Mental Hiccups

An off century

2010-12-24T05:58:00.004-05:00

Larry Elder reviews 50 years of Liberal policies -- from taxes to welfare, education, gun control, minimum wage, affirmative action, and Obamacare -- and concludes, "Any party can have a bad half-century."

Read the whole thing.

Incentives matter

2010-12-22T15:55:00.002-05:00

Michael Barone on what the 2010 Census reveals:

The great engine of growth in America is not the Northeast Megalopolis, which was growing faster than average in the mid-20th century, or California, which grew lustily in the succeeding half-century. It is Texas.

Its population grew 21 percent in the past decade, from nearly 21 million to more than 25 million. That was more rapid growth than in any states except for four much smaller ones (Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho).

Texas' diversified economy, business-friendly regulations and low taxes have attracted not only immigrants but substantial inflow from the other 49 states. As a result, the 2010 reapportionment gives Texas four additional House seats. In contrast, California gets no new House seats, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850.

There's a similar lesson in the fact that Florida gains two seats in the reapportionment and New York loses two.

This leads to a second point, which is that growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Altogether, 35 percent of the nation's total population growth occurred in these nine non-taxing states, which accounted for just 19 percent of total population at the beginning of the decade.

Say it with me: Incentives, incentives, incentives. By far the most important concept I've learned over the past few years of trying to become economically literate is that

Incentives, Not Intentions, Are What Matter.

I really can't stress enough how important this is. Whether it's economics, parenting, crime, or anything else, if you flat out ignore the intentions of a policy, action, or behavior and simply ask What incentives are being created?, you'll begin to understand things in ways you never imagined.

If you reward something, you get more of it; if you penalize something, you get less of it. This is the physics of people. It's like gravity, and it always wins.

They never learn

2010-12-22T15:25:00.004-05:00

TaxProf:

Oregon raised its income tax on the richest 2% of its residents last year to fix its budget hole, but now the state treasury admits it collected nearly one-third less revenue than the bean counters projected. ...

In 2009 the state legislature raised the tax rate to 10.8% on joint-filer income of between $250,000 and $500,000, and to 11% on income above $500,000. Only New York City's rate is higher. Oregon's liberal voters ratified the tax increase on individuals and another on businesses in January of this year, no doubt feeling good about their "shared sacrifice."

Congratulations. Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. ...

One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did. Funny how that always happens. These numbers are in line with a Cascade Policy Institute study, based on interstate migration patterns, predicting that the tax surcharge would lead to 80,000 fewer wealthy tax filers in Oregon over the next decade. ...

All of this is an instant replay of what happened in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state's millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up.

Newsflash: When you penalize something, you get less of it.

This was entirely foreseeable, which is why the Cascade Policy Institute was able to predict it, and why this is not only a replay of what happened in Maryland, but in New York, California, New Jersey, and other states as well.

Government falls into a basic trap, time and again. They see taxpayers primarily as a revenue source and fail to recognize that they are people, who respond to incentives. If you tax them, do they not bleed? Of course they do. Then they move out of the state or figure out other ways to keep you from taking their money.

Those who continue to act like they can just pass laws and magically achieve only the intended results need to wake up and meet the Law of Unintended Consequences: Incentives, not intentions, matter.

Incentives are like gravity; they win every time.

Quote of the day

2010-12-21T12:53:00.000-05:00

Thomas Sowell:

One of the biggest obstacles to economic recovery is that politicians and the media are both focused on how government can make the economy recover, rather than on how it can let the economy recover. One of the biggest deterrents to investments — and the jobs they could create — is uncertainty over what new bright ideas will come out of Washington to change the rules in midstream.

But I thought poverty causes crime?

2010-12-21T12:39:00.001-05:00

CSM:

As new FBI crime figures point out, property crimes, murder, rape, and arson all plunged in the first six months of 2010 – some would say counterintuitively – even as unemployment and hard times hit communities from coast to coast....
"Recessions actually tend to be associated with decreases in crime," adds Peter Scharf, a criminologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. "People's aspiration levels go down, they get less greedy, they stay home. Not only don't you go to Saks and Macy's, you don't go to Best Buy and Walmart. So even in your risk populations you can get a recession effect: People are not out in the large economy involved in conflict and alcohol and property crimes" to the same extent as during a booming economy.

A lost decade in education

2010-12-16T11:51:00.002-05:00

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

History is usually made by a small group of passionate people. On Dec. 7, history was made by a small group of parents in Compton, Calif.

Their children attend McKinley Elementary School - a school that has been defined as failing for the past 10 years. Using a new power known as the "parent trigger," which I fought for and state legislators approved last year, these Compton parents banded together to demand change. The legislation allows parents of students at troubled schools to demand such significant reforms as closing a school, replacing a school's management or most of its staff, or reorganizing a school into a charter, if 51 percent of parents sign a petition.

McKinley Elementary is being reorganized and will soon be transformed into a charter school run by Celerity Educational Group, which is successfully operating three other schools in California.

Schwarzenegger may think he's trumpeting a success story, and perhaps he is, but that story remains to be written. What I hear, instead, is an indictment -- no, a confession, an admission of guilt that for at least 10 years California has knowingly allowed this school to fail without taking corrective action. How many kids have been robbed of their futures in that time?

Consider the remedies only now being made available to the victims of McKinley Elementary: replacement of the school's management and staff, reorganization into a charter school. Now consider what things would look like if, instead of being herded through a government-run monopoly, parents were given real choices in an educational marketplace.

To begin with, the failures at McKinley would have been addressed a decade ago. A failing school remains a tragedy only as long as we force our kids to attend it. Had we allowed parents to choose where they send their kids -- the way we allow them to choose where they shop for groceries or fill their gas tanks -- McKinley would have been vacant as soon as parents learned there was a better product down the road. The failing school would be forced to reform or shut down (very likely with a new school, under new management, moving in to fill the vacuum). In any event, in the face of competition failure is not an option for very long, and a lost decade could have been averted.

The lesson, as always, is that, if given choices, people do a much better job of looking out for their own interests than any government can ever do. Until we break free from the government monopoly on education, we will continue to condemn millions of children to bleak, stunted futures. No amount of money or reform is enough to improve a system that doesn't need to succeed to survive.

The unAmerican dream

2010-12-16T01:15:00.006-05:00

I haven't paid attention to the details of the DREAM Act because I'm against rewarding illegal behavior, and no matter what kind of package it comes in, that's what Harry Reid is selling. (If it didn't reward illegal behavior, illegals would have no interest in it and there would be no point.) So when it comes to the DREAM Act -- well, sing it, Groucho:

I don’t know what they have to say,
It makes no difference anyway --
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I’m against it.

Your proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood --
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it,
I’m against it.

Still, it was interesting to read Bob Dane's "How To Guide for Becoming a DREAM Act Beneficiary," which takes the aspiring young illegal by the hand to make sure all his dreams come true should the act become a reality. I'll leave the reading to the, er, reader, and simply note that there are far fewer hurdles and far more ways around the requirements than I imagined. There are some nice perks thrown in as well. For example, illegals would actually become eligible for federal benefits like health care sooner than if they had come here legally.

DREAM Act indeed.

Hug a rich person

2010-12-15T23:40:00.005-05:00

Bernie Goldberg says we need to stop vilifying rich people and instead build a huge monument "to pay tribute to those this nation of ours owes a great debt; to those who give and give and give and in return get anything but our gratitude." He offers some numbers to make his case:

Did you know that the top one percent of American wage earners (adjusted gross income) pay about 38 percent of all our federal personal taxes (according to the National Taxpayer Union)? The top one percent, by the way, account for 23.5 percent of all income — a substantial amount, yes, but considerably less than 38 percent.
Or that the top five percent pay just under 60 percent?

Or that the top ten percent pay about 70 percent of all the personal income taxes collected in this great land of ours?

These “fat-cats” are the ones who do the heavy lifting in this country. They’re the ones whose federal tax dollars pick up a big chunk of the tab for all sorts of noble things, such as: food for folks who don’t have enough to eat … medicine and doctors for people with little money … financial aid to help other people’s kids go to college … milk and diapers for poor babies whose 15 year-old mothers and deadbeat fathers are too irresponsible to take care of their own kids … a safety net for old folks who are retired on fixed incomes … and on and on. . . .

No, I’m not saying the wealthiest Americans are all a bunch of selfless philanthropists. But try to imagine an America without those rich people.

By the way, the bottom 50 percent of tax filers pay a paltry 2.7 percent of our federal income taxes. How many poor people do you think their tax dollars are taking care of? If you ask me, they’re the ones not paying their fair share. Every time they pass a “rich” person on the street, they ought to say, “Thank you for everything you do for me and for this country.”

Goldberg is right. The rich aren't necessarily heroes, but Americans have the highest standard of living in the world in large part because we receive the benefits of a small group of rich people acting in their own self interests. In addition to all the services they pay for and the jobs they provide, they are responsible for all the wonderful things that make our lives so much better.

Even poor people in America are known to have cars and stereos and color TVs with cable service and VCRs and computers with Internet connections and cell phones and microwaves and washers and driers, not to mention plumbing and electricity and heat and air conditioning and contact lenses and medicines and on and on.

Rich people created all that stuff! Then they figured out ways to make it cheap so we could afford it. Poor people in America have luxuries that even the super rich couldn't buy not so long ago.

Hell, I love rich people.

I know. You say, then why don't you marry them? Well, I just might should one of them ask.

No, maybe we don't need to build a monument to rich people, or give them a national holiday, or even start naming streets and babies after them. But maybe we could at least cut them a little slack? Stop calling them bad names? Say thanks for all the cool stuff?

Besides, if rich people are all that bad, why is everybody trying so hard to be one?

Pigs at the trough

2010-12-15T16:27:00.006-05:00

Jamie Dupree put together a handy collection of links that allows you to take a look at the earmarks your senator has included in the new budget bill.

One of my senators is requesting 13 earmarks (* Turns out this in not true. Dems played dirty. See both updates below!); the other is requesting 32. As far as I can tell there's not a single item on the list that the Constitution says they are allowed to spend money on, and they want to spend millions.

Dupree writes:

The projects include the usual smattering of things that make some lawmakers go nuts, like $300,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

"I'm not making it up," said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who again took to the floor on Tuesday to denounce the thousand of earmarks in this bill from both parties.

"The American people said just 42 days ago, 'Enough!'" said McCain. "Are we tone deaf? Are we stricken with amnesia?"

Apparently.

h/t: JammieWearingFool

* Update: Despite his request for 13 earmarks, Judd Gregg has announced that he will vote against the omnibus bill. Apparently, he got the message voters sent on November 2. As Milton Friedman said, it's nice to elect the right people, but the way you get things done is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, I can't imagine my other senator, Jeanne Shaheen, will do the right thing under any circumstances.

