hell she learns stuff like this I do not know.

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The linked blog contains detailed analysis of outages in this whole region of the country, with Ohio and Pennsylvania both hit hard, much harder than one might expect from a hurricane. Notable region outages include Ansoft Corporation (192.149.1.0/24), Continental Broadband Pennsylvania, Inc. (209.114.166.0/24), LogicaCMG Inc. (128.129.0.0/16, since 9/13/2008), and two USWeb networks. OK, let me be honest here: I grew up in the Caribbean and I didn’t know that yinz could have hurricane effects at all this far inland. It’s either refreshing or a little bit scary. I’m still trying to figure out which.

Repairs continue, but as of last night 60,000 people in the local area still didn’t have power. If you’re reading this, I assume you’re not one of them. Good luck out there, people.

Recently, we were invited (well, “invited” is a stretch—more on that in a minute) to another very clever party. The general idea was this:

• If you have kids’ stuff that you want to get rid of, come to this party.
• If you need kids’ stuff (for new babies, or growing toddlers, come to this party.
• Put all the stuff you don’t want anymore in a big pile (which the guests all carefully sorted).
• Take what you need or want.
• Everything left over gets donated to charity after the event.

Simple, clever, amazingly useful. The party built community (people met each other, helped care for each other’s kids, etc.) while solving a practical set of problems: how do you redistribute the amazing pile of baby crap that exists in the world.

Erica, the creator of this party, made it further amazing by showering guests in incredible food and drink. Sangría. Beer. Fresh scones. Madeleines. Watermelon. Roasted corn. The list goes on. Her house on the North Side had a fantastic side yard where everyone could gather and the kids could all run around and play.

As I mentioned before, we weren’t really invited to this party. Our new friend Andrea (who came to the aforementioned housewarming party), heard about this party from a friend, who heard about it from another friend. Who may (or may not) have been invited by Erica. The email chain was long enough to cause my attention to waver halfway through. What’s interesting about all of that is that we went, we were welcome and we had a great time. This is an incredibly open, interesting city, socially.

Chalk another one up to Pittsburgh as a fantastic place to live.

[This is neither about Pittsburgh nor about technology, but it's a Friday night so cut me some slack.]

I love the Olympics.  I’m one of those people who normally doesn’t care at all about sports (tough to live in Pittsburgh without caring about sports, I’m learning) but I love the sports that you can see at the Olympics that you cannot see at any other time. This year, there are fascinating stories of the drama and controversy with China hosting the olympics (human rights, lying about competitors’ ages, polution, Tibet), the wonderful swimming stories, and of course the medal race.

Normally the medal count is straightforward:  most golds, most total medals.  Those are the two rankings that make sense.  The BBC, however, has a hilarious and fascinating proposal of five alternate medal total rankings.  They propose some interesting alternative rankings, including highest medals to GDP ratio and highest medals to athletes in the olympics ratio.

In both of these ratios, the tiny West African country of Togo comes out in the top 10.  As is turns out, I was born in Togo.  Had I been willing to do the mandatory military service, I probably could hvae had Togolese citizenship.  In which case, maybe I could have been on the Togolese summer Olympics team.  I swam a little bit in High School.  I can dream.

Anyway, it’s pleasant to see Togo in the top-10 of some medal ranking. Go Togo!

We moved here from New Hampshire, the state with the second lowest per-capita tax burden in the US. The lowest is Alaska, with it’s Permanent Fund Dividend—they pay you to live in Alaska and use money from the mineral rights from state-owned lands. In New Hampshire they do it the old-fashioned way: by having very small, frugal state government.

This is clearly not the Pennsylvania way, nor is it the Pittsburgh way. So today is the end of the month and my first paycheck as a Pennsylvania resident was deposited in my account. Since I still have the same job for the same company this provides an concrete, simple way to determine: just how much more does it cost to live in Pittsburgh than it did to live in New Hampshire?

Taxes, Taxes and More Taxes

I’m going to write this up without telling everyone exactly how much money I make. Friends know that I’m not that private about stuff like that, but revealing detailed salary history does put one at a disadvantage in future salary negotiations. And the Internet is forever. If you’re smart enough, you can probably figure it out from what I write. But don’t do that. It’s rude.

So the difference between my take-home pay in New Hampshire and my take-home pay in PA? 5.2%. At the end of every month in Pittsburgh I have 5.2% less money in my pocket (by which I mean my bank account—my metaphorical pocket) than I did in New Hampshire.

The difference is state income tax (New Hampshire has none) and city income tax (no city in New Hampshire has one). But the differences don’t stop there. Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh also have sales taxes (7% on most stuff we buy). New Hampshire doesn’t have that, either. And, since we bought a house here, don’t forget about that totally crazy 4% transfer tax. Four percent. Tax. On real estate transactions. That is a serious disincentive to buying property here. Even with affordable real estate that is a serious chunk of change when buying a house.

But wait, there’s more. Property taxes here are higher than they were in New Hampshire, too. About .9% higher per year. And the liquor is more expensive (and harder to get). So what does this all add up to? Let’s split the transfer tax between me and Beth and amortize it over 5 years (a reasonable time to assume we’ll be in this house although I hope it’s longer). Let’s take the property tax rate difference (ignoring the differences in the values of the houses) and tack half of that on per month. Let’s also make some half-assed calculation about how much sales tax the IRS would let me deduct? they estimate another $98 a month of sales tax. While I find it hard to imagine that I would be spending that much money ($1400/month) on taxable items, that’s what they say and I don’t have a good basis for disagreeing with the IRS’s statisticians.

So grand total? 8.7% of my take home gone to various kinds of taxes. Over and above what I was paying before. And that’s assuming Beth pays her share.  If she mooches off of me (or vice-versa) we’re looking at well over 10% reduction in take home pay over the New Hampshire situation.

Choices and Consequences

I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m complaining. I’m really not. One of the great things I learned while living on the New Hampshire/Vermont border was to be mature and honest about tax policy. There’s no free ride. If you want a government that provides infrastructure and services, someone has to pay. In Vermont they have decided they want that and they pay for it. Boy, do they pay for it. Vermont has one of the highest per-capita tax rates in the country. But they offer health insurance to every child to the age of 18 for free through the “Doctor Dinosaur” program. And they send a nurse to your house after you have a baby. And they have health inspectors and pay for highway repairs and fund their schools. All that crazy stuff that governments tend to do.

New Hampshire, just as rationally, has chosen to do almost none of that stuff and instead just to have low taxes. It sucks to be poor in New Hampshire. There are no housing benefits, Medicaid is almost unfunded, the Department of Public Health has to beg for money for vaccines every year, the schools are criminally underfunded. Restaurants are only inspected when towns choose to pay for that, and not all of them do. And the list goes on. But wow are taxes low. And people (even lots of the poor people) seem to really like it.

Neither of these seems a fundamentally bad choice to me. Just significant differences in direction with important consequences. I haven’t lived in Pittsburgh long enough to know whether people are honest about tax policy and consequences here. My initial impressions, based on the disagreement about the Allegheny County drink tax is that there’s a lot of dishonesty and a lot of manipulation. There are three or four reasonable positions on that issue that I can see and none of them are being publicly discussed, at least where I can see them.

So back to taxes, services and quality of life in Pittsburgh. What do I get for my 8.7% and is it worth it? Well, I get people to come to my house and pick up my trash rather than driving it to the dump myself. That’s kind of cool, but usually costs $20-50/month or so. Schools? My kids are too young so far and public schools refuse to educate 3 or 4 year olds no matter what parents want. So it’s private pre-school for Agatha and playing at the JCC for Beatrix. And Pittsburgh public schools seem uneven, although there are some really bright spots and they appear to be getting better. I’ll have to learn more about that in years to come. Police services? Hope not to need them but those were funded reasonably in New Hampshire. Infrastructure? There’s a lot of it in the city—roads, bridges, tunnels—and it seems to be reasonably well maintained. In any case it’s under construction all the time. Public health, housing assistance, other public programs? I honestly don’t know yet.

The Bottom Line

At this point you might think I really am cranky. I don’t have a clear, material, personal benefit for my 8.7%. But so far Pittsburgh really impresses me. There are all kinds of harder-to-quantify positive aspects of living here that depend upon it being a medium-sized city. And medium-sized cities cost more money than small towns, per capita. I like walking everywhere. I like having bus service. I like having a town full of smart, engaged, hard-working people surrounding me. It makes me think I might become a smart, engaged, hard-working person, too.

I haven’t even addressed business tax policy, which does seem crazy in Pennsylvania. There’s a tax on capital invested in businesses and a corporate income tax as well.  It’s not clear that that is a smart way to attract people who want to start companies, although taxes are far from the most important factor in that equation.  Witness California’s silly high taxes and how many companies start there.

But for an individual it’s not cheap to live here, tax-wise. And the verdict is still out as to whether it’s worth it. But I don’t feel cheated yet.

I’ve typed in all the recommendations and put the results over at a new wiki I set up just for this purpose:  RustWiki.  There is already a reasonable font of information over there that we will be using to settle in to our new town.  The food page is particularly fabulous for the categories that people dreamed up (”Best Takeout Items for Vegetarians Whose Kids Eat Spicy Food” is probably the most genius of the lot).

Take a look.  It’s a wiki so feel free to edit it.  If you see stuff missing, please feel free to add it.  In particular, if anyone wants to carry out the same Housewarming scheme in some other Rust Belt city and wants to add the results to the RustWiki, you’re more than welcome.  Mi wiki es su wiki.

On a business trip back to Manchester, New Hampshire this past week, I couldn’t get away from Pittsburgh. Now, it’s true that part of this was the result of the ridiculous air traffic delays in Philly, but the rest of it was the ongoing drumbeat of national press coverage about Pittsburgh.

The first article was on real estate and the generally sanguine state of the industry in Pittsburgh. The article opens with the now-standard quote about our fair city, including the phrase “formerly a troubled steel city” and “recently named the best metropolitan city.” Having read these articles about Pittsburgh for most of the past year, I’ve come to believe that there must be a law requiring feature writers of national publications to use these phrases in their writing. They’d probably have their press passes pulled if they refused.

The article is positive throughout, though, and leaves an impression that is close to truth in my very limited experience: that Pittsburgh is an affordable place to live with a lot going for it.

The second article comes on the front page of the lifestyle section complete with an above-the-fold color picture of kayakers paddling by downtown. It, too, contains the same stale, steel tropes (headline: “Pittsburgh Forges Ahead”; excuse me while I retch a tiny little bit in my mouth). And it also manages to work the “most livable city” tidbit into the lead. It would be funny if it didn’t represent something truly depressing about the state of journalism and writing.

One of the things that strikes me so far is that Pittsburgh protests too much (hat tip and apology to the bard). This city is fantastic and it is only a misunderstanding of how public relations works that causes it to continue saying that it’s fantastic. When your product or brand has traits or messages in the marketplace (or people’s brainspace) that you don’t like, it is almost always deeply ineffective to counter those traits directly. Some people might believe you but most people are left with the suspicion that there’s something true about the original reputation, which is what is motivating you to talk about it so much.

The only real way to change the traits associated with a product is to give people new traits to think about that crowd out the old ones. In effect, what you need to do is change the conversation. Here are some, perhaps naive, recommendations from a brand new comer to your awesome burgh:

• Pittsburgh isn’t a steel town and no one who moves themselves, their families or their companies here does it for the (mostly dead) steel industry. So just stop talking about it. Seriously.
• There are jobs in Pittsburgh. The employment market here is not significantly worse than any comparable city that I can think of. There are tons of medical-industry jobs, some interesting high tech stuff, a little bit of web, some fascinating podcasting companies. And that is just the stuff I’ve caught wind of in two weeks.
• Pittsburgh is one of the best towns I’ve ever seen for raising a family, but it seems to accomplish that without the enforcing the escapism of the suburbs. It also seems to be able to be great for kids without being unfun for adults. This is a seriously hard row to hoe and Pittsburgh does it with panache. A Robot block party?!?! Unbelievably fantastic.
• Pittsburgh has culture and diversity. So far in my first few weeks in Squirrel Hill/Point Breeze I’ve met native speakers of Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Arabic, and those are just some of the ones I recognize. This part of the city, at least, is seriously integrated in some interesting ways. No city is perfect in this respect, but so far Pittsburgh doesn’t suck at all. As a Spanish speaker, I’m particularly excited about the Latin American Cultural Union (who haven’t written me back yet about their sábado infantil picnic—anyone have a contact there?).

I’m sure there are *tons* of things wrong with Pittsburgh and I’ll be cranky and bitter soon. Just not quite yet. On the other hand, I’m not particularly interested in Pittsburgh boosterism. I have a lot less invested that most of you (yinz?). But I will say that I refuse to engage in this “Pittsburgh is a revitalized steel town that is less crappy than you thought” messaging. It’s counter-productive. On second thought, although the city’s PR folks deserve an A+ for reach, they may only get a C for crafting and controlling the message.