Macro Roundup

"...Many analysts predicted that minorities would represent a larger share of the electorate in 2016 than in 2012. They did not. Taken together, Hispanics, blacks, and people of other races made up virtually identical shares of the vote in 2016 (26.6 percent) and 2012 (26.2 percent)...."
Eleanor O'Neil, "What we thought we knew: 2016 voter turnout expectations and reality," American Enterprise Institute, May 25, 2017, https://www.aei.org/articles/what-we-thought-we-knew-2016-voter-turnout-expectations-and-reality/

What we thought we knew: 2016 voter turnout expectations and reality

The US electorate is becoming more diverse and groups such as Hispanics and Asians will exert greater electoral clout over time. But a new report from the Census on voting in 2016 shows that the transformation of the electoral landscape won’t happen overnight. This is one of the many interesting stories from the Census’s report.

The Census has collected voting and registration data since 1964 through a biennial supplement to the Current Population Survey. Starting in 1978, the bureau began to include citizenship data, adding more clarity to the picture. The Census’s latest report on voting and registration in 2016, based on a survey taken after the election, is the most comprehensive source of data on 2016 voting for the population of all age-eligible citizens and for many key subgroups. It also gives us important information about what some analysts got right and wrong in their election models or predictions.

Let’s look at some specifics, starting with the demographic composition of the electorate.

Many analysts predicted that minorities would represent a larger share of the electorate in 2016 than in 2012. They did not. Taken together, Hispanics, blacks, and people of other races made up virtually identical shares of the vote in 2016 (26.6 percent) and 2012 (26.2 percent).

The long-awaited surge in Hispanic turnout did not occur in 2016. Hispanics were a larger share of voters in 2016 (9.2 percent) than in 2012 (8.4 percent), but their rate of voting was essentially flat, 48 percent in 2012 and 47.6 percent in 2016. In another interesting note on the data, the Pew Research Center reported that the number of eligible Hispanic non-voters was higher than the number of eligible Hispanic voters, as has been the case in presidential elections since 1996. Hispanics’ electoral clout does not yet match their demographic weight. Hispanics tilt toward Democrats, giving about two-thirds of their votes to them in recent years.

Since 1996, when 53 percent of blacks reported voting, black turnout rose with every national election, reaching its high point in 2012, when 66.6 percent of blacks voted. That year, the rate of voting by blacks was higher than the rate of voting by whites for the first time in the data series. Many expected that black turnout would continue its steady increase of the past two decades. In 2016, however, black voter turnout declined to 59.6 percent, significantly below its record high and below the white rate (65.3 percent). The group is one of the few monolithic bloc votes in American politics, tilting overwhelmingly toward Democrats.

Finally, the white share of the electorate did not decline as it has in most recent presidential contests. As the Census noted, “or the most part, from 1980 to 2012, the share of reported voters who were non-Hispanic white decreased from one election to another.” In 1980, 87.6 percent of voters were white; in 2012; 73.7 percent were. And, in 2016, their share was 73.3 percent. White voter turnout increased from 64.1 to 65.3, again defying the predictions of some.

The Census collects information on other factors such as age and sex in addition to race, shedding more light on the electoral landscape.

Young people continued to be less reliable voters than older ones. In 2016, turnout among young people ages 18-29 years was 46.1 percent; among those 65 and older it was 70.9 percent. Democrats, who draw some of their strongest support from the young, have reasons to be encouraged by what the Census found. According to the Bureau, young voters ages 18-29 were the only age group to report higher turnout compared to 2012.

Since 1980, women have voted at a higher rate than men, outnumbering them by about 8 million in recent elections. In 2016, once again, women voted at a higher rate than men (63.3 to 59.3 percent) and 10 million more of them voted than men. The turnout rate among women in 2016 (63.3 percent) was similar to what it was in 2012 (63.7 percent). Women did not surge at the polls. Neither did men, whose turnout rate was 59.7 percent in 2012 and 59.3 percent in 2016.

Overall, how did we do? Was turnout up or down? In 2016, 61.4 of the age-eligible citizen population reported voting, a number the Census described as “not statistically different from the 61.8 percent who reported voting in 2012.”