Update: Kimberley Strassel reports that "omnibus author and Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye dug up earmark requests that Senate Republicans had made in the past year (prior to their self-imposed ban) and, unasked, included them in the bill."

Apparently, Inouye was trying to play a dirty trick, inserting the outdated earmark requests into the bill in hopes of luring Republicans into voting for it, and also setting them up to take the blame if it passed. Pretty slimy stuff -- and it might have worked if not for the leadership of Mitch McConnell.

A tale of two states

2010-12-15T15:51:00.002-05:00

I've been reading more and more accounts like this one from Victor Davis Hanson, and missing my beloved California less and less.

The tax rates are too damn high

2010-12-15T11:34:00.003-05:00

Katria Trinko writes:

President Obama asked Congress this morning to pass the tax cut compromise “as swiftly as possible,” stressing its importance to generating economic growth and helping the middle class.

Obama is on record, both as a candidate and as president, supporting the idea that lower taxes (at least on the middle class; he's flip-flopped on the issue when it comes to high income earners) are essential to economic growth. The vast majority of both Democrats and Republicans agree (again, at least as regards the middle class).

So why aren't any of them calling for actual tax cuts? The so-called "tax cut compromise" doesn't cut tax rates; it simply keeps tax rates where they've been for the last decade.

If all these politicians really believe that lower tax rates are good for the economy, then let's get busy, you know, lowering the tax rates.

Update: Well, there's one. I just heard Michele Bachmann tell Sean Hannity that we should be cutting tax rates instead of simply maintaining the status quo. Music to my ears! I know there's no chance it will actually happen, but it cheers me to hear someone taking an honest to goodness conservative position for a change. Good on her.

If the news doesn't fit, you must omit

2010-12-15T10:49:00.004-05:00

NewsBusters catches the Washington Post hiding the ball, as they fail to report the results of their own poll: [emphasis in original]

A new ABC-Washington Post poll found ObamaCare sunk to its lowest popularity yet: 52 percent opposed, and only 43 percent in favor. ABC mentioned the poll without fanfare at the end of a Jake Tapper report on Monday’s World News, and Tapper added this was the health law's "lowest level of popularity ever." But Tuesday’s Washington Post reported not one sentence on the poll in the paper – even as they reported in the paper that the same survey found Obama’s tax-and-unemployment-compensation deal has “broad bipartisan support.”

This is the same Post that highlighted the news on Page One on October 20, 2009, when they found a “clear majority” in favor of a socialist “public option” -- amid charges they oversampled Democrats.

The numbers weren't excluded because they arrived late. The Post poll numbers went up on the website yesterday at about 1 pm, under the headline “Health care opponents divided on repeal.”

So, they reported the results of the tax deal question, which has Americans agreeing with Obama, but they hid the results of the Obamacare question, which has record numbers of Americans disagreeing with Obama, even though the questions came from the same survey. The Post has a reputation for a pro-liberal slant and this seems to confirm that bias.

I've long said that most media bias comes not in the actual reporting but in what is reported or ignored. This seems to confirm that theory as well.

Rising gas prices not Obama's fault

2010-12-14T18:07:00.004-05:00

Ron Futrell of Big Journalism wonders why the media isn't blaming Obama for rising gas prices the way they did Bush.

Oh, the activists in the old media commit sins of omission and sins of commission, sometimes both in the same story.
Take those pesky little ol gas prices that have now skyrocketed to more than $3.00 a gallon. For months the media had just omitted the story altogether like they hadn’t even noticed, while during the Bush administration they couldn’t stop doing stories on “Pain At The Pump” and they worked overtime to point the nozzle directly at the White House.
Here are a couple of examples, there are many others.

This story from 2006 on MSNBC blasts Bush for doing little to stop the rising gas prices.

This story from 2008 talks about how Bush and Evil Big Oil were conspiring against us all to raise prices and how Dear Leader Obama was going to come in and save us all from high gas prices and our dependence on foreign oil.

Whoops. . . .

When Obama entered the White House gas prices averaged $1.81 per gallon. Evil Bush/Oil must’ve done something to make those prices fall – but there’s no time in the 10 hours a day that local TV stations do in their newscasts to mention this little fact. They’re out of space in the New York Times to provide context for this story.

A formula for success

2010-12-14T17:47:00.004-05:00

Economists Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution:

Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent."

That's a pretty simple formula. Unfortunately, unwed child births are at historic highs, high school graduation rates are dismal, and it's tough to find and keep a job while you are on drugs or in prison, which is the fate of all too many of our youth.

Also unfortunate is that we tend to inherit both our genes and our environment from the same people, meaning that the behavior patterns of the fathers tend to be visited upon the sons.

Read Obama's lips

2010-12-14T17:23:00.002-05:00

Chuck Norris:

[O]f the more than 500 promises Obama made during his candidacy, even according to the pro-Obama website PolitiFact's "Obameter," his scorecard reads: 123 promises kept, 39 compromised, 24 broken, 82 stalled, 232 in the works and three not yet rated. What that coddled language boils down to is this: Even according to those on the political left, Obama has fulfilled 123 promises and left 380 pledges dangling farther than participles.

Norris accepts Obama's recent challenge to "Look at what I promised during the campaign. There's not a single thing that I've said that I would do that I have not either done or tried to do."

After "setting aside" such things as "promises of transparency, C-SPAN coverage of health care debates and even Guantanamo Bay's closing," Norris goes on to list some of the major promises Obama has failed to deliver on:

--"We've got a philosophical difference, which we've debated repeatedly, and that is that Sen. (Hillary) Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it." (Spoken during the Democratic presidential debate on Feb. 21, 2008.)
--"We need tougher border security and a renewed focus on busting up gangs and traffickers crossing our border. ... That begins at home, with comprehensive immigration reform. That means securing our border and passing tough employer enforcement laws." (Spoken in Miami on May 23, 2008.)
--"Based on the conversations we've had internally, as well as external reports, we believe that you can get one to two brigades out a month. At that pace, the forces would be out in approximately 16 months from the time that we began. That would be the time frame that I would be setting up." (Spoken to The New York Times on Oct. 31, 2007, about the withdrawal from Iraq.)
--"We will launch a sweeping effort to root out waste, inefficiency and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called Recovery.gov." (Spoken in a speech on Jan. 28, 2009.)
--"There is no doubt that we've been living beyond our means and we're going to have to make some adjustments. Now, what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut." (Spoken during the presidential debate on Oct. 15, 2008.)
--"We are going to ban all earmarks." (Spoken at a news conference on Jan. 6, 2009.)
--"Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase -- not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." (Spoken at a town hall meeting on Sept. 12, 2008.)
--And oh, yes, then there's that substantial promise repeated dozens of times in one way, shape or form on the campaign trail: "It's true that I want to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans." (Spoken in Chester, Pa., on Oct. 28, 2008.)

Liberals and Conservatives will disagree over which of these promises are laudable and which are not, but it's clear that Obama hasn't lived up to a number of large, important vows.

The voters punished Bush-41 for breaking his famous "read my lips" pledge. Will they hold Obama similarly accountable?

Swing and a miss

2010-12-13T16:03:00.004-05:00

At The Notion, Laura Flanders takes New York's Republican Congressman Peter King to task for his evolving "definition of terrorist". King, Flanders complains, "can't remember what the word means anymore."

The problem is that two of the three examples Flanders uses to track King's allegedly inconsistent definition of terrorism have nothing to do with terrorism. After staking out King's position on a 1980's extradition case, Flander's writes:

Flash forward to 2005, when Karl Rove and Scooter Libby outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. King called for "crosshairs" to be set on news media for not being tough enough on Plame's husband Joe Wilson instead. He also suggested that the media "be shot" for pursuing the story.

First, let's get the facts straight: it was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, that "outed" Valerie Plame. And Armitage didn't actually "out" her, as she wasn't undercover to begin with (she was listed as a CIA agent in Who's Who, for crying out loud). This is why Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald didn't charge Armitage (or anyone else) with outing Plame; he concluded there was no evidence a crime was committed.

Setting all that aside, what does any of this have to do with terrorism? By Flanders own account, all King did was criticize the media for not doing its job.

Flanders continues:

Terrorism has a new definition now, though, and King is emphatic on who the bad guys are. "I am calling on the attorney general and supporting his efforts to fully prosecute WikiLeaks and its founder [Julian Assange] for violating the Espionage Act," he told a New York radio station.

Again, what does this have to do with terrorism? According to Wikipedia, the Espionage Act made it a crime "to convey information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies."

This sounds like a pretty fair description of what Julian Assange did. In fact, the Wikipedia article on the Espionage Act includes a section specifically on the Assange case. But there's no mention of terrorism in the article, and there shouldn't be. Espionage and terrorism are different things, and King seems to understand that, even if Flanders doesn't.

I'm actually not a fan of Peter King, but Flanders is bending over backwards to play "gotcha" when there's no cha to be got.

I try to read The Notion regularly, so I can get opposing views and keep up with what the Left is thinking, but when this is the kind of stuff they push it's hard to keep going back.

Merry Christmas from the president

2010-12-10T12:20:00.003-05:00

What does it say that it's "news" that the President of the United States actually uttered the words "Merry Christmas" (three times!) at the national tree lighting ceremony?

If you ask me, it's downright ridiculous that this is at all remarkable, but here we are. But since we are here, it's worth sending out some kudos to President Obama for opting for "Merry Christmas" (three times!) over the bland and politically correct "Happy Holidays."

Nicely done, Mr. President.

Bush gave the facts; journalists are hacks

2010-12-09T20:08:00.003-05:00

Larry Elder says George W. Bush is owed an apology by those who claimed he lied when he uttered the now famous 16 words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This was never a lie to begin with, of course. The British, to this day, stand by that report. But it turns out there is hard evidence to corroborate the claim.

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq -- on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels -- what even The Associated Press called "the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program": 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: "The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. ... To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam ... would have been too big a risk."

Now the mainscream media no longer deem yellowcake -- the WMD Bush supposedly lied about -- a WMD.

Funny how "Bush Lied" made headlines for years, but the evidence of the actual nuclear material in question didn't seem to get much attention. I certainly didn't read about it anywhere. Did you?

Dems protest too much

2010-12-08T13:01:00.003-05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama struggled Tuesday to prevent wholesale defections by fellow Democrats that could sink the tax deal he worked out with Republicans -- angry opposition that could subject millions of Americans to a big holiday-season tax increase.
Many GOP lawmakers seemed ready to embrace the Obama-GOP compromise and declare victory. The question was whether enough Democrats would join them in support, especially in the House, where liberal resentment of the president's concessions on tax breaks for the wealthiest runs strong.

My ever-growing inner cynic has me pretty well convinced that this is pure political theater. Obama has given ground, but it's not like this is a truly conservative end point.

