Governments confront difficult political choices when they must determine how to balance their spending. But what would happen if a government found a means of spending without taxation? In this book, Gene Park demonstrates how the Japanese government established and mobilized an enormous off-budget spending system, the Fiscal Investment Loan Program (FILP), which drew on postal savings, public pensions, and other funds to pay for its priorities and reduce demands on the budget. Park's book argues that this system underwrote a distinctive postwar political bargain, one that eschewed the rise of the welfare state and Keynesianism, but that also came with long-term political and economic costs that continue to this day. By drawing attention to FILP, this study resolves key debates in Japanese politics and also makes a larger point about public finance, demonstrating that governments can finance their activities not only through taxes but also through financial mechanisms to allocate credit and investment. Such "policy finance" is an important but often overlooked form of public finance that can change the political calculus of government fiscal choices.
Battery Park City is a special place, and superlatives have come easily to those who have written about it. It is one of the most significant "new towns" ever built in America, constructed by private developers on landfill, with an infrastructure financed by the sale of bonds by a state-created public benefit corporation. Its successful mix of attractive office and residential buildings has been the major contributor to the revitalization of New York City's downtown. It's also paid off literally. The Battery Park City Authority, the public benefit corporation that was the driving force behind the entire development is in the black and, indeed, generates more than $100 million a year in profit without the City or State having a cent invested in the venture. The development is even rich culturally. It's bookended on its south end by The Museum of Jewish Heritage, which has the most important collection memorializing the Holocaust outside of Washington D. C.'s Holocaust Museum, and on the north by the new home of Stuyvesant High School, which most years sends more graduates to Harvard than any other high school in America. Amidst parks, sculpture and apartments providing homes for almost 10,000 people, most of whom walk to work, stands the New York Mercantile Exchange and the imposing World Financial Center. Within the shouting distance of young children on scooters and adolescents on skateboards are long town cars, waiting to whisk executives to their next appointment. But if anything truly merits superlatives, it's the public amenities that grace this "city" extending out into the water from lower Manhattan. On a summer Sunday, its long and graceful esplanade hosts thousands of bikers, hikers and people out for a stroll along the Hudson River. The area is thronged at lunchtime. And after work on any pleasant afternoon, Battery Park City's yacht cove is ringed with workers unwinding after a busy day and its harbor side restaurants are crowded with diners enjoying the spectacular view. The city's financial powerhouses charter yachts with names such as "Royal Princess" and "Excalibur," anchored in the cove, for business-promoting cocktail and dinner parties. But you don't have to be rich and powerful to enjoy what the development has to offer. The indoor concerts under the high-arching crystal vault filled with palm trees and bright flowers, part of the World Financial Center just behind the cove, are free and open to the public. Signs on the esplanade caution bikers and skaters to "Yield to Pedestrians." But one of the marvels of Battery Park City is that the whole development actually does that. Here in the heart of Manhattan, on the island that the automobile long ago conquered, the public spaces have been planned for people on foot. The spaces are broad and open, the streets just wide enough to provide necessary vehicular access. Already, although building continues on its several empty lots, Battery Park City has become one of New York City's landmarks, attracting foreign visitors as well as tourists from around America as one of Gotham's must-see sights. As with any landmark, it now seems to own the space it occupies. Despite the evident newness of everything in the development, its component parts are beginning to take on an air of inevitability. But the truth is that there was nothing inevitable about the development of Battery Park City. Every element of it was a battleground over which politicians and planners fought. In fact, this marvelous and extremely valuable asset to America's greatest city might just as easily have remained under water. That's the point of this book. There's something deceptively inevitable about land, steel and concrete. With the passage of time it becomes harder and harder to imagine that the land wasn't there, that the
Bolder economic policy could have addressed the persistent bouts of deflation in post-bubble Japan, write Gene Park, Saori N. Katada, Giacomo Chiozza, and Yoshiko Kojo in Taming Japan's Deflation. Despite warnings from economists, intense political pressure, and well-articulated unconventional policy options to address this problem, Japan's central bank, the Bank of Japan (BOJ), resisted taking the bold actions that the authors believe would have significantly helped. With Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's return to power, Japan finally shifted course at the start of 2013 with the launch of Abenomics—an economic agenda to reflate the economy—and Abe's appointment of new leadership at the BOJ. As Taming Japan's Deflation shows, the BOJ's resistance to experimenting with bolder policy stemmed from entrenched policy ideas that were hostile to activist monetary policy. The authors explain how these policy ideas evolved over the course of the BOJ's long history and gained dominance because of the closed nature of the broader policy network. The explanatory power of policy ideas and networks suggests a basic inadequacy in the dominant framework for analysis of the politics of monetary policy derived from the literature on central bank independence. This approach privileges the interaction between political principals and their supposed agents, central bankers; but Taming Japan's Deflation shows clearly that central bankers' views, shaped by ideas and institutions, can be decisive in determining monetary policy. Through a combination of institutional analysis, quantitative empirical tests, in-depth case studies, and structured comparison of Japan with other countries, the authors show that, ultimately, the decision to adopt aggressive monetary policy depends largely on the bankers' established policy ideas and policy network.