Changes in the demographic make-up of our population do not automatically translate into changes at the ballot box. Predicting the share and partisan tilt of various groups based on what happened in the past is an exceedingly difficult task for campaigns and pundits alike. The results from 2016 remind us yet again that those predictions don’t always line up with reality.

James Capretta, “Trump’s budget signals the absence of a realistic agenda,” American Enterprise Institute, May 26, 2017, https://www.aei.org/articles/trumps-budget-signals-the-absence-of-a-realistic-agenda/

Trump’s budget signals the absence of a realistic agenda

One of the reasons Donald Trump prospered during the presidential campaign was because he created the impression that he would bring fresh thinking and new ideas to the federal government. He said he could cut taxes, increase defense spending, protect Social Security and Medicare benefits, increase support for veterans, and balance the budget by bringing a business perspective to eliminating waste and unnecessary spending. He said he would find ways to cut costs that never occurred to his predecessors. Many voters wanted to believe him.

The release of the administration’s first full budget this week should lay to rest for good the notion that Trump has an imaginative plan for painless cost-cutting that will help him fulfill his campaign promises. There is no such plan, never was, and never will be.

Instead, the budget OMB Director Mick Mulvaney presented this week is the predictable result of a fiscal policy that is entirely divorced from reality. Because it is based on so many flawed assumptions, the plan is more likely to result in policies that make the budget outlook worse rather than better.

The administration has been in place now for four months, and one of its top priorities is a major tax cut and tax reform. The president has said repeatedly that he would like to sign into law one of the largest tax cuts in history. And yet the budget plan provides no details at all on the administration’s tax plans. Instead, it assumes a revenue-neutral tax reform, which will only occur if higher growth offsets some of the revenue loss associated with lower rates. Separately, the budget also assumes $2 trillion in additional revenue from the growth effects of the administration’s policies, of which tax reform must be considered the centerpiece. In other words, instead of building into the budget forecast a major tax cut, as the president has touted, the administration says its tax policies will result in an additional $2 trillion in revenue over the next decade. This is what is known as a heroic assumption.

The administration claims it will get this additional revenue because its policies will push economic growth up from just under 2 percent annually in recent years to 3 percent per year beginning in 2021. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assumes the economy will grow 1.9 percent annually starting in 2021, and most economic forecasters expect growth to hover around 2 percent for the foreseeable future.

Higher growth is essential for an improved fiscal outlook. But the Trump administration hasn’t proposed anything that would justify such a large deviation from the consensus forecast. The administration says it is pushing for pro-growth tax reform, but that’s not the same thing as actually proposing a pro-growth tax reform plan. At this point, projecting 3 percent growth in the outyears of the budget is little more than wishful thinking.

The budget increases defense spending modestly in 2018, by 4.6 percent compared to the enacted level of funding for 2017. Nonetheless, the budget assumes defense spending will continue to fall as a percentage of GDP, from 3.4 percent in 2017 to 2.4 percent in 2027, which would be the lowest level of defense spending relative to the size of the national economy since before World War II, in 1940. Given the many developing threats to national security, it seems more likely that defense spending will remain closer to the post-war historical average.

The Trump budget stays true to the president’s commitment to stay away from major reforms in Social Security and Medicare. This commitment forced the administration to focus its cost-cutting on the rest of the budget, where there is room for some savings, especially in the aftermath of increases pushed through Congress during the Obama administration. But because the administration wanted to show it balanced the budget within ten years, the administration’s planned cuts outside of defense, Social Security, and Medicare are all out proportion to what is reasonable or realistic.

In 2017, the federal government will spend $619 billion on non-defense appropriated accounts. This is the portion of the budget that pays for the myriad domestic federal agencies that get their funding through the annual appropriations process, such as the Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health. The Trump budget assumes there will be a downsizing of these accounts to $601 billion in spending in 2018 and to $429 billion in 2027, or $190 billion below what is being spent this year. Congress already rejected the administration’s proposed cuts to these programs for 2017; the same is almost certain to be true for 2018. And there is zero chance of enacting what would amount to a 40 percent cut in real terms by 2027.