A conservative plan would lower tax rates for everyone. Obama only agreed not to raise them, and even then only temporarily. A conservative plan would shorten the number of months people can receive unemployment payments, which has already been extended. The Obama compromise has Republicans agreeing to extend unemployment benefits an additional 13 months. A conservative plan would eliminate the estate tax. Under the compromise, the estate tax will be set at 35 percent.

So while it's true that Obama gave ground and Republicans got a lot of what they asked for, Obama got some things in return and we ended up with a plan far from what conservatives would like to see.

What I think we're seeing is a coordinated effort to make it look like Obama has pivoted to the center a lot further than he has. He gives in a little while his team complains quite loudly about how he's caved. Then Obama can campaign for 2012 on the claim that he bucked his own party to reach across the aisle, etc. etc. I predict we'll soon be hearing about what a great leader he has been, and how he's set a new tone in Washington of cooperation and bipartisanship, when he's done exactly the opposite for two years.

So methinks the Dems protest way too much. Especially when I see this a bit farther down in the article:

Democratic leaders in the House criticized the tax plan, sometimes harshly, but stopped short of saying they would try to block it.

Why all the whining and pissing and moaning if they're not going to actually do something about it? Because the whining and pissing and moaning, not the policy, was the point from the start.

Rethinking Robin Hood

2010-12-07T11:50:00.005-05:00

This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. . . . It is this foulest of creatures—the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich—whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal. . . . Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.

-- Ragnar Danneskjold, in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

We draw the wrong lesson from the 20th century version of the Robin Hood legend. His virtue was not in stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He didn't steal from King Richard, for example, because Richard was just and treated the people fairly. Robin began "stealing" only after the king's brother John took charge and began plundering the peoples' property. In response, Robin sought justice, recapturing what was stolen and returning it to its rightful owners.

Robin was indeed a hero for taking on the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. But by mischaracterizing his deeds we demonize all the wealthy (even the beloved King Richard) and legitimize the stealing of their property. We buy into the unjust notion that we have a "right" to our neighbors' property simply because they have more than we do. This, of course, turns morality on its head. I don't have a right to steal my neighbor's car merely because he has two of them and I have none.

Most everyone is raised to know that it's wrong to take something that doesn't belong to you. But many of us fall into the trap of thinking "it's different" if the things we're taking belong to the "evil rich" and we're just "spreading the wealth around."

When President Obama says he wants to "spread the wealth around," he's talking about taking what doesn't belong to him. He's talking about stealing.

Restoring science to its rightful place

2010-12-05T18:40:00.004-05:00

E21 blog summarizes a new study that takes an empirical look at the results of Obama's "stimulus" policies. (Most analyses, like the oft-cited CBO estimate, use formulas based on assumptions to derive their numbers.)

The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs “created or saved” by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.

HT: Peter Robinson at Ricochet

Put your tax money where your mouth is

2010-12-03T14:17:00.005-05:00

I'm not going to accept Don Surber's challenge, because government already has too much of our money, but for those of you who think taxes should be higher, don't let us evil conservatives stop you:

Gifts to the United States
Citizens who wish to make a general donation to the U.S. government may send contributions to a specific account called "Gifts to the United States." This account was established in 1843 to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States. Money deposited into this account is for general use by the federal government and can be available for budget needs. These contributions are considered an unconditional gift to the government. Financial gifts can be made by check or money order payable to the United States Treasury and mailed to:

Gifts to the United States
U.S. Department of the Treasury
Credit Accounting Branch
3700 East-West Highway, Room 6D37
Hyattsville, MD 20782

Any tax-related questions regarding these contributions should be directed to the Internal Revenue Service at (800) 829-1040.

If you'd like to part with even more of your money, I'm accepting "unconditional gifts" as well. Money sent to me will go into my "general fund" and will be used for my "budget needs." I'll happily accept checks, money orders, or cash. Alternatively, you can just leave your credit card info in the comment section.

Oh, and thanks for your ~~stupidity~~ patriotism.

From the Department of Duh!

2010-12-03T09:23:00.003-05:00

Via TaxProf:

TIGTA’s analysis found that the majority of tax returns the IRS identifies as being filed by prisoners are not being screened to assess their fraud potential. The review found that 253,929 (88 percent) of the 287,918 returns filed by prisoners as of March 24, 2010 were not selected for screening. Of those, 48,887 who claimed refunds totaling more than $130 million had no wage information reported to the IRS by employers. ... TIGTA’s findings regarding prisoners are similar to its findings in a September 28, 2005 audit, The IRS Needs to Do More to Stop the Millions of Dollars in Fraudulent Refunds Paid to Prisoners (2005-10-164).

$130 million of taxpayer money. Who would have thought that convicted criminals would try to steal?

Too bad somebody didn't look into this years ago so we'd have known to watch out for this kind of stuff. . . wait. . . what?

Gaming the system

2010-12-03T08:35:00.005-05:00

Margery Eagan of the Boston Herald provides a some anecdotal evidence against extending expiring unemployment benefits. Of the eight "unemployed workers" (how's that for an oxymoron?) she spoke with, only two were "unequivocal" in their desire for the benefits to be extended. The rest worry that an extension will allow people to continue to "game the system."

It's telling when even those who stand to benefit from the extension are against it. I wonder if these sentiments are reflective of the larger population. I also wonder about the logic of the two people who want to see benefits extended:

The first was a 52-year-old civil engineer out of work since April 2007 who wants Brown to extend benefits “at least through the holidays and until spring time,” said Mark, who asked that his last name not be used. “I hate being unemployed. I hate collecting unemployment. Now I have to take money out of my 401.”
The second, Greg Vasale, 61, has been out of work for 18 months and said he was for extending benefits, even though they won’t help him much. Why? He played by the rules. He never refused work. But that meant, particularly cruelly, that when he took a job for less money and lost it, his unemployment was cut in half. Any day now he may lose his car.

So one hates collecting unemployment, but would like to collect more of it. Odd sounding, but fair enough. The other says it won't really help because the system is broken, but is in favor of extending it anyway.

I see the logic behind both rationales, but these aren't exactly glowing endorsements for a program that is sending 40 million taxpayer dollars a day just to California. It's no wonder lame-duck House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is reduced to claiming that unemployment benefits are "one of the biggest stimuluses [sic] to our economy."

Yeah, Nancy, keep singing that tune.

Honoring the founders

2010-12-02T11:00:00.006-05:00

Dana Milbank has an op-ed at the Washington Post entitled "A strange way to honor the founding fathers." It begins,

Republicans gained control of the House last month on a promise to "restore the Constitution." So it is no small irony that one of their first orders of business is an attempt to rewrite the Constitution.
On Tuesday, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), a member of the House GOP's majority transition committee, introduced a constitutional amendment that would allow a group of states to nullify federal laws with which they disagree.

My question is how does amending the Constitution in any way dishonor the founders? The founders themselves explicitly provided the authority and procedures by which the Constitution can be amended. Indeed, it's been amended 27 times. Did we dishonor the founders when we passed amendments to abolish slavery or give women the right to vote?

And where is the irony in allowing the states to act as a check against overstepping by a federal government whose only power derives from those very states? Millions of Americans believe that the federal government has abused the powers lent to it. They believe the Supreme Court, charged with protecting and preserving the Constitution, has proved itself a conspirator in a Washington power grab that perverts and exceeds the scope of that document. Therein lies the irony; therein lies the dishonor.

And yet, there is nothing new in this. No group, not even a constitutionally elected federal government, is capable of internally policing itself for very long. Men have ambitions and agendas. It's only natural that they will push at the boundaries of their authorities in order to advance them -- hence the need for checks and balances. And when the internal checks and balances prove inadequate, isn't it logical to look to external ones, in this case the states keeping tabs on an institution they themselves empowered?

Milbank vilifies the doctrine of nullification -- the idea that a state has the right to invalidate a federal law if it deems it to be unconstitutional. He attempts to tarnish it by associating it with slavery and segregation. But both Madison and Jefferson, two of the founders Milbank claims would be dishonored by such a thing, argued in favor of nullification in their Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.

It's worth noting that Madison and Jefferson asserted that individual states have a right to invalidate unconstitutional federal laws and that this right is upheld by the Constitution. In other words, no amendment is required.

It's silly, then, for Milbank to argue that a properly ratified constitutional amendment, which would require two-thirds of the states to agree that a federal law is unconstitutional before it could be set aside, in any way dishonors the founders or the Constitution.

Update: Ann Althouse agrees:

Dana Milbank notes "the unfortunate echo of nullification," but nullification was the idea that individual states could disregard federal law they opposed. The Repeal Amendment would institute an orderly structural safeguard as part of the Constitution, a check on federal power that requires a supermajority vote of the states.
. . .
Since the Repeal Amendment, proposed by Randy Barnett, can easily be portrayed as an effort to return to something closer to the balance of power provided for in the original Constitution, it is pretty silly to portray yourself as brimming with respect for the Founders when what you really support is the shift of power to the national government that occurred over the long stretch of time, a shift that the courts have allowed to take place.

Empty promises on health care

2010-12-01T15:34:00.005-05:00

Byron York:

Barack Obama is only halfway through his term, but it's not too early to ask: What is the biggest whopper he has told as president? So far, the hands-down winner is, "No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your healthcare plan, you'll be able to keep your healthcare plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

Opponents of Obamacare at the time were called obstructionists, liars, racists, and worse. We now know that they were right:

For example, we know that the government's Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has found that the new law will increase healthcare costs, rather than reduce them, in the coming decade. We know that cuts in Medicare, with the money saved going to pay for expanding coverage to the poor, will jeopardize seniors' access to care. We know the law will make it impossibly expensive for companies that currently offer bare-bones health coverage to low-income employees to keep doing so. We know several corporations are taking giant write-downs because the bill will increase the cost of providing prescription-drug coverage to retired employees. And perhaps most important, we know the law offers an enormous incentive for employers who currently provide coverage to workers to stop doing so, sending those workers to buy coverage in government-subsidized healthcare exchanges.

In sum, what the law means for millions of Americans is: No matter what the president said, if you like the coverage you have now, you can't keep it.

The evidence mounts daily that Obamacare is exactly the catastrophe that critics warned it would be. We were told it would cover everyone. It doesn't. We were told it would create more competition. It has decreased competition. We were told quality would improve. It hasn't. We were told it would be more affordable. It's more expensive. We were told we could keep our doctors and our coverage. We can't.

The key question of healthcare reform has always been how to make things better for the 16 percent [with poor insurance] while not messing things up for the 82 percent [that liked what they had]. Obama decided to blow up the system for everyone.
. . .
Is any of this a surprise? The fact is, the president knew or should have known that his healthcare scheme would have these effects. He paid a political price for his actions on Nov. 2. There might be more to pay on Nov. 6, 2012.

