DFE Blogger and Rochester City Councilwoman Carla Palumbo reports on the state of the current proposed City budget. Notice how much different the City’s budget process is from the County’s. What? You’ve never heard about the County process? Yeah, that’s the point:

» Firetrucks and Rec Centers… » Carla Palumbo

The City Budget process is almost to the end…City Council’s vote on Tuesday night will wrap up over a month of budget review, hearings and deliberations. There are a few major changes proposed in this budget — the two drawing the most ire are the changes to the Fire Dept and Rec Centers After-school programs. Given the tight budget there were some fairly significant cuts to City staff, mostly in IT — but the Rec Center After-school program is being cut and the Fire Dept methodology changed with a loss of 16 positions (not lay offs, loss is by attrition)

I’d call this a sign of the times. The Rochester Business Journal is reporting that home sales in Monroe County plummeted 11 percent this month, while automobile sales continued to climb. Unfortunately, the RBJ did not report on what types of cars are being sold. Based on other reports about plummeting SUV sales, I suspect that the answer is “a whole mess of Priuses.”

Rochester Business Journal:

Sales of existing homes in May dropped 11 percent compared with a year ago, the Greater Rochester Association of Realtors Inc. reported Friday. Though May closings, at 928, were up 10.7 percent from April, which posted 838 closings.

Rochester Business Journal:

Sales of new vehicles in Monroe County continued to increase last month, while used-vehicle sales fell in May, the Rochester Automobile Dealers’ Association Inc. reported.

While we all wring our hands and wonder why it is so many of our young people are leaving the state, perhaps it would be instructive to consider the latest report on wages in New York:

Report says ‘anemic’ wages affect 5.7 million New Yorkers | Democrat and Chronicle

The report from a labor-backed think tank said that 5.7 million New Yorkers are part of families that face a “hardship gap” in which at least one person has a job but the earnings aren’t enough to cover all basic expenses, including food, rent, utilities, health insurance, transportation and child care.

The proportion of New York families who don’t make enough to pay for these services, 30 percent, is well above the national median of 22 percent and is the highest of any Northeast state, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute report.

The report also goes on to state that a wage of $17 an hour is required in order to keep a family of four afloat. That’s a tall order in many professions, and especially in unskilled labors. Keep in mind also that the national average of 22 percent includes states like Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia where grinding poverty exists in ways most of us in this state don’t even fully understand as “America.” That we are so far behind in providing our state citizens - to say nothing of national citizens - a decent living wage is an embarrassment to our name.

The Rochester Business Journal and 13WHAM both have articles up covering a press conference wherein the Main and Clinton Development Corporation trotted out a few local business owners to say they supported the Renn Square project. But I can’t help noticing that in two articles by two separate media outlets, only three businesses are identified, and then not by name. “A dry cleaner, a convenience shop and a new deli” is the extent of the support identified.

I don’t discount the value of these businesses downtown, but I hardly think this represents a groundswell of grassroots support for the project. To be charitable, perhaps we’re missing some information in the reporting?

With luck, perhaps they’ve finally put the nail in the coffin of those goddamned SUVs once and for all:

Rising Gas Prices Finally Kill The Once-Mighty SUV | Autopia from Wired.com

Need more proof the SUV is a goner? Ford’s venerable F150 pickup ended its 17-year-run as the best-selling vehicle in America last month, dethroned by the Honda Civic and three other Japanese sedans. General Motors is looking to unload Hummer, the epitome of gas-guzzling excess, after sales fell 60 percent in May. The number of Civics sold in one month exceed the number of Hummers GM expects to sell all year.

Now, the question is: does this mean an increase in production of more fuel-efficient cars? My continuing chagrin with my car manufacturer of choice, Saturn, has been that they only make two hybrids: a hybrid SUV and a luxury car. I appreciate the effort, but spending the extra dough for a hybrid only to get 35MPG is hardly worth the trouble. I’m getting about that now.

So I’m beginning to look elsewhere, with my term on my current vehicle edging ever closer to completion. And by “elsewhere,” I mean something other than American cars. The trouble is that, while I’m hardly one to be defined by my car, there’s a certain lack of - oh, let’s just call it “testicular fortitude” - in the available options. The Prius has gotten better looking as it goes on, but a $25k price tag makes it hard to take. Not impossible, though. The new India-produced TaTa (to be marketed as the “Mini-Cat,” its English translation, in the States) looks like it might be OK, but what the hell is up with the 1Lakh? And the “Smart Car?” It’s only smart if your working towards a life of celibacy. And while I lived in the city, I considered buying a Vespa scooter until I realized I’d look like an English schoolmarm with a hickory switch up her keister.

As a person whose favourite car of all time was the Dodge Shadow, I hardly require a “penis-mobile” of any variety. But come on! These things just make you look stupid driving around in/on them. The manufacturers are doing the environment and the world economy a great service by even producing these vehicles, but they’d be doing an even greater service if they made the vehicles just a little bit more approachable for the average American.

But then, vehicles that appeal to an American sensibility would be more likely if American producers would produce the vehicles, wouldn’t they?

C&L posted a clip of Fox News Sunday that I just had to repost here. Never mind the fact the Britt Hume tries to make gas prices a good issue for John McCain despite all evidence to the contrary, check out this first exchange (emphasis mine) for a textbook example of cluelessness:

Crooks and Liars » Fox News Sunday: Damning John McCain With Faint Praise

CW: Let’s talk about the economy, because the news on Friday was certainly striking, Brit. I mean, you had this $10 spike in the price of a barrel of crude oil, you had the unemployment rate, there were some statistical issues, but it was up by a half a point, the highest in 2 decades. Stock market, 400 points down. If - and I repeat, if — not necessarily that set of perfect trifecta, bad economic news continues, does a McCain stand a chance?

BH: He stands a chance, because he is not the incumbent. But the candidate of the incumbent party is always affected badly by bad conditions in the country. And the economy is not likely to be perceived as particularly good. On the other hand, whatever happened to the recession? I thought we were in a recession; you don’t hear that. It hasn’t happened. It’s kind of a miracle it hasn’t, given all the forces that were weighed against the economy, which continues to kind of poke along at a very slow pace. But remarkable, nonetheless. . . (he goes on like this)

What happened to the recession, Britt? You’re soaking in it.

. . . Long time passing.

A basic premise of the metered Internet plans Time Warner and other ISPs are cooking up is that there is simply too much bandwidth being used up by too few people. You know, the YouTube users and the downloaders. In order to be able to maintain - and presumably enhance - the network to accommodate such over usage, someone needs to pay for all that loss of bandwidth. As much as I vehemently disagree with the plan on a number of levels, I did at first take this root concept somewhat at face value.

But then, on my ride into work this morning, I happened to catch another one of those annoying Time Warner commercials for their “All in One Package” and it suddenly dawned on me: hey! Isn’t broadband phone service (VoIP to it’s friends) kind of a heavy-bandwidth activity? And aren’t people paying Time Warner extra money for use of said service?

Why, yes. Yes they are. And having now encumbered a fair amount of the overall network bandwidth with phone calls, Time Warner would like to charge Internet users extra to do what they were encouraged to do when Broadband Internet was a new and expensive novelty. I’d say that’s fairly close to “double-dipping.”

Does that sound fair to you?

Late Update: Ok, just for the sake of measurement, I checked the total download size of this video on YouTube.  It’s 13 delicious megabytes of the best comedy on television, and it’s five minutes long.  Longer videos are obviously bigger files.  Just for the sense of scale for those of you not as familiar with Ye Olde Internet Page of Weights and Measurements, if you watched this video 65 times a day - without doing a single other thing on the Internet, at all - you would fill up your 25 gig allotment for the month.  I’m not saying that’s a little, I’m not saying it’s a lot. I’m saying it’s a fact.

It’s crazy to think that, two years ago, I stopped smoking to save that $4.25 a day I was wasting on my habit.  It’s crazy to think that the state of New York has been hiking the taxes on cigarettes with at least the justification that pricey smokes would discourage smokers.  And it’s even crazier to think that in a few months time, I’ll be paying $4.25 a gallon for gas.

It begins to look like the more sound financial decision is to drive less and smoke more.  Now, ain’t that some shit?

Here’s a remarkable article. It crows about foreign “confidence” in the United States’ economy, as evidenced by the fact that so many foreign companies are buying up businesses in the U.S.:

Foreign Investor Confidence in US Business Is High - Seeking Alpha

Bottom Line: Americans might have lost confidence in their economy over the last few years, but foreign investors apparently haven’t, and in fact, are increasingly bullish about the U.S. economy and its businesses. Despite subprime mortgage problems, a housing slump, threats of a recession in 2007, and comparisons to the Great Depression, foreigners almost doubled their investments in U.S. businesses in 2007 ($277 billion), compared to 2006 ($165 billion).

Um. Dude is either full of shit or he’s never heard of a lawn sale.

A major source of the revenue that fueled Bush’s 2000 and 2004 wins has turned to sunnier pastures in the Democratic Party, Bloomberg reports:

Bush Business Donors Shunning McCain for Democratic Candidates || Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

Bankers and investors don’t point to specific policies affecting their industry in explaining McCain’s lack of support. Grano, a McCain backer, said disappointment over what he calls the “terrible” execution of the Iraq war may account for some of McCain’s difficulties. Bush’s job performance is another oft- mentioned reason.

“There’s a great deal of dissatisfaction with the Republican Party,” said Mallory Factor, a merchant banker who co-hosts a weekly meeting of conservatives in New York City and raised more than $1 million for Bush and his party four years ago. “People are just fed up.”

And so, Republican power all but inevitably stripped for another few years, the savvy business community places its bets on the winning horse(s). It’s a cyclical thing: business plants it’s seeds in in the sound economic planning of Democratic presidencies, then rapes the field in the tax-slashing Republican presidencies.