The budget also assumes massive savings in the Medicaid program. The budget’s summary tables show deficit reduction of $250 billion over 10 years from repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This is more deficit reduction than CBO projects would occur if the House-passed American Health Care Act (AHCA) became law. Embedded in CBO’s estimate is a reduction in Medicaid spending of $834 billion over 10 years, from a rollback of the enhanced federal matching funds for expanding coverage under the ACA. Implicitly, the Trump budget assumes this reduction in Medicaid spending and then also assumes an additional reduction in the program of $606 billion over a decade. In total, the budget is proposing to cut Medicaid by $1.4 trillion over 10 years.

Medicaid is badly in need of reform. The House-passed AHCA would move away from open-ended federal matching payments to the states by placing a per person cap on federal financing of the program. This reform would bring much needed discipline to the program. But the Trump budget takes this important reform and turns it into a fictional exercise to claim unrealistic levels of savings. Like the other cuts in the budget, the added Medicaid savings assumed in the budget plan is there for only one reason: to allow the administration to claim it has proposed a balanced budget.

The first year of a new administration is normally the time to advance an ambitious legislative agenda. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has released a budget plan that is more of a political statement than something designed to bring about a change in policy. Indeed, there is very little in the Trump budget that will be taken seriously in Congress, much less passed as legislation.

All of this points to the lack of a concrete and realistic agenda. The budget could have been used as a way for the president to present those creative and new ideas for government reform that he promised as a candidate. Instead, the administration’s plan is disconnected from reality and seems likely to have no effect on policymaking whatsoever. The Trump budget is therefore a significant missed opportunity for the new administration.

Joseph Spector and Sean Lahman, "NY spends $8B each year on job programs. So where are the jobs?,"Democrat and Chronicle, June 7, 2017,https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/albany/2017/06/07/new-york-job-programs-investigation/102323140/

NY spends $8B each year on job programs. So where are the jobs?

ALBANY — In late 2015, New York announced a sweeping agreement to save four Kraft-Heinz production plants across upstate, vowing to invest $20 million to save the 940 jobs.

Now, less than two years later, the small town of Campbell in the Southern Tier is unsettled. Efforts are teetering to keep open a Kraft cheese plant in the community of fewer than 3,700 people, and the company announced in May it will continue to look for a new buyer until August, leaving 330 jobs in the balance.

"They don’t know if the plant is going to be bought by somebody or if they are just going to close the doors, and everybody just gets laid off -- the unemployment line," said the local union's leader, Rich Dexter.

The plant's fate illustrates the perilous nature of New York's economy as it pours at least $8 billion a year — more than any state in the nation — into dozens of job-creation programs that haven't met their goals.

A six-month-long investigation by the USA Today Network in New York found myriad problems with the state's economic-development efforts, ranging from under-performing programs to a lack of transparency on how taxpayers' money is spent.

And despite the spending, the labor force outside New York City continues to shrink.

Among the investigation's findings, which centered on a dozen economic-development programs that have doled out $13 billion in incentives since 2011 when Gov. Andrew Cuomo took office:

Money went to initiatives that in many cases fell short of the job goals, while others did not set any benchmarks for assessing their success or failure.

The state's Regional Economic Development Councils have pledged more than $4.4 billion to 5,300 projects since 2011, but few have job-creation targets, and potential conflicts of interest emerge.

The state's largest incentive program, tax credits for movies and TV shows, provided more than $730 million for 273 television and movie productions since 2014 — at a cost per job of $42,000.

One effort, the StartUp NY program, which provides tax-free zones to new businesses, dished out nearly $6 million in tax breaks in addition to $53 million in ads to promote it. It initially promised 3,324 jobs, but created a third of that as of the end of 2016.

Local Development Corporations, run locally, gave out nearly $1.3 billion in state and local tax breaks to 1,660 projects between 2010 and 2015. The net number of jobs came in at 1,686 — far short of 9,136 promised.

Nearly half of jobs promised by another type of local body, Industrial Development Agencies, fell short of their stated goals. And while the total cost of IDA projects rose by 22 percent between 2010 and 2015, the tax exemptions for the projects grew by 44 percent.

The review comes as the state Legislature and Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli are calling for stronger laws and better oversight of the massive incentive programs.

Also, a state scandal that led to the arrest of Cuomo's former top aides last September is centered around the state's economic-development efforts.

"I have long said that the best economic-development program the state can have is to improve the job-creation climate for everyone and reduce the cost of doing things in New York," said Assemblyman Robin Schimminger, a Buffalo-area Democrat who heads the Assembly's Economic Development Committee.