Either Obama lied or he had no idea what he was doing. In either case, he made a mess of things that, despite what Republicans promise, will never be totally undone. I think it was John Stewart Mill who said it's the job of liberals to break things and the job of conservatives to make sure they don't get fixed.* That's the formula: three steps toward the cliff; two steps back. I fear we're stuck with Obamacare for good.

* Update: The quote I was grasping for was from G. K. Chesterton: "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."

Welcome to "eventually"

2010-12-01T12:21:00.003-05:00

Stanford economist Michael Boskin summarizes the latest economic research at WSJ.com.

[E]conomic theory, history and statistical studies reveal that more taxes and spending are more likely to harm than help the economy. Those who demand spending control and oppose tax hikes hold the intellectual high ground. . . .
Andrew Mountford of the University of London and Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago conclude that the small initial spending multiplier turns negative by the start of the second year. In a new cross-national time series study, Ethan Ilzetzki of the London School of Economics and Enrique Mendoza and Carlos Vegh of the University of Maryland conclude that in open economies with flexible exchange rates, "a fiscal expansion leads to no significant output gains."
My colleagues John Cogan and John Taylor, with Volker Wieland and Tobias Cwik, demonstrate that government purchases have a GDP impact far smaller in New Keynesian than Old Keynesian models and quickly crowd out the private sector. They estimate the effect of the February 2009 stimulus at a puny 0.2% of GDP by now.

In other words, what we've been trying for the past two years doesn't work. "Stimulus" spending doesn't stimulate and very quickly starts to burden the economy even more.

So what does work?

By contrast, the last two major tax cuts—President Reagan's in 1981-83 and President George W. Bush's in 2003—boosted growth. They lowered marginal tax rates and were longer lasting, both keys to success. In a survey of fiscal policy changes in the OECD over the past four decades, Harvard's Albert Alesina and Silvia Ardagna conclude that tax cuts have been far more likely to increase growth than has more spending. . . .

As Thomas Sowell recently pointed out, prior tax cuts, under presidents Coolidge and Kennedy, also boosted growth. There is a track record, if we're willing to look at it.

Conversely, a tax increase is very damaging. . . The best stimulus now is to stop the impending tax hikes. . . [S]pending cuts are more likely to reduce deficits. . . and less likely to cause recessions, than are tax increases. . . [B]ased on the best economic evidence, we should reject increased spending and increased taxes.

So after two years of making things worse, what's the Obama plan moving forward? To increase taxes and increase spending, exactly the opposite of what the best economic evidence suggests will work.

If anything, we should lower marginal effective corporate and personal tax rates further. . . We should quickly enact an enforceable gradual phase-down of the spending explosion of recent years. That's what the president and congressional leaders should initiate. Then let the equally vital task of long-run tax and entitlement reform proceed.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised that he would be guided by evidence rather than by ideology. The evidence says we should cut spending, yet Obama is arguing for more spending. The evidence says we should cut taxes, but not even the Republicans are calling for that, as all their efforts are required just to keep Obama from increasing taxes.

This recession has been a wake up call. History has shown that "progressive" policies do not work. Margaret Thatcher was right when she warned that eventually you run out of other people's money.

"Eventually" has arrived, and it's done taking IOUs.

Republicans have the stronger case, but can they make it?

2010-11-30T20:05:00.002-05:00

Thomas Sowell looks at the arguments for and against increasing tax rates on high income earners and offers a suggestion: let's take a look at the evidence.

These are not new arguments on either side. They go back more than 80 years. Over that long span of time, there have been many sharp cuts in tax rates under presidents Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. So we don’t need to argue in a vacuum. There is a track record.
What does that record say? It says, loud and clear, that cuts in tax rates do not mean cuts in tax revenues. In all four of these administrations, of both parties, so-called “tax cuts for the rich” led to increased tax revenues — with people earning high incomes paying not only a larger sum total of tax revenues, but even a higher proportion of all tax revenues.
Most important of all, these tax-rate reductions spurred economic activity, which we definitely need today.

Sowell says Republicans (and some Democrats) have the facts on their side, but he's skeptical that they are articulate enough to make their case. I am too, and this echoes something I wrote a few days ago regarding George Bush: he was right on a lot of the issues, but I'm not sure he fully understood the underlying principles, and so he was sometimes led astray by superficial arguments.

An ominous sign

2010-11-30T14:28:00.004-05:00

More meddling from Washington:

[T]he Federal Highway Administration is ordering all local governments -- from the tiniest towns to the largest cities -- to go out and buy new street signs that federal bureaucrats say are easier to read.

This is going to cost tax payers millions of dollars, and it's none of the federal government's business. The Constitution doesn't grant Washington the authority to dictate what city street signs should look like.

The new regulations were written under the Bush administration, in case you're keeping score at home.

Bill Whittle: What We Believe

2010-11-29T12:06:00.003-05:00

I'm extremely envious of Bill Whittle's talent for presenting things in a clear and engaging manner. If you haven't seen it, be sure to check out his outstanding YouTube series called "What We Believe." It's a great summation of what conservatism in general, and the Tea Party in particular, are all about. I highly recommend it to those of all political leanings, and to those who are apolitical, as well.

More pie for everyone

2010-11-29T11:18:00.003-05:00

W. Kurt Hauser:

The Obama administration's budget projections claim that raising taxes on the top 2% of taxpayers, those individuals earning more than $200,000 and couples earning $250,000 or more, will increase revenues to the U.S. Treasury. The empirical evidence suggests otherwise. None of the personal income tax or capital gains tax increases enacted in the post-World War II period has raised the projected tax revenues.
Over the past six decades, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP have averaged just under 19% regardless of the top marginal personal income tax rate. The top marginal rate has been as high as 92% (1952-53) and as low as 28% (1988-90). . . .

Over this period there have been more than 30 major changes in the tax code including personal income tax rates, corporate tax rates, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, investment tax credits, depreciation schedules, Social Security taxes, and the number of tax brackets among others. Yet during this period, federal government tax collections as a share of GDP have moved within a narrow band of just under 19% of GDP.

This isn't all that surprising. If you tax something -- including productivity -- you get less of it. The best policy, then, is to keep tax rates low. This stimulates the economy, which increases employment and GDP. The government will continue to take its 19% of the pie, except now it's a bigger pie. Everybody wins.

The Left doesn't understand this. They think pies only come in one size, so if one person doesn't have enough pie, we must steal pie from someone else and "spread the wealth around." The thought that we can make more pie and give everyone a bigger piece doesn't make sense to them.

The target of the Obama tax hike is the top 2% of taxpayers, but the burden of the tax is likely to fall on the remaining 98%. The top 2% of income earners do not live in a vacuum. Our economy and society are interwoven. Employees and employers, providers and users, consumers and savers and investors are all interdependent. The wealthy have the highest propensity to save and invest. The wealthy also run the lion's share of small businesses. Most small business owners pay taxes at the personal income tax rate. Small businesses have created two-thirds of all new jobs during the past four decades and virtually all of the net new jobs from the early 1980s through the end of 2007, the beginning of the past recession.
In other words, the Obama tax increases are targeted at those who are largely responsible for capital formation. Capital formation is the life blood for job creation. As jobs are created, more people pay income, Social Security and Medicare taxes. As the economy grows, corporate income tax receipts grow. Rising corporate profits provide an underpinning to the stock market, so capital gain and dividend tax collections increase. A pro-growth, low marginal personal tax rate stimulates capital formation and GDP, which triggers a higher level of tax receipts for the other sources of government revenue.

The economy is an organism. You can't starve an arm or a leg without starving the whole system. A tax on one is a tax on all. Obama isn't "spreading the wealth"; he's limiting the wealth. What he needs to do is get out of the way and let the wealth grow. Then the free market will take care of spreading it around.

HT: TaxProf Blog

Obama: American Narcissus

2010-11-24T08:19:00.004-05:00

Jonathan Last hits a home run with his Weekly Standard piece documenting Obama's extreme vanity. I was familiar with some of this, but the, dare I say, "audacity" of the man's self-importance is utterly astounding when taken in toto. Consider this passage, quoted from a 2008 New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza:

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

Hubris just oozes from Obama's every pore.

Be sure to read all the way to the end.

HT: Vox Popoli

Considerable quote

2010-11-23T00:16:00.000-05:00

Dennis Prager:

There is an amazingly simple way to defeat the left: Raise children who are grateful to be American, who don't complain, who can handle losing and who are guided by values, not feelings. In other words, teach them how to be happy adults.

Dear parent, your kid is fat

2010-11-22T18:42:00.003-05:00

Daily Caller:

Chubby elementary school children in Flagstaff, Ariz., have more than just bullies to worry about. If they’re too fat, their school will notify their parents.
Starting in the fall, students in the Flagstaff district will be weighed and measured at school. Students who are found to be overweight, marginally overweight, or underweight will have a letter sent home to their parents, which will include graphs showing a range of appropriate weights for a given age and height.

If a kid called another kid fat, I'm pretty sure it would result in a suspension for hate speech or bullying or some such thing, but it's okay when it comes from Big Brother.

Now that he government is in the health care business, this is only the beginning. How long before we hear about a "fat tax?"

Don't just do something. Stand there!

2010-11-20T05:07:00.005-05:00

On the Corner, Larry Kudlow posts about an interview he did with former President Bush which will be broadcast next week on Kudlow's show on CNBC. Kudlow writes,

But the former president stuck with his view that TARP Bailout Nation was necessary to avert a depression. And although there were other voices with different solutions inside his administration, he said there was no time for theoretical discussion.

There's no way of knowing what things would look like in an alternate universe where TARP never happened. In other words, it's all theoretical discussion, and there seem to be plenty of smart people on both sides of it, just as there were in the event. But the wheels of government -- and recessions and depressions -- move slowly, and it was hugely important to get this right, so it seems to me that a whole lot of discussion, theoretical though it may be, was in order.

The idea that government must act, and act now, whenever there is a problem is a mindset, not a self-evident truth. The mere fact that the financial crisis caught so many "experts" by surprise is a strong indication that they don't understand these things nearly as well as they think they do. How can those who got it so wrong be so sure that their "solution" won't make things worse? And why should we believe them?

When Bush says there was no time for discussion, that says to me that he panicked. He fell prey to the politician's fallacy:

We must do something;
This is something;
Therefore, we must do this.

Not only is the logic faulty, but the initial premise, that we must do something, is unfounded. It takes a lot of courage to do nothing, but sometimes nothing is just the thing.

Kudlow continues:

Mr. Bush says he believes in the free market, but to this day he still thinks he had to abandon market principles in order to save the free-market system. He told me today that he hopes future recessions will not be dominated by more bailouts.

