Did anybody else’s morning coffee taste unusually bitter upon reading about the proposed City incentive package to bring Korean solar-panel manufacturer Nexolon America LLC to Brooks City Base?

There are two kinds of unfortunate math in the kind of deal the City and Brooks are proposing for Nexolon. First is the mathematic equation that I’ve been teaching my 7-year-old daughter: when you subtract a negative, the result is a positive. How does that relate to Nexolon? When you remove the obligation to pay taxes, you’ve “subtracted a negative” and the taxpayer undoubtedly receives a mathematically positive benefit: they get to keep more of their money than they would have without the abatement.

Mathematically, this also means that public coffers are poorer by that same amount because the businesses that receive abatements aren’t paying into the system.¹ In plain English, when public officials award a tax abatement, it’s the same thing, in math and money terms, as handing out cash from the public coffers.²

I find this math noncontroversial, but everybody I’ve talked to who works in “economic development” in San Antonio refuses to agree that tax abatements equal public handouts for private gain.

The second kind of math associated with Nexolon gets even worse. The Express-News story on the incentives quoted Mayor Castro, who supports the deal because of the “400 good paying manufacturing jobs” it is supposed to bring to San Antonio in return for the incentives.

One cannot credibly make the case that President Obama is a president incapable of doing big things. After all, he staked his first term on passing a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system. He got it done, and he won reelection.

So it’s almost baffling that his administration, in light of achieving something so momentous, has been unable to get a Senate-confirmed Customs and Border Protection commissioner in place.

Don’t get me wrong: getting nominees through the tough confirmation process has never been a slam-dunk. (You might recall Bill Clinton’s well documented first-term struggles to appoint an attorney general.)

But CBP commissioner is a post well under-the-radar for most Americans, rarely sparking much public debate. That doesn’t mean, though, that the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee can be easily charmed, as the president found out with his nomination of Alan Bersin back in 2009 – an outstanding pick that I supported.

Television commercials are back to pitching deodorant and dishwasher detergent instead of trashing politicians with out-of-context quotes and embarrassing pictures while ominous music plays in the background. The election must be over.

But now the real work begins. Congress is back in Washington in a lame-duck session, staring down the fiscal cliff – a dangerous cocktail of big tax hikes and drastic spending cuts that could send an already soft U.S. economy back into recession.

Those of us on the border are watching closely to get a sense of how our issues are going to figure into the next Congress and what priority level they’ll take in the administration.

So here’s a post-election to-do list straight from the border for the president and Congress:

The Houston-Galveston Area Council's Livable Centers Program helps communities develop livable communities built around daily life.

A Pattern Language, the 1977 community planning guide by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, describes an important neighborhood design pattern called Activity Nodes. Their description begins with a complaint: “One of the greatest problems in existing communities is the fact that the available public life in them is spread so thin that it has no impact on the community. It is not in any real sense available to the community.” San Antonio overhauled its City Master Plan three years after the publication of those words, but most would agree that the problem articulated by Alexander and his colleagues holds true here today.