"That’s the best economic-development program, but it doesn’t create headlines."

State officials have defended their efforts, saying the Cuomo administration's investment in the New York economy is unrivaled.

"I’m proud to say upstate New York has now had a greater investment from the state government than any administration in the history of the state of New York," Cuomo said April 25 in Rochester. "That’s exactly what upstate needed. We’re now going to continue, and we’re building on that."

Indeed, the state has the most jobs in its history; the unemployment rate is nearly half what it was when Cuomo took office. He also lowered business and income taxes, as well as approved a property-tax cap.

Howard Zemsky, Cuomo's economic-development czar and head of Empire State Development, said the various business programs are aimed at luring in new companies and bolstering existing ones, as well as trying to lower the cost of operating in New York.

The state has committed $1.5 billion to transform Buffalo, is spending $700 million a year on the state's 10 economic regions and investing $10 million a year to revive downtowns. Another $500 million each is going to the Rochester area, the Southern Tier and central New York.

"The economy has gotten dramatically better over the years, and I think we’re putting in place some fundamental building blocks for a continued transformation of that economy," Zemsky said in an interview with the USA Today Network's Albany Bureau.

He said the upstate economy needs time to change a trajectory that for decades was headed downward because of a loss of manufacturing jobs and population.

Tourism, health care and agriculture have been the state's fastest-growing sectors after decades of relying on manufacturing.

"There isn’t any one silver-bullet project or idea can transform economies that have been in some state of either depletion or decimation over a 40-year period," Zemsky, a Buffalo businessman, said. "It’s not realistic to say we will grow faster than the Sun Belt overnight."

Cuomo's office declined to make the Democratic governor available for an interview about the state's programs.

Criticism and lack of transparency

The heavy spending has also been met with criticism, particularly in several recent national studies.

A Pew Charitable Trusts report in May found New York is one of the worst states in evaluating the effectiveness of its tax breaks and grants.

A month earlier, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found New York awarded $8 billion in incentives in 2015 — three times as much as the next three largest states combined.

"The majority of studies suggest incentives are not cost-effective, with either no statistically significant effects or large costs per job created," the report said.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed group, determined all the spending comes to $8.6 billion a year -- more than half of which came from economic-development authorities linked to local governments.

The USA Today Network's review found many of the state's programs lack clear reporting standards. The regional development councils, for example, have no clear benchmarks to objectively determine whether the $750 million it allocates each year is well-spent.

In one case, renovations to the low-income senior housing Maple Terrace facility in New Rochelle received among the most largest awards issued by the councils: $9.5 million in 2012, but records show no indication that jobs were created or if the work was completed.

The findings from the investigation were buttressed by a report in May by Comptroller DiNapoli.

He said half of Empire State Development's programs failed to meet reporting requirements. The agency had a remarkable 173 subsidiaries under its umbrella, yet only had annual reports for 15 of them. Thirty-six of programs had no reporting requirements at all.

"You need to have transparency in terms of where is that money going and what are we getting in return for it," DiNapoli told the Albany Bureau. "And don’t assume just because you are putting money in a particular program that you are getting the return intended."

Zemsky and state officials have blasted DiNapoli's audits, saying they do a "tremendous amount of reporting" on projects. At a board meeting last month, Zemsky said the reporting is the most in the state's history, blasting DiNapoli's report for being "inept."

Methodology of the investigation

The USA Today Network in New York partnered late last year with the Investigative Post in Buffalo, ProPublica and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to collect data from the state's economic-development programs through Freedom of Information requests.

Then the USA Today Network took the initial findings and expanded it to include additional data and analysis to provide a comprehensive review of the state's incentives.

One of the key takeaways is that for all the money spent, job creation can be limited.

And while some programs have clawback provisions or a limit on tax breaks if the jobs aren't created, the standards are not uniform.

One of the state's largest efforts, the Excelsior Jobs Program, provides tax credits in exchange for jobs. It is often hailed as one of the state's more accountable programs.

Yet even it has drawn questions.

Records showed that between 2012 and 2016, Excelsior committed $708 million in tax credits to 450 companies that pledged to create 45,750 jobs. As of last fall, only $52 million of the credits have been given out, and the companies reported creating roughly 19,000 jobs.