Bush used this as a talking point at the time, but he never offered any rationale as to why something that works would need saving, or why he felt called to abandon something he has faith in, or why, if he believes he acted wisely, he would hope we respond differently in similar circumstances in the future.

This doesn't add up for me, and I suspect that's because it doesn't add up for him either. I've always suspected that Bush, like so many of us, believes in things he doesn't fully understand. I'm not sure he could sit down and explain, beyond the mere basics, how free markets work. Could he explain why his tax rate cuts stimulated the economy, but his tax rebates did not? Could he articulate why policies like minimum wage laws, rent control, and affirmative action actually hurt the very people they are intended to help?

I'm guessing no. And that's why Bush could so easily "abandon market principles" when the calls came to do something -- or why he apparently didn't recognize that we had abandoned market principles long before the crisis hit.

Bush isn't alone in this, of course. President Obama also claims to believe in the free market system, but his actions reveal no underlying understanding of how markets work. As a candidate he argued that increasing taxes during a recession would further hurt the economy. Now, with unemployment 2 percent higher than it was, he is pushing just such a tax hike. Candidate Obama also argued, on economic grounds, against forcing Americans to buy health insurance. Now, he's in court, vigorously defending just such a mandate on the grounds that it's simply a new tax, despite the fact that he previously insisted that it's not a tax and argued that increasing taxes during a recession is unwise.

I'm more skeptical of Obama's professed belief in the market. I think he not only doesn't understand but doesn't particularly care about free market principles. He's more interested in social justice, wealth redistribution, and a rather warped and shallow notion of "fairness." But Bush? I think he's sincere when he says he had to abandon the free market in order to save it, and I think the irony of that belief is totally lost on him.

The miracle of competition

2010-11-19T10:55:00.005-05:00

I read over at Joanne Jacobs about a new study that concludes that "competition improves public schools" and I'm thinking, No kidding. We need a study for that? Of course competition improve public schools; competition improves everything. People try harder when there are consequences.

I get a little irritated when a study is needed to prove something that should be obvious to a six-year old, and then the results are reported like we've discovered something counterintuitive and ground breaking.

But then I take a breath and back away from the keyboard and remind myself that there really are people -- "experts" even -- who don't get it.

So, I'll toggle off the snark and join Joanne in calling attention to the research and hope that a few more people start to get it.

Conclusion
Our results indicate that the increased competitive pressure public schools faced following the introduction of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program led to general improvements in their performance. Both expanded access to private school options and greater variety of options that students have in terms of the religious (or secular) affiliations of private schools are positively associated with public-school students’ test scores following the introduction of the FTC program. The gains occur immediately, before any students leave the public schools with a scholarship, implying that competitive threats are responsible for at least some of the estimated effects. And the gains appear to be much more pronounced in the schools most at risk to lose students (elementary and middle schools, where the cost of private school attendance with a scholarship is much lower) and in the schools that are on the margin of Title I funding.

Blackout in a Can

2010-11-19T05:01:00.004-05:00

Washington Post:

Federal agencies moved aggressively Wednesday to eliminate from the market the potent alcoholic "energy" drinks spiked with caffeine that have become wildly popular on college campuses in recent years.
...
The drinks, sometimes called a "blackout in a can," contain high levels of alcohol and caffeine. The mixture creates a state of "wide-awake drunk" that makes it difficult for people to realize how intoxicated they are and enables them to consume far more alcohol than they otherwise would without passing out, officials said. That puts them at increased risk for alcohol poisoning, engaging in risky behavior such as driving drunk, and committing or being the victims of sexual assaults, they said. Consuming one can of Four Loko - the most popular product - has been compared to drinking five cans of beer and a cup of coffee.

Okay, this sounds both scary and stupid, and is just the type of thing a lot of young adults will be compelled to try. They lack judgment (which is why we might want to reconsider bumping up the voting age a few notches, but that's a different issue).

But why is the federal government meddling in this? No where in the Constitution is Washington granted the authority to ban beverages. In fact, the 21st Amendment makes pretty darn clear that this is a states' issue. And even if Washington had the legit authority to enact such a ban, shouldn't it come in the form of an actual law or something and not through bureaucratic fiat?

If a state wants to act on this, fine. While I'm sure even the dimmest frat boy can solve the magical mystery of combining coffee and booze, at least a state has the legitimate authority to say they can't. But Washington should mind its own business. It's gotten way too drunk on power.

h/t Don Surber

Update: Ricochet has more.

Food Nazis

2010-11-18T11:45:00.004-05:00

In the latest example of government gone wrong, police are now conducting armed raids on organic food stores in California. Apparently, there's a huge problem with people deciding what they want to eat for themselves.

Does marriage matter?

2010-11-18T06:02:00.005-05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) - Is marriage becoming obsolete?
As families gather for Thanksgiving this year, nearly one in three American children is living with a parent who is divorced, separated or never-married. More people are accepting the view that wedding bells aren't needed to have a family.
A study by the Pew Research Center highlights rapidly changing notions of the American family....
Indeed, about 39 percent of Americans said marriage was becoming obsolete. And that sentiment follows U.S. census data released in September that showed marriages hit an all-time low of 52 percent for adults 18 and over.

John Adams warned that "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Adams was perhaps the most religious of the Founders, but his point is not a religious one. He is reminding us that the Constitution is primarily a governing document. It reflects and derives from our cultural and moral values, but it is not the source or repository of those values. It remains the bedrock of our civil society only so long as we remain a reliably moral and just people apart from it. The Constitution was created of, by, and for the American people -- people with a particular culture, character, and creed. Adams knew that our values and our virtues are the ultimate authority, and that if we lose our way as a people, not even the Constitution can save us.

It follows that we require a mechanism, wholly apart from government, to protect and preserve our culture and values. Traditionally, the family and the church have assumed these responsibilities, reliably passing our societal DNA from one generation to the next. But these institutions are breaking down; church attendance has been falling off just as the family has become an endangered species.

As these institutions become less prominent, what will take their place? Nature abhors a vacuum, and man is not exempt from this. Where will we turn when the structure that sustains us begins to atrophy? I fear the answer is government and the trend is already well established. We've given over so much power to government that it no longer simply governs us, it defines us. It's begun to dictate where we can live , what we can eat, what we can drink, what we can buy, what we must buy, and more intrusive decisions.

So the nuclear family, and therefore marriage, matters. It is more than some trivial artifact of antiquity that we can give up without consequence. It fixes us in place that we might remember who we are and what is important to us. And that's essential, because if we lose our definition we risk being increasingly defined by a voracious government that can sate itself only by feeding on our freedoms. I believe this society, robbed of its freedoms, is what Adams anticipated when he observed that our government alone is "wholly inadequate" to the task.

Tragically, few seem to recognize this risk:

About 34 percent of Americans called the growing variety of family living arrangements good for society, while 32 percent said it didn't make a difference and 29 percent said it was troubling.

Count me firmly as part of the 29 percent.

Ignoring what works in education

2010-11-17T08:15:00.005-05:00

John McWhorter puzzles over why schools still aren't teaching disadvantaged black kids to read when we've known how for four decades:

The tragedy is that the discussion about black kids in school -- boys as well as girls -- takes place as if there were some great mystery about how to teach children from disadvantaged homes how to read. An entire plangent and circular conversation drifts eternally over a problem that, at least in the case of reading, was solved way back during the Nixon administration.
Back then, in the early '70s, Siegfried Engelmann led a government-sponsored investigation called Project Follow Through. It compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results among 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading -- based on sounding out words rather than learning them whole (phonics), and on a tightly scripted format emphasizing repetition and student participation -- was vastly more effective than any of the others. And for poor kids. Including black ones. . . .
Decade after decade, DI has continued to kick serious butt all across this great land. Houston, Baltimore, Milwaukee -- you name it; I am unaware of anywhere it hasn't worked, and it's hard to even choose one example as a demonstration. In 2001, students in the mostly black Richmond district in Virginia were scoring abysmally in reading. With a DI-style program, just four years later, three-quarters of black students passed the third-grade reading test. Meanwhile, over in wealthy Fairfax County, where DI was scorned, the minority of black students taking that test -- despite ample funding -- were passing it at the rate of merely 59 percent.

I've read a fair amount about Direct Instruction (DI) over the past year. Everything I've seen indicates that it works, and works well. Project Follow Through (PFT) was the largest and most expensive educational study in history. If I recall, it cost tax payers a billion dollars. It was designed specifically to determine which teaching methods do and do not work. You can read a summary of PFT here, but the short version is that McWhorter has it exactly right when he says that DI kicked serious butt.

Having identified the most effective methodology, it was a fairly simple matter to ~~publicize the results~~ ignore the results and ~~begin transitioning schools across the country to the new program~~ continue doing what we were doing.

No, it doesn't make a lot of sense. I didn't quite believe it at first. Even government couldn't be that clueless, could they? Well, I did a little digging around and I'm sorry to report that, as McWhorter suggests: they could.

Apparently, the "experts" are quite married to their pet theories. And even though the teaching programs based on those pet theories performed worst in the PFT, the study didn't come back with the "right" answer, so it was ignored.

I've seen ads for a company that comes into your home or business and cleans up after fires and floods and such. Their slogan is "Like it never even happened."

In a nutshell, that's the story of Project Follow Through, a billion dollars, and the prospects of 40 years of public school kids.

*Poof* Like it never even happened.

Update: There's some good discussion about this article and the merits of Direct Instruction on Joanne Jacobs blog. Of particular interest to me was a long comment citing a lot of more recent research that supports the effectiveness of DI. DI may not be the holy grail of effective teaching, but it's part of an elite group of programs which stand out sharply from the rest. Further, these elite programs share a core set of evidence-based elements. In other words, we have the list of ingredients and several recipes for putting them together successfully. We should be putting these effective programs to work and continuing to do the research to make them even more effective.

The emperor's sweater continues to unravel

2010-11-15T14:20:00.003-05:00

On the heals of two prominent Democratic strategists calling for President Obama to announce that he won't run for a second term, comes this pronouncement from liberal columnist Paul Krugman:

[T]he main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

Chasing the rabbits of politics and war

2010-11-15T04:56:00.005-05:00

Washington Post:

The Obama administration and its NATO allies will declare late this week that the war in Afghanistan has made sufficient progress to begin turning security control over to its government by spring, months before the administration’s July deadline to start withdrawing U.S. troops, according to U.S. and European officials.

Even as it announces the “transition” process, which will not immediately include troop withdrawals, NATO will also state its intention to keep combat troops in Afghanistan until 2014, a date originally set by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The seemingly contradictory messages, in communiques and agreements to be released at NATO’s upcoming summit in Lisbon, are intended to reassure U.S. and European audiences that the process of ending the war has begun.

At the same time, the coalition wants to signal to the Taliban – along with Afghans and regional partners who fear a coalition withdrawal, and Republicans in Congress who oppose it – that they are not leaving anytime soon.

“We have to assemble a coherent narrative . . . that everyone buys into,” said a senior administration official, one of several who discussed ongoing alliance negotiations on the condition of anonymity.

Obama is in a tough spot here. He's under an enormous amount of pressure from the Left to get out of Afghanistan -- hence his promise to begin pulling out on a set day this July. But setting a hard withdrawal date is unwise in the extreme in terms of actually winning the war. Knowing that date, all the bad guys need to do is hunker down for a few months and reemerge when the coast is clear. In the meantime, Afghans who would otherwise fight on our side are unwilling to do so, because they would likely be killed when the bad guys take over again after the U.S. leaves.

It's a real mess, and Obama made it so by allowing politics to compete with sound policy. This is somewhat understandable, since he probably wouldn't have gotten elected if he had staked out a clear and principled position, but it's a mess nonetheless. How do you fight a war with an expiration date?

I fear it's going to get a whole lot messier as the July drawdown date approaches and the 2012 election looms large on the horizon. Obama can only chase two rabbits for so long. He's either going to have to retreat before the "good war" is won or break yet another key promise to the only constituency that remains somewhat loyal to him. He could easily come up rabbitless, especially if the economy doesn't break his way rather sharply.

Further along in the article, this bit caught my attention:

Obama has made some converts among those who at first opposed a public withdrawal pledge. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who initially believed the July withdrawal pledge "denied us flexibility," said he changed his position and "came to believe this was the right decision" after Obama promised to base any U.S. drawdown on "conditions on the ground."

This is cute. Gates' loyalty is admirable, but it's obvious that he's only a "convert" to the extent that Obama has abandoned his fixed date rhetoric in favor of a more traditional and sensible "conditions on the ground" metric.

Wars are messy, and Obama is getting this one all over himself.

h/t Captain's Journal

Exemptions from Obamacare

2010-11-15T04:36:00.002-05:00

Obamacare is such a disaster that the only way the administration can make it work is by granting exemptions from the law. Exemptions to companies, unions, and states, covering millions of Americans, have already been granted and more are on the way. Michelle Malkin runs it all down and concludes:

Make no mistake: Team Obama isn’t granting the waivers out of bleeding-heart compassion for the affected workers, but out of a panicked urgency to avoid a public relations disaster.
As I’ve boiled it down before:

Old Democrat promise: Everyone gets to keep their health insurance.

New Democrat promise: You can keep your health insurance…if you BEG hard enough for an Obamacare waiver.

Yep: The only way for hundreds of thousands of workers to keep their health insurance is to exempt them from the government-imposed “fix.”

Dvorak update

2010-11-15T03:15:00.002-05:00

I switched to the Dvorak keyboard about a month ago. My original post on the transition is here.

My typing speed has increased to a little over 40 words per minute since then. I still make a fair amount of errors, most of them a result of my muscle memory reverting back to the QWERTY layout when I get tired or lose my concentration.

My fingers are finding the keys more and more out of reflex now, though it still takes a low level of concentration to keep them moving smoothly and consistently. I don't notice this much when I'm typing from a script, as that doesn't require me to split my attention. I'm sometimes able to get enough of a flow going to where I hit the "autopilot" threshold, where the active brain is able to take a step back and "watch" the magic unfold. That's a wonderful feeling that I remember well from the times when I would start to master a difficult passage on my trumpet.

Just as with my trumpet, however, that magic is revealed as a cheap illusion when even a few brain cycles are required for something else. When I compose a blog post, for example, or send a chat message to a friend, and have to think about what I'm typing instead of mindlessly mimicking the letters in front of me, things can fall apart rather quickly. That's when it becomes obvious, sometimes frustratingly obvious, that the typing is taking more concentration than I realize.

This is compounded by the fact that I think in words, but still type only letter at a time. This extra layer of "translation," from words to letters, burns even more CPU cycles and gums up the works even more. I'm making progress with this. I'm seeing more and more instances where smaller words -- and, the, etc. -- have become part of vocabulary of words which are able to make their way from thought to screen without all the apparent mental gymnastics. It's kind of a fascinating process.

Stay tuned.

This can't be good

2010-11-13T13:25:00.003-05:00

Joe Scarborough:

The top Senate Democrats in the United States Senate have all told me individually, "this guy [Obama] has no idea what he's doing."

I got it from Agnes*

2010-11-13T03:45:00.006-05:00

I love Bill Whittle. Here he is unfolding the theory that Mexicans are the rightful owners of America's southwestern states.

Mexican racist groups like La Raza -- which means "the race." La Raza is racism defined -- assert that Mexicans have the legal right to all of the southwestern United States, because it was taken by force and is, therefore, illegally obtained.

Let's examine this argument just a little more fully. La Raza claims that all of Texas is in that category. Mexicans should be free to go into Texas with impunity, because Texas really still belongs to them, to Mexico.

Well, let's stand well north of the current border. Let's stand outside of Lubbock, Texas and see who we need to give this land back to.

You see, America wouldn't return Texas to Mexico; we would return it to the Confederacy. We took it by force, and therefore illegally, according to this logic. But, obviously, the Confederacy is gone, so we should then have to return it to its rightful owners, which is the Republic of Texas. The Texans would then have to give it back to Mexico, since they took it from them by force. So, Mexico has it.

But, then of course, La Raza, being people of integrity, will demonstrate in the streets in order to give Texas back to Spain, since the Mexicans took it from them by force. Spain will then have to give it back to France, naturally enough, since Spain took it from France by force. And the French can just hand it right back, since they took it from Spain by force to begin with. So, Lubbock belongs to Spain.

. . . who took it, by force, from the Comanches. Give Texas to the Comanches, then! We've got it solved. . . only, the Comanches took it, by force, from the Apaches.

The providence of Texas gets a little dicey here, since no one knew how to write before that time, but we do know that the Apaches pinched this land from the ancient Pueblo People, who hijacked it from the Firstview People, who captured it from the Plainview People, who conquered it from the Folsom People, who snatched it from Clovisman, who arrived on what is downtown Lubbock, Texas, USA about 11,000 years ago.

Now, since all of these owners took that patch of land more or less by force, no one owner is in any position of moral superiority. Yes, it was taken from them, but they took it from someone else. There are only two people on that timeline with a unique claim: the people who had it first, Clovisman, and the people who have it now, us, America.

One might quibble that the Apache, being the earliest owners that are still identifiable as a group, also have a unique standing, but Whittle's point is, as usual, well made.

Be sure to watch his entire "What We Believe" series on YouTube -- beginning with Part 1: Small Government and Free Enterprise. It's great stuff.

* Be sure, also, to check out Tom Lehrer's delightfully wicked I Got it from Agnes.

Global warming, not so alarming

2010-11-12T14:48:00.003-05:00

Bruce McQuain has a round-up of the latest global warming scares that have, er, melted away.

Agenda trumps facts in Obama administration

2010-11-12T10:54:00.006-05:00

Byron York:

During the Bush years, liberals and Democrats often accused the administration of ignoring science and expert opinion if it conflicted with conservative ideological goals. That would change, we were told, if rational, pragmatic Democratic leaders were given a chance to run the government.

Now we have had two years in which Democrats, with cherished ideological objectives of their own, have been fully in charge of Washington. Given what has taken place, can the president really claim that his is the party that values facts and science and argument above all?

Read the whole thing for some clear examples of where the Obama administration has ignored and manipulated scientific findings in order to advance an agenda that is not supported by the evidence.

Debating the wisdom of earmarks

2010-11-12T08:44:00.003-05:00

A couple of days ago, on The Corner, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn made the case against earmarks. Today, also on The Corner, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe argues in favor of them. I don't understand the issue well enough to have an informed opinion, so I'd normally look to just such men -- both are reliably conservative and have some credibility with me on fiscal matters -- for guidance. With them coming down on opposite sides of the issue, and each presenting what seem to be reasonable arguments, it's tough to know what's best.

The crux of the matter seems to be what happens to the money appropriated by an earmark if that earmark is removed. Inhofe explains that the money still gets spent; it's just that, without the earmark, Congress can no longer control how it's spent. That decision gets made by someone farther down the food chain.

I remember being frustrated by this practice when the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" issue arose. Like many Americans, I wrote my representatives to complain about my tax dollars being spent in such dubious and extra-constitutional ways. Several weeks later I received a triumphant response from then Senator Judd Gregg suggesting that I'd "pleased to learn" that my precious tax dollars had been spared as the "Bridge to Nowhere" was no more. In fact, I wasn't at all "pleased to learn" this, because I had been following the issue and knew that, while the earmark had been defeated, the money was still sent right along to Alaska. The requirement that it be spent on that particular bridge had been removed, but the money was now theirs to do with as they pleased. Presumably they could even elect to spend it on the same damn bridge.

So Inhofe makes a good point: eliminating the earmark doesn't actually save the money. In a sense, it makes the problem worse, since the transparency is lost. At least with the earmark, tax payers know how their money is being spent.

But Coburn makes makes an equally good counter-point: it doesn't have to be that way! There's no law that says Congress has to fork over the money once the earmark is removed. And if earmarks are banned at the outset, there's no reason that money has to be allocated in the first place. Coburn argues that, if Congress is serious about cutting spending, they need to show it by banning earmarks and then by tightening up the purse strings.

I'm not convinced it's as simple as all that. In fact I'm sure it's not. Congress does things in very wacky ways, and they are very creative at finding ways to waste our money. But while I'm not at all optimistic that it will do a bit of good, on the face of it, I find Coburn's case for banning earmarks a little more compelling at this point.

Repeal the 26th Amendment!

2010-11-11T08:41:00.002-05:00

Ann just may be on to something here:

Jimmy Carter was such an abominable president we got Ronald Reagan, tax cuts, a booming economy and the destruction of the Soviet Union.
Two years of Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress got us the first Republican Congress in half a century, followed by tax cuts, welfare reform and a booming economy –- all of which Clinton now claims credit for.
Obama's disastrous presidency has already produced Republican senators from Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Illinois; New Jersey's wonder-governor Chris Christie; and the largest House majority for Republicans since 1946.
We deserve more. Clinton only threatened to wreck the health care system; Obama actually did it. We must repeal the 26th Amendment.
Adopted in 1971 at the tail end of the Worst Generation's anti-war protests, the argument for allowing children to vote was that 18-year-olds could drink and be conscripted into the military, so they ought to be allowed to vote.
But 18-year-olds aren't allowed to drink anymore. We no longer have a draft. In fact, while repealing the 26th Amendment, we ought to add a separate right to vote for members of the military, irrespective of age.
As we have learned from ObamaCare, young people are not considered adults until age 26, at which point they are finally forced to get off their parents' health care plans. The old motto was "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote." The new motto is: "Not old enough to buy your own health insurance, not old enough to vote."

Bolton on Iraq invasion

2010-11-04T00:26:00.002-04:00

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton on the wisdom and justification of invading Iraq:

Let me just make one quick point on the WMD. The main thing people feared at that time was Saddam Hussein's chemical weapon stocks. That fear was not based on intelligence at all. It was based on Iraq's own declarations in 1991, as part of the cease fire in the first Gulf War, and the fact that over all of the intervening years, Saddam never produced records that showed he had destroyed those weapons as he claimed to the UN. The UN's last Chief Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix, said to the Iraqis, if you had destroyed these chemical weapon stocks, you have records; you have people who can tell us about that destruction. He said that stuff isn't marmalade. The Iraqis never produced it and everybody, and I mean everybody, concluded that having declared the stocks of weapons and failed to show that he had destroyed them, the conclusion was the Iraqis still had those weapons. So, let's be clear about what the concern was. . . So I don't doubt to this day, despite all the anguish that occurred after the overthrow of Saddam, the decision to remove that threat was entirely correct.

More of the same?

2010-11-03T18:20:00.003-04:00

John Stossel reminds us of what happened the last time Republicans ran Washington:

As a libertarian, I so want to believe that the tea party marks the beginning a comeback for small government.
But I'm probably deluding myself. I know that big government usually wins. Remember the last time the Republicans took power? They promised fiscal responsibility, and for six of George W. Bush's eight years, his party controlled Congress. What did we have to show for it?
Federal spending increased by 54 percent. That's more than any president in the last 50 years. Much more than the 12 percent increase under Bill Clinton, and it even beat the 36 percent increase under big spender Lyndon Johnson. The number of subsidy programs grew 30 percent, and the regulatory budget grew 70 percent. The private sector shrank, while the government sector grew by 1.6 million jobs.
Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress created a prescription drug entitlement, the biggest entitlement expansion since Medicare. At one point, he nearly tripled the Department of Education budget.

This time Republicans won't run the whole show. They'll have to deal with a Democratic president and senate. It will be difficult for either side to advance their agenda. In one sense this is a good thing. At least with gridlock they won't continue spending trillions of dollars we don't have. On the other hand, a lot of automatic spending increases are built into the system, so spending will continue to rise in spite of the gridlock, and we won't be seeing any of the spending cuts that Republicans have promised.

Like Stossel, I'm not optimistic.

But I love her

2010-11-03T10:58:00.003-04:00

Jay Nordlinger:

How bad does California have to get, before the voters turn from the Democrats? How dire does the state’s economy have to become? Going down the tubes, Californians still know how to do one thing: reach for the Democratic lever. As far as I’m concerned, that’s like grabbing an anvil when you’re drowning.
And as the Republicans vote with their feet, California will become “bluer,” I’m afraid. Businessmen, entrepreneurs — they’ve been hightailing it to Nevada, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina. They will probably hightail it further, seeking a state that will allow them to flourish.

When I moved from California to New Hampshire a little over a decade ago, it was only supposed to be for a few years. Alas, life had other plans. The years have slipped away, but the dream of returning to my warm, sunny, west coast home have endured. In the last few years, however, the dream has begun to fade. I've still not come to think of NH as "home", but neither anymore is CA. I hang in limbo betwixt two coasts.

I've watched CA starve itself over the last decade, and that's played no small part in the continuing dissolution and disillusion of my dream. I weep a little, and shake my head at how, like a woman in an abusive relationship, Californians can't seem to connect the dots, break the cycle.

I wasn't at all surprised to see Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown elected again -- I predicted it, in fact, observing often that CA is reliably disappointing in the end -- and yet I hoped, as is my wont.

And that's on me, of course. In that way, I'm the one who can't connect the dots, break the cycle. And in that way, I remain a Californian.

Maybe next time. . .

It's Official: The Government Isn't Getting Its Money Back Out of GM

2010-11-03T10:28:00.002-04:00

Megan McArdle:

Well, they've priced the GM IPO, and it looks like they've valued the firm at just about what we lent it: $50 billion. Since the government only took a 60% stake, that's well below what would be needed for the government to recover its investment. Even with the billions they've already "paid back"--by not using all the money--Uncle Sam needed the company to be worth more like $70 billion to break even on the bailout.
. . .
We could have given every autoworker $100,000, offered retraining and relocation assistance to tens of thousands of employees at their suppliers, and still come out ahead on this deal. Had we done this, we would have helped eliminate some of the overcapacity in the global auto industry, and sent a clear signal to CEOs that they should not emulate Rick Wagoner's pigheaded refusal to prepare for a possible reorganization.

I don't guess anyone really thought we'd get our money back on this. That's just not how government works.

Obama and the fiscal crisis

2010-11-02T17:36:00.005-04:00

I just watched an interesting interview with Richard Epstein, presented as part of Peter Robinson's fine Uncommon Knowledge series. Epstein is an expert in a host of legal areas including constitutional law. He taught at the University of Chicago where he had occasion to interact with future President Obama both personally and professionally. Below are some quotes from the interview, given shortly after Obama took office, that I found both interesting and, in some cases, prescient.

On the Supreme Court:

[E]verybody's intuitive sense of justice and intuitive sense of what The Constitution means is essentially at odds with the way in which The Constitution has been interpreted.

On Obama's politics:

[H]e's a man on the left who will, if necessary, throw bones to the center; this is not a man from the center.

On Obama's world view (pieced together from different responses):

And the fundamental mistake of his entire world view is that he treats contracts as devices for exploitation. He doesn't treat them as devices for mutual gain, and he assumes that redistribution can take place without any negative impact upon production. And if you live in that kind of a fairy land. . . everyone of your major social and economic initiatives are gonna miss-fire. And if they succeed. . . they're gonna create an intensification of the downturn that we've already experienced. So, wrong guy for the job in terms of his intellectual format.
. . .
And so what this guy is about to do, in my opinion, is to engage in a series of proposals that will redistribute wealth that we do not have. . . [T]these are all wealth killers.

On the real problem behind the fiscal crisis:

There's no liquidity problem. We have huge amounts of cash just sitting on the sideline right now and, you know, in the hands of large investment bankers with tremendous sophistication. They don't want to lend. Why not? Because they don't believe that the money they lend today is gonna be collected tomorrow under the mortgages that they issue. . . They don't think that the deal they get today is the deal they're gonna have tomorrow. After all, if you're welch on AIG you could welch on anybody, and that's what they're really afraid of. So, what's happened in this market. There is now a complete lack of confidence that long-term transactions will be consistently construed over their entire lives. And that's worse than a liquidity crisis 'cause even if you got the money nobody wants to do anything but put it into treasury bills.

Obama's electric-car cult

2010-10-31T09:06:00.006-04:00

I haven't paid much attention to the emergence of hybrid and electric cars on the logic that I don't need to. Like most "green" technologies, I figure, the science and economics don't yet add up, else consumers would be flocking to them. The fact that they're not, despite all the hype and the furtherance of government rebates and subsidies, is a strong sign that these products aren't viable. A product that has to be forced on me at the point of a proverbial gun (CFL light bulbs, and Obamacare come to mind) is a bad product. Get back to me when you're making an honest profit.

So, I wasn't surprised to read this in today's Washington Post:

Maybe it was karma, but the [GM Chevy] Volt's launch coincided with publication of a 72-page report by J.D. Power and Associates that confirmed, in devastating detail, what many other experts have found: Electric cars still cost too much, even with substantial federal subsidies for both manufacturers and consumers, to attract more than a handful of wealthy buyers - and this will be true for at least another decade.

Doesn't exactly make you want to rush right out and get one, does it? And there's not much there for the rational environmentalist either:

What little gasoline savings the vehicles achieve could be had through cheaper alternative means. And electrics don't reliably reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since, as often as not, the electricity to charge their batteries will come from coal-fired plants.
. . .
Fine print on the Volt ad promises just "25-50 miles of electric driving in moderate conditions." Translation: Much of the time the car will be running on gas, just like ones that cost far, far less than the four-seat Volt's price of $33,500 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit).
. . .
[T]he disposal of depleted battery packs presents yet another environmental challenge.

This is what you get when you let government meddle in the market: a not-ready-for-prime-time turkey, courtesy of the American tax payer. Anyone else thinking that letting Obama take over the car industry wasn't such a good idea?

I wonder how Ford, the American auto company not being run by Washington, is doing. A quick search, and here we have it, Exhibit B:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ford sales for the month of December 2009 were up 33.5 percent compared to December 2008, even as Chrysler and GM sales were falling.

And Exhibit C:

Ford Motor Company's plan to add more than 1,000 jobs at seven Michigan plants is proof that the Motor City, so hammered by this economy, is finally seeing early glimmers of a comeback.

Ford, the only U.S. automaker not to take federal bailout money, is leading the way. This morning, the company announced their record third quarter profits.

Now there's a bit o' inconvenient truth. Want to see the economy turn around and America strong and vibrant again? Tell Washington to mind its own business, then stand back and hold on for the ride.

Or, we can keep riding that good ol' Audacity Express:

In short, the Obama administration's commitment of $5 billion in loans and grants for electric cars is the biggest taxpayer rip-off since corn-based ethanol. It benefits no one but a few well-to-do car buyers and politically connected companies. Any "green" jobs these rent-seeking firms create will vanish when consumers reject their products and/or the subsidies cease.
. . .
For a president who claims to make policy based on "facts and science and argument," lavishing subsidies on electric cars is an intellectual scandal.
. . .
[L]like a rural voter clinging to his guns, the Obama administration brushes aside the experts because - well, who knows why? Perhaps subsidizing electric cars helps a Democratic administration make corporate welfare and tax breaks for the wealthy seem progressive.

I don't know about you, but this isn't the change I was hoping for.

The Plame Game

2010-10-30T21:25:00.004-04:00

Kyle Smith reviews the facts in the Valerie Plame-Scooter Libby affair in anticipation of an upcoming movie which he says distort those facts.

Our divisive president, redux

2010-10-30T20:02:00.003-04:00

President Obama was elected on the promise of reinventing Washington. He vowed to bring a new spirit of civility and cooperation to frequently hostile and polarized environment. The reality, however, has been so at odds with his campaign rhetoric that professional Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen felt compelled to denounce Obama's record in a Wall Street Journal piece back in July. I linked to that piece in an earlier post.

Now, on the eve of a landmark off-year election, Caddell and Schoen return with even sharper criticism of Obama's leadership:

We write in sadness as traditional liberal Democrats who believe in inclusion. Like many Americans, we had hoped that Obama would maintain the spirit in which he campaigned. Instead, since taking office, he has pitted group against group for short-term political gain that is exacerbating the divisions in our country and weakening our national identity.The culture of attack politics and demonization risks compromising our ability to address our most important issues - and the stature of our nation's highest office.

. . .

The president is the leader of our society. That office is supposed to be a unifying force. When a president opts for polarization, it is not only bad politics, but it also diminishes the prestige of his office and damages our social consensus.
Moreover, the divisive rhetoric that Obama has pursued can embolden his supporters and critics to take more extreme actions, worsening the spiral.

. . .
With the country beset by economic and other problems, it is incendiary that the president is not offering a higher vision for the nation but has instead chosen a strategy of rank division. This is an attempt to distract from the perceived failures of his administration. On issue after issue this administration has acted in ways that are weakening the office of the president.

Private social security accounts

2010-10-29T15:05:00.003-04:00

Cato's William Shipman and Peter Ferrara argue that, despite the threat of major downturns in the financial markets, private social security accounts are still the way to go:

Suppose a senior citizen — let's call him "Joe the Plumber" — who retired at the end of 2009, at age 66, had been able to set up a personal account when he entered the work force in 1965, at the age of 21. Suppose that, paying into his personal account what he and his employer would have paid into Social Security, Joe was foolish enough to invest his entire portfolio in the stock market for all 45 years of his working career. How would he have fared in the recent financial crisis?
While working, Joe had earned the average income for full-time male workers. His wife Mary, also age 66, had earned the average income for full-time female workers. They invested together in an indexed portfolio of 90% large-cap stocks and 10% small-cap stocks, which earned the returns reported each year since 1965.

By the time of their retirement in 2009, Joe and Mary would have accumulated account funds, after administrative costs, of $855,175. Indeed, they would have been millionaires a few years earlier, but the financial crisis lost them 37% in 2008. They were unfortunate to retire just one year after the worst 10-year stock market performance since 1926. Yet their account, having earned a 6.75% return annually from 1965 to 2009, would still pay them about 75% more than Social Security would have.

The economics of Seinfeld

2010-10-29T14:36:00.003-04:00

From the "economics in everything" department, here's a fun site that extracts the economic reasoning that drives a surprising number of the plot lines of the popular Seinfeld TV show. Fun stuff.

Considerable quote

2010-10-29T13:55:00.004-04:00

Upon graduating, I took a job waiting tables while I figured out my path (or next step, at any rate). Working in a restaurant is the perfect place to learn a few key things about the real world. First, your tip is usually a reflection of the quality of service you give. This was major incentive to do my job well, because it was the ultimate in merit-based pay.

Of course, people are unpredictable, so for every $100 tipper there was an equal and opposite $2 tipper. But knowing that how I did my job usually reflected directly in how I was compensated went a long way with me. It wasn’t about each individual result having to be fair, it was about opportunity and potential reward. Also, if you didn’t show up for work, you didn’t get paid. Every now and then we would have to pool tips and divide them up fairly between wait staff, bussing staff and bartenders. This was my first introduction to the concept of wealth redistribution. I didn’t care for it.

Attack ads, circa 1800

2010-10-29T13:19:00.002-04:00

The next time someone complains about how negative elections have gotten, point him to this video.

Lack of intellectual diversity in academia

2010-10-29T13:05:00.003-04:00

Via John Miller: The Student Free Press Association highlights the massive political imbalances on campus, as measured by the political donations of professors:

At the University of Michigan, Eden Stiffman reports that 87 percent of faculty donations go to Democrats or liberals PACs.
At Stanford, Lisa Wallace reports that 75 percent of faculty donations go to Democrats.
At the University of Missouri, professors at 36 times more likely to donate to Democrats than to Republicans.
At Georgetown, 70 percent of faculty contributions went to Democrats or liberal PACs.
Boston College is an exception that proves the rule: Morgan Chalfant reports that 62 percent of faculty donations went to Republicans. Yet it would be a mistake to think that BC is some kind of Republican school: Two years ago, 94 percent of faculty donations went to Democrats. So the anomalous 2010 results may be the Scott Brown effect.

Does "outsourcing jobs" hurt the economy?

2010-10-28T15:17:00.003-04:00

Daniel Griswold does a nice take down of the alarmism about "outsourcing American jobs."

Time to connect the dots

2010-10-28T14:47:00.003-04:00

Reuters:

The United States has dropped out of the "top 20" in a global league table of least corrupt nations, tarnished by financial scandals and the influence of money in politics, Transparency International said on Tuesday.

. . .

The United States fell to 22nd from 19th last year, with its CPI score dropping to 7.1 from 7.5 in the 178-nation index, which is based on independent surveys on corruption.

This was the lowest score awarded to the United States in the index's 15-year history and also the first time it had fallen out of the top 20.

In the Americas, this put the United States behind Canada in sixth place, Barbados at 17th and Chile in 21st place.

Americans are disgusted with politicians. Both Republican and Democrat approval ratings are in the gutter. We're tired of the games and the lies and the corruption. Few groups are viewed with such contempt and scorn.

Yet we go right on handing them more and more power and control over our lives. We put them in charge of our health care, our retirement, our children's educations, and all manner of things.

Instead of placing our lives and fortunes in the hands of people we don't trust, wouldn't in make more sense to take power away from them? Isn't the best way to protect against waste and corruption in Washington to simply give them control over as little as possible? If we can't trust the people who run government, isn't the answer to make government as small and limited as possible?

Time to connect the dots, America.

The Constitutional Revolution of FDR

2010-10-27T11:28:00.004-04:00

Lisa Murkowski, commenting on Social Security and other "safety net" programs:

That somehow or other these are unconstitutional because they're not enumerated within the powers of the constitution, that somehow or other we should just be eliminating these, I think that is out of the mainstream.

I suspect she's right. I haven't seen any polls on this, but I'm guessing the vast majority of Americans believe that Social Security (SS) is constitutional and don't want to see it eliminated.

This is unfortunate, as SS should have been ruled unconstitutional from the outset. The 10th Amendment reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

As a straight forward proposition, then, the creation of SS was unconstitutional, since nowhere in the Constitution is Congress empowered to create such a program. Unfortunately, politics sometimes trumps the rule of law, and this happened in a major way under FDR's "constitutional revolution" of the 1930s.

SS was part of FDR's New Deal, a series of programs designed to change and expand the role of the federal government in unprecedented ways. When the Supreme Court began to rule that the New Deal policies violated the 10th Amendment and were therefore unconstitutional, FDR responded aggressively. He pushed to expand the size of the Court so he could fill the new vacancies with justices he could control. FDR's attempt to "pack the Court" ultimately failed, but it was enough to intimidate the existing justices into "discovering" new federal powers in Congress' charge to "provide for the general welfare."

Thus SS and other New Deal policies were suddenly deemed "constitutional" and the precedent was set to justify all manner of constitutional overreach. This has led directly to federal intrusions into education, health care, welfare, housing, and the many programs and policies that have crippled our economy and which should properly be left to the states.

Before continuing, it's worth noting what some of our Founding Fathers had to say about the Constitution's "general welfare" clause and the proper role of the federal government:

"To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."
-- James Madison

"Our tenet ever was that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated, and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money. "
-- Thomas Jefferson

"They [Congress] are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.... [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one...."
-- James Madison

"With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
-- James Madison

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
-- James Madison

"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
--Thomas Jefferson

"We must confine ourselves to the powers described in the Constitution, and the moment we pass it, we take an arbitrary stride towards a despotic Government."
-- James Jackson

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."
-- James Madison

"Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"[T]he powers of the federal government are enumerated; it can only operate in certain cases; it has legislative powers on defined and limited objects, beyond which it cannot extend its jurisdiction."
-- James Madison

" The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."
-- James Madison

It's obvious that the "general welfare" clause has been abused to expand federal powers far beyond what was intended by the Framers. Unfortunately, we're stuck with these missteps. They are so well established and relied upon that, for all practical purposes, they are the Constitution, despite the fact that they corrupt that sacred document.

Update: Here's a short history of SS and how it came to be deemed "constitutional."

"Tax cuts for the rich" are tax cuts for everyone

2010-10-26T10:08:00.003-04:00

Thomas Sowell takes a look at the historical record regarding "tax cuts for the rich" and finds that such cuts benefit the entire economy.

More than 80 years ago, the "tax cuts for the rich" argument was refuted, both in theory and in practice, by Andrew Mellon, who was Secretary of the Treasury in the 1920s.
When Mellon took office, there was a large national debt, the economy was stagnating, and tax rates were high, though the tax revenues were still not enough to cover government expenditures. What was Mellon's prescription for getting out of this mess? A series of major cuts in the tax rates!
. . .
Between 1921 and 1929, tax rates in the top brackets were cut from 73 percent to 24 percent. In other words, these were what the left likes to call "tax cuts for the rich."
What happened to federal revenues from income taxes over this same span of time? Income tax revenues rose by more than 30 percent. What happened to the economy? Jobs increased, output rose, the unemployment rate fell and incomes rose. Because economic activity increased, the government received more income tax revenues. In short, these were tax cuts for the economy, even if the left likes to call them "tax cuts for the rich."
This was not the only time that things like this happened, nor was Andrew Mellon the only one who advocated tax rate cuts in order to increase tax revenues. John Maynard Keynes pointed out in 1933 that lowering the tax rates can increase tax revenues, if the tax rates are so high as to discourage economic activity.
President John F. Kennedy made the same argument in the 1960s -- and tax revenues increased after the tax rates were cut during his administration. The same thing happened under Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. And it happened again under George W. Bush, whose tax rate cuts are scheduled to expire next January.
The rich actually paid more total taxes, and a higher percentage of all taxes, after the Bush tax rate cuts, because their incomes were rising with the rising economy.

Politicians constantly stoke the "us versus them" fires to get and stay elected. They know that a voter who realizes that our economic fortunes are all tied together will vote differently than one who wants to "soak the rich" and make them pay their "fair share."

I'm fond of pointing out that you can't tax anyone without taxing everyone. Similarly, a "tax cut for the rich" is a tax cut for everyone. We need to stop thinking in terms of "spreading" wealth and start thinking about creating more of it.

Obama calls Republicans "enemies" who should be "punished"

2010-10-26T07:01:00.006-04:00

President Obama, making an appeal to Latino voters:

And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, we're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's gonna be harder — and that's why I think it's so important that people focus on voting on November 2.

Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Obama has been sharply divisive throughout his presidency. He ran as the anti-Bush and has continued to blame Bush and others when his policies have not performed as promised. His infamous "I won" retort to GOP leaders attempting to work with him on a stimulus package is indicative of how willing he is to "reach across the aisle." Though he promised to give Republicans a seat at the table and televise the discussions on CSPAN, we've seen none of that. Instead, he's had some of the most massive and transformative legislation in history crafted in back rooms and forced to a vote without even allowing Republicans the opportunity to offer amendments, or even the time to read it.

Now we have Obama openly referring to Republicans as "enemies" who must be "punished." This probably isn't quite as unclassy as when Obