By Dan Johnson

We need an army of social workers working in our higher-crime neighborhoods, reaching people before they turn to mindless violence or gangs with compassionate, humane assistance. It's clearer now than it has been for years that, especially for many black Americans, the police are often an occupying force of violence -- "I can't breathe" -- and not a path for help. 

That doesn't mean police officers are bad people. It means we are using armed men and women with the power to arrest and detain to try to prevent crime. That only works for those criminals who are only deterred by force. For all the people who commit crime for other reasons -- an emotional inability to handle short-term conflict, a lack of resources to manage drug or alcohol addiction, for teenage males a lack of social structure like a job or after-school activities to prevent predictable bad decisions -- armed officers are of no benefit. And instead, they can make things worse. 

This is an opportunity not just for protest (which, ultimately, is a bit empty) but for policy improvement. We hire and create our local police departments. We can reshape them for our times and our needs. 

The United States spends $100 billion a year on police protection every year -- an increase of 445 percent since 1982. We've got the money now to really prevent crime. We just have to redirect it to social services that help people without many resources live prosperous, healthy lives. 

Here's a great excerpt from a 2000 North Carolina paper explaining the institutional dynamics of social work and law enforcement.

The historical background of the police/social work relationship indicates that, for over a century, social
service has been considered a key part of policing, and serving victims of crime and offenders has been a major
emphasis of social work. Law enforcement and social work have served the same target groups but with varying
success. ... 
Police calls for service are crisis situations where police respond, stabilize and then partner with human service agencies that provide client
based services and case management to prevent the problems that result in subsequent calls for service.


However, finding the money for social workers is always harder than finding the money for police officers. 


That's why police departments themselves should hire social workers. Instead of two separate agencies trying to work together to serve the exact same population (with almost always a limited degree of success), the social workers should be part of what the police department does. This gets police departments in the business of preventing crime, not just imposing force on people. 


Most police officers know who the at-risk people are -- especially the younger males. They know which kids are most likely to follow their uncle into a gang or to lose their temper over something and get violent. But it isn't the police officers' job to help those people make better choices. Instead it is the officers' job to sit and wait for them to make a bad choice and then to pounce. That's a dumb use of our tax dollars. 

Police departments should be 25% or 30% staffed by social workers with the job to work with their colleagues and partners -- police officers -- and help the particular people identified by the officers from becoming a criminal. It's so much cheaper to keep people out of the criminal justice system altogether so we never have to pay for jails or judges or prosecuting attorneys or parole officers.  That's why we should change our $100 billion police force in the US into a force for preventing crime by helping Americans who need the help make better choices.


And that's something every single municipality in the country can do. This year. 

By Dan Johnson

Illinois pollutes more than California.

And Indiana pollutes more than Illinois.

Those two pieces of data floored me. 

Here's the list, by state, of greenhouse gas pollution:

By Dan Johnson

This is pretty awesome. I'd like to know who the biggest carbon polluters are in Illinois to get an idea how much money we are wasting by letting these companies pollute for free.

Turns out the federal government keeps such a list.

The biggest polluter in Illinois is a huge coal power plant owned by a Texas utility Dynegy. The Baldwin Plant alone pollutes 12 million tons of carbon (out of a statewide total of 91 million). Most of the 91 million is from coal power plants. And we don't charge them anything for that pollution. 


The market price for a ton of carbon pollution is apparently about $12/ton. If Illinois decided to quit subsidizing these polluters and had them pay the market price for their pollution, we'd generate more than a billion dollars -- annually. (91 million tons times $12/ton). 


To put that in context, all the debate over lowering the state income tax from 5% to 3.75% will cost about $3 billion. We could lower the income tax even more down to 3.25% with the money we could raise from charging polluters a market price. 


Thanks to the feds compiling this data (which is only about half the total carbon emissions), we're in a place to sketch out what a fee on carbon pollution might actually generate. That's very helpful.

In most places, an oil refinery or a massive manufacturing plant that creates tens of thousands of metric tons of carbon pollution doesn't have to pay for that pollution. Since it's free to the company, they keep on spewing out the climate change causing carbon like dumping toxic sludge directly into a sewer: no filters, no caps, no nothing.

Some states are figuring out they ought to charge those companies a fee for their pollution to not only get them to figure out how to pollute less (since now it's getting expensive) but also to pay for other parts of the public sector. The latest initiative is from Washington Governor Jay Inslee - his cap-and-trade proposal would charge 130 or so big companies and generate about a billion dollars a year. 

Washington State could join California which has been charging carbon polluters in a quarterly auction to set the price for years. 

Illinois should do the same thing. If we charged our oil refineries and major manufacturers a fair price for their pollution, we'd not only quit subsidizing our polluters but we'd be able to help pay for the backbone of our low-pollution economy: the CTA and Metra. These trains carry 2 million people every day but the backlog for maintenance is far larger than what we're budgeted to pay for. Makes sense to pay for the maintenance (and expansion) of low-pollution public transportation by finally kicking the polluters off the free ride bus.

If Washington State could generate a billion and we're about twice their size....we might be able to solve our transit funding shortfalls in an elegant policy combination. 

Lower oil prices are great, especially for parts of the world (like the Midwest) that don't have a lot of oil but use a lot of it. 

The Wall Street Journal reported:


Lower prices at the pump, down about 60 cents a gallon from a year ago, will have the equivalent effect of cutting taxes in the U.S. by between $100 billion and $125 billion,Goldman Sachs economists said Wednesday. Americans spent $370 billion on gasoline last year.



--

So for every penny the cost of gasoline falls, American consumers save about $2 billion (a rough projection from the Goldman Sachs calculation). That's a lot of money.

The best way to lower oil prices is to lower consumption. So reducing oil consumption should be a core economic development objective of every local and state government (that isn't a massive oil producer). 

We tend not to put reducing oil consumption into the economic development box. Economic development in practice usually means chasing after larger companies that are setting up a bidding war of tax breaks among different cities or states. That's a pretty dumb way to do economic development. Much better to come up with a universal strategy for reducing costs for all residents and businesses (like lowering energy costs) and spend time, energy and staff resources on advancing that strategy.

We could use more economic research on the impact of lowering oil prices. For example, if one state reduces oil consumption by a million barrels of year, what sort of impact on the global price of crude oil can be reasonably expect? If we can figure that out, at least ballpark, we can more easily justify the investment in reducing that oil consumption, because we can see the economic return in the form of lower prices for all. 

The California High Speed Rail project expects to save 12.7 million barrels of oil every year (since it runs on electricity, not oil). What's the impact of saving all that imported oil? We need more research!