That's a decent return: About 7 percent of the amount pledged was spent, but 46 percent of the jobs were created.

But those job figured have been questioned.

A DiNapoli audit last year found the state could not provide documentation to support many of the Excelsior job claims. In some cases, job-creation goals were changed retroactively, and the state was counting new employees hired, not new positions created, which doesn't account for turnover. The state disputed the findings.

Another program, called JOBS Now program, offers loans and grants to businesses willing to relocate to New York. The projects that received about $36 million in funding pledged 8,450 jobs, but have delivered fewer than half that number to date, the records showed.

Good-government and business groups want the state to create a "Database of Deals" so the public can gauge how their money is spent and crack down on abuse. The state budget approved April 9 included a requirement for the state to create an annual comprehensive economic-development report.

Cuomo's former top aide Joseph Percoco was accused last fall of accepting payments from companies seeking business with the state in exchange for using his influence in government.

Former SUNY Polytechnic Institute president Alain Kaloyeros was charged separately in a bid-rigging scandal involving some of the state's top economic-development projects.

Cuomo has said he was unaware of the alleged activities.

The state Legislature has a series of bills it is considering before its session ends in late June to try to better account for the state's spending.

"We’ve all seen the indictments. We’ve all seen the mounting evidence, and we know that something is wrong here," said Jennifer Wilson, policy director for the state League of Women Voters.

"Millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on one of the largest bid-rigging schemes in state history."

The scandals led some of the state's largest projects to falter.

In December, Austrian computer chip maker ams dropped plans for a multi-billion technology campus in Utica with SUNY Poly. A nearly $5 billion SUNY Poly deal with IBM and other computer-chip makers ended in 2016, and now some of the equipment from the sprawling nanocenter in Albany is being auctioned off.

In Batavia, unrelated to SUNY Poly, a massive yogurt plant owned by Muller Quaker Dairy with Pepsi shuttered last year after three years and after hoping to create 200 jobs, leaving one of the largest dairy producing plants in the nation vacant. Later, DiNapoli knocked Empire State Development for lowering job-creation requirements for the project so it could get tax breaks.

In the North Country, an Alcoa plant's future is uncertain after the state brokered a deal two years ago to keep it open through 2019 and save nearly 600 jobs.

"It’s a good place to do business, and I just hope the business we have can compete in the global marketplace," said John Burke, a legislator from St. Lawrence County, where many of the Alcoa workers live.

ESD's Zemsky said the agency has taken over the SUNY Poly projects and has assured companies the scandal won't impact state operations.

A $600 million photonics center in Rochester, for example, is now being headed by the state agency and Cuomo's office, rather than SUNY Poly. And the state is investing more than $750 million in a SolarCity solar panel factory in Buffalo, which had been tied to SUNY Poly.

"We’ve got those deals in much better spots now than they were. They were all in some condition of paralysis or disarray," Zemsky said.

Improving the regions

All the money for the projects, though, hasn't created a widespread turnaround in the economy outside New York City — where three out of four new jobs in the state were created from 2009 to 2014.

While the state's employment rate fell from 8.3 percent in January 2011 to 4.6 percent in January 2017, so too has size of the workforce outside the city, the USA Today Network's review found.

The labor force in the city grew 5 percent during that period while it fell 3.4 percent everywhere else, records from the state Labor Department showed.

A bright spot has been the lower Hudson Valley, where the labor force was up slightly and the unemployment rate was 4.1 percent.

Also, a report this month from the Urban Land Institute showed Buffalo had the 12th largest increase in its population of millennials -- those aged 25 to 34.

Upstate cities, though, continue to struggle with among the worst poverty levels in the nation and slow growth.

Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse ranked among the worst metropolitan areas in the nation for economic growth between 2010 and 2015, a Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Program report in March found.

New York outside the city, particularly upstate, did not have the type of nosedive during the recession that some parts of the country felt. So as other places have grown since then, upstate hasn't, said Alan Berube, the group's deputy director.

"It actually weathered the recession OK," he said. "So while the rest of the country has been picking up steam during the recovery, most of upstate has not."

The labor force has shrunk in part because of the aging population outside the city, ranking New York as the fourth-oldest population in the nation.

Other economists painted a more optimistic picture, as did Zemsky.

