Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

City Cash Cascading Crash

By Dave Anderson:



Chris Briem has an accurate and scary paragraph at Null Space for anyone interested in municipal finance in the State of Pennsylvania:

And connected to everything are the finances at the casino.  Revenues down there have clearly settled into a range. 
No joke how everything comes back to the revenue generating capactiy of
the casino.  Harrisburg has forced the universities to wait for money
only to flow from the prospective table games; the SEA depends on
casino payments to fund the arena bonds; as bad as the city's finances
seem to be now and into the future, they depend ever more on ongoing
payments from the casino directly into city coffers on top of
everything else. and finally the state, which the city will look to as
a last resort, is stuck backing up payments to the SEA from the casino
to pay for the bonds building the arena.  Got all that?   So everything
is connected in all of these debates.  I sense the potential for a
cascade failure.

The Pennsylvania casinos are generic products and they are in a market that is quickly saturating with New York, Michigan, West Virginia and New Jersey all offering casinos with the same or greater amenities, and Ohio and Maryland offering casinos or slots parlors in the near future.  This means that the the vast majority of money will be local money as no one from Boston or New York City will remark that it would be a wonderful day to fly to Pittsburgh to play slots or table games instead of either driving up to Foxwoods or flying to Vegas for the same activity.  That means the only money that the casinos generate will be from local disposable income and displacement from other taxable activities.

The casinos were supposed to save the state and city finances.  It is becoming clear that take the cheap and politically easy solution has failed.  The city (and county) will need to find millions of dollars that it had been counting on from the local tax revenue from the casino to balance the general fund, while the casino revenue obligation bonds that the state issued earlier this decade will need to be backed by general revenue if gambling revenue is entirely locally derived. 

The casino in Pittsburgh, and gambling in the commonwealth, is a single point of failure for multiple systems... that is not sustainable nor resilient. 



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