• The "Lite" edition offers a compact file for quick page loading on your smart phone • Works on a variety of operating systems • Lite version has everything you need to find and follow routes to heaven (well, maybe just heavenly views) Edition 1 of this digital guidebook was so enthusiastically received that the authors immediately began improving it, sharpening trail overlays, tweaking some of the data, and making it available to operate on multiple operating systems and e-readers. The smart phone edition contains everything you'll need to reach each of the highest peaks in the Mount Rainier National Park, with the exception of the Big One. Edition 2.0 now includes links to KML tracks, rechecked and revised (where needed) elevation data, 34 new route descriptions, additional route options for several peaks, and optimized tables, images and maps for faster page loading and quicker navigation of the material. This unique guidebook includes the following: • Vital statistics for each peak by trailhead • Each peak has driving directions, route description, comments, topological maps, and many peaks have route photos • Links to live Gmap4, Google Earth, Weather, Flickr Photos (more than 800 in all), peakbagger.com, and downloadable KML tracks for all 100 peaks • Color photos of each peak • All but a very few peaks are scrambles—not technical climbs When introduced, Guide to 100 Peaks in Mount Rainier National Park quickly became a goal list for many, and a game for the more obsessed climbers who latched onto this challenge.
Governments are widely seen as having to choose between high levels of spending, low levels of taxation, and balanced budgets. This dissertation shows how the Japanese government could have all three at the same time. By deploying a large government-run financial system---the Fiscal Investment Loan Program (FILP)---the Japanese government could "spend without taxation." Unlike budgetary systems, FILP mobilizes savings for investment, Japan's postal savings system, which hold more deposits than the largest private bank in the world, and the national pension system provided massive financial resources to FILP that the government deplored to square the circle: heavy investment in industrialization, liberal compensation to political supporters and fiscal restraint. This formula served as a pillar of Japan's postwar political settlement, but the FILP solution sowed the seeds of its own demise. While the government's use of FILP to serve fiscal and political goals made this settlement possible, it gradually undermined the system and with it the larger political coalition itself. These tensions came to a dramatic climax with the emergence of Prime Minister Koizumi, who had long advocated FILP reform and staked his political career on this issue. To privatize the postal system, which provided the largest share of FILP funds, he dissolved the Diet, called for elections, expelled opponents from his own party, and won a landslide mandate for reform in 2005. By tracing the development of FILP and how it has shaped government choices over time, this study shows why the reform of such a seemingly arcane system evolved into one of the most contentious issues in contemporary Japanese politics.
This work is a three-part collection of baseball poems. Part One, entitled Baseball Snapshots, has 114 short, untitled poems written in free verse that provide images of baseball moments on and off the playing field. Part Two, A Baseball Potpourri, features 27 longer, titled poems with all but one written in free verse. Many of the poems found in the second part tell stories about particular baseball events in the lives of a variety of fictional people. Part Three, A Rhymed Registry: Player Clerihews, is a compilation of 348 clerihews written about players from the past hundred years. Each of the three parts has an introduction.
My father, Per, came to the United States during the potato famine and depression in Shilafors, Sweden at the age of 18. Alfred Rosenquist, his future father-in-law, sponsored him to come to the United States to help on the Rosenquist family farm west of Burnside, Iowa, a small rural community near Fort Dodge, Iowa. My father started courting my mother, Myrtle Rosenquist, by borrowing my grandpa and grandma's horse and buggy and escorting her to the Sunday church services at Burnside. In 1917, love bloomed, they were married and soon thereafter started a family. I grew up during the 1920's and 1930's in a rural community. Our family moved around (at least 5 times) to adjust to the depression and survive the hard times. We helped our parents supplement their income with part time jobs, mostly from a milk, cream, egg and farm produce route to Fort Dodge on the weekends. The depression was unquestionably a unique experience in survival. My childhood encounters during the Depression coupled with the adventures of my teen years helped shape the rest of my life. On weekends, when dad and mom had a spare nickel or dime and we had earned it with extra chores, we wound up at Park Theater in Fort Dodge. The theater had cowboy shows that were continued each following weekend, like a serial. On the way home we would stop at the Gold Bar for a malt, which cost a nickel. It was crushed up ice, flavoring and very little milk. We would get wimpy hamburgers for a nickel and classic Iowa Maidrites (ground beef, onions and seasoning) that would melt in your mouth. During the Depression, I worked once a week folding and mailing newspapers at the Dayton Review for 50 cents a week. Our family would combine the money from the egg and milk route to Fort Dodge plus the extra money the family made, and we would buy salt, sugar, flour and other incidentals. Our clothes were hand-me-downs. Although we endured the Depression and just generally lived in a state of what is now referred to as "economically disadvantaged," we had a great life. When WWII, was underway, Mom and Dad gave me permission to enlist as a cadet for pilot training, even though I had a farm deferment. While I thought I knew what it was, I didn't know real fear until I had lots of people trying to kill me while I was flying in a B-24 over previously scenic Europe. The trials of life, such events as the Great Depression followed by WWII, and other traumatic encounters are not humorous, especially when they are happening to us and those around us. However, God stands with us and gets us through, no matter what it takes. I trust God and believe that God gives us the sense of fear to protect our bodies, but he also gives us a sense of humor to protect our min
Charles Barnard, a Connecticut entrepreneur, settled in the Brazos Valley in 1849, running an Indian Trading Post. He built a gristmill in 1860 near the confluence of the Brazos and Paluxy Rivers, around which the town of Glen Rose sprang up. Captured here in over 200 vintage photographs and postcards is the history of this quintessential little Texas town, from its origins as a mill town, to the bedroom community of Fort Worth that it has become today. In its earliest days, settlers flocked to the region from the war-torn South during the Civil War. By the 1900s, both Somervell County and Glen Rose established fame as a tourist resort, offering springs and artesian waters to heal the body and spirit. Naturopathic and magnetic healers built sanitariums, while locals built tourist parks to entertain the crowds that came for rest and relaxation. Showcased here are images of the Hill postcard collection, which relay the intriguing story of Glen Rose as a recreation mecca, the Moonshine Capital of Texas during Prohibition, the discovery of the infamous dinosaur tracks, and its development as it enters the 21st century.
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