The largest job loss in New York has been, ironically, a decline in the government sector, records show, where employment dropped 5 percent between 2010 and 2015 or nearly 69,000 fewer jobs.

Zemsky said he has gotten used to naysayers, but believes in the state's strategy to reverse 40 years of job declines outside the city.

"At the end of the day, you have to take the noise out and say, ‘Do we have a fundamentally sound, go-forward strategy that will make a significant impact in the upstate economy over the long haul?’" he said.

"Because the damage that has been done has no quick fix."

UK government did the exercise we were talking about!

"...Official estimates, published for the first time last month by government statisticians based in Newport, Wales, bear this out. In 2015-16, average Londoners paid £3,070 more in tax than they received in public spending. Smaller net contributions to the national purse were made in the south-east and East Anglia. In contrast, net recipients of public spending ranged from an average of £1,296 for people in the south-west to £5,527 for those in Northern Ireland. If London was a nation state, it would have a budget surplus of 7 per cent of gross domestic product, better than Norway...."

Just as Donald Trump’s America will not prosper by blaming other countries for its own problems and Britain’s woes are not the EU’s fault, the rest of the UK should stop accusing London of stealing its future. Politicians are there to lead. If they think regional prosperity will come from London’s pain, they are leading Britain to la-la land.

Growth cannot be pushed around the country like chips on a roulette table. Numerous attempts to relocate private industries have failed. Moving statisticians to Newport damaged the quality of information without helping much locally. Cities should instead seek to address barriers that prevent local businesses’ success. Manchester’s dynamism shows it is slow work but possible.

For the Tories to bemoan London’s relative success highlights a frivolity in government economic policy. There is every need to improve the performance of all parts of Britain, but setting policy to reduce the gap between the capital and elsewhere threatens universal misery. As the Centre for Cities notes, the most equal cities where gaps between rich and poor have been ironed out successfully — Burnley, Stoke and Mansfield — are also among Britain’s weakest.

Londoners have suffered the most and yet still provide the money to redistribute resources to poorer places and more vulnerable people. The rest of Britain should write a thank-you note.

The idea that London sucks the life out of other parts of Britain is absurd. Equally ludicrous is the notion that the capital’s population has lived the life of Riley while other places have suffered. After housing costs, Londoners’ median household incomes have performed worse than any other region since 2008.

If London was a nation state, it would have a budget surplus of 7 per cent of gross domestic product, better than Norway. It could finance the £30bn cost of the Crossrail 2 transport project with a little over one year of this excess cash. By contrast, Scotland, the West Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside, the north-west, the north-east, Wales and Northern Ireland would each have budget deficits greater than 10 per cent of their national incomes. Without London, they would soon feel the warm embrace of an International Monetary Fund programme.

Official estimates, published for the first time last month by government statisticians based in Newport, Wales, bear this out. In 2015-16, average Londoners paid £3,070 more in tax than they received in public spending. Smaller net contributions to the national purse were made in the south-east and East Anglia. In contrast, net recipients of public spending ranged from an average of £1,296 for people in the south-west to £5,527 for those in Northern Ireland.

Politicians’ antipathy towards London is bizarre. It is definitively the cash cow that allows them to promise the high quality public services all parts of the country crave.

Of the main parties, the noisiest complaints come from the Conservatives. Displaying an undisguised hostility to the capital, the Tory manifesto talks of spreading wealth and opportunity across the UK, “not just the most prosperous places in London and the south-east”. It calls for arts funding to be redirected from the capital, for Channel 4 television and for civil servants to be relocated by force. “We will ensure that senior posts move too, so that operational headquarters as well as administrative functions are centred not in London but around Britain,” it promises. Labour is less vindictive, but shares the analysis. It complains the UK has “relied too heavily on the financial sector centred on London and the south-east”.

London is under attack. The perpetrators are aiming at its wealth, the opportunities it offers, its cultural vibrancy and its power. These foes are themselves mighty. They are the majority of Britain’s political class.

If the capital were a country, it would have a budget surplus of 7 per cent of GDP

Why London deserves a thank you note from the rest of Britain

Chris Giles, "Why London deserves a thank you note from the rest of Britain,"Financial Times, June 8, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/ff0df3b4-4aa8-11e7-919a-1e14ce4af89b