But rather than waste time with silly reports that whitewash reality, perhaps the RBJ could better use its time actually digging into the numbers and reporting the facts.

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Here is a quick chart, taken from the National Association of Realtors website, of Rochester’s median home price as a function of its relative value to the U.S. national average. You can see just how much harder the nation is being hit by underwater homes and high unemployment. I know of at least one person who moved to Rochester for a fresh start, which is not something you hear about often.. and they can’t sell their house where they’re from.

* taken from Realtor.org: Metropolitan Median Prices

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And it is certainly true that many retail companies rely on Christmas for nearly a third of their total yearly income. Not simply down years but every year relies on the Christmas season to keep it afloat; with the economy in as much jeopardy as it is currently, we need some good news from the holidays to keep us from sliding off our tenuous perch at the edge of financial precipice.

But what is strange is the silence in the economic community about what is surely an early-warning bell-weather of our holiday mood, Halloween. Not to put too much of a damper on what is, after all, a pure-entertainment “holiday,” of course. But Halloween’s share of the marketplace has grown exponentially over the last decade. According to this About.com article written in 2006, each of us is likely to spend as much as $60 dollars on Halloween stuff on average. That’s not Christmas territory by any means, but that’s a hell of a lot of money for a single two- to three-hour celebration. Halloween is getting close to Valentine’s Day, where we spend around $122 a person when the economy doesn’t suck.

But as that last link points out, such frivolous expenses can and are easily shed when the economy is bad. Valentine’s and Halloween are even more expendable celebrations than Christmas is. So the question is: what will Halloween sales look like this year and what does that say about the Christmas season?

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And not quite as crappy, but crappy nonetheless is news that the Rochester Broadway Theater League is bowing to the obvious and looking outside Rochester for it’s new venue. You may recall – a hazy, foggy, far off memory, to be sure – that the Renaissance Square project was originally to include three theaters for use by RBTL, MCC and others. Well, that shit ain’t happenin’, is it?

So once again, those in search of culture must look outside Rochester. Great.

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Well, I’ll give him the unemployment rate with the caveat that we’ve not yet reached the 14% that was predicted in the absence of a stimulus. But mortgage rates are not as simple. When mortgage rates go down, it is an indication of the weakness of the market: supply and demand, less people buying houses means lower prices for the mortgage.

Thus while mortgage rate increases do put a pinch on the recovery of the housing market – and with it, the breath of relief for middle class families watching their neighborhoods turn into ghost towns – they are the natural reflection of positive signs in that market. And by the way, more interest income means maybe we tax payers can start getting some of that TARP money back.

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All of this is to say that, in the absence of government works projects, very few in Saudi Arabia are capable of holding down jobs on their own. Unemployment is rampant and so the government is constantly building new soccer stadiums and monuments to themselves as a means to keep the inevitable revolution of millions of starving, uneducated citizens at bay. These public works serve no useful function and generate no revenue of their own, but merely serve as make-busy jobs until the next useless project can be funded.

Here in Monroe County, we have no Wahabist imams forcing religion down our throats. We have no problem with education, in fact our schools are the envy of a majority of the United States. But when Monroe County insists that the Renaissance Square project is a good “shovel ready” project with which to spend our Federal Stimulus dollars, the only reasonable benefit I see is precisely this make-busy idea that keeps Saudi citizens working.

Because while generating jobs to stimulate the economy is a good thing – and I would submit that blue collar jobs are especially important on this point – focusing on the construction industry for economic growth is ultimately self-defeating. Construction jobs are only really useful to the economy as a whole where those jobs are backed up by genuine economic activity. If we worked to build our manufacturing base in Monroe County, the employees of those manufacturing companies would have permanent jobs and the companies would need construction workers to build or repair facilities. But when we focus on construction jobs, once the project is built, what happens next?

Nothing. Which exactly the problem with every monument built in Saudi Arabia and exactly what’s wrong with Renn Square as an economic project. What new jobs will be created by Renn Square after it’s built? I can only think of minimum wage jobs working in stores and restaurants inside the new terminal. . . and not even that if Bob Duffy gets his scaled-down project. What new revenue will Renn Square generate? Nada, which makes it about as useful as a statue of the Prince of Saud.

Better that we should focus on building a new terminal at the site of the current Amtrak station, if we are to build any new bus terminal at all. We can get more bang for the buck if we create a terminal that both serves the Rochester public and advocates for Rochester to the people who travel through here on rail. Better still that we should use the Stimulus money to pave our streets and fix our roads. These things generate revenue and have intrinsic value. Renn Square’s only intrinsic value is as a campaign fund project.

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When we discuss data in terms of the number of DVDs or HD Hulu movies we get off the Internet, the discussion almost seems silly: nine DVDs a month does seem like a lot. But consider that medical transcriptionists – many of whom I know for a fact live in the Rochester TW area – download and upload one MP3 and one Word document with every job they do. And they do about twenty or thirty jobs a day on the small side.

It won’t take long before those transcriptionists are paying to work each month. And they’re not alone. Lots of people work from home, some using much bigger files than those mentioned in the above example. Moreover, many of them use Remote Desktop, which means a constant stream of information going back and forth between their home and work PCs.

And while Time Warner uses the straw man of YouTube and Hulu videos, they don’t mention all the other Flash files you download while browsing the Internet: all those rich advertisements, popping up on your screen and hovering over your intended websites. I presume they’ve developed a way to avoid charging you for those, correct? Because every single .jpg, .gif and Flash file that advertises wrinkle creams and new low mortgage rates is a file you have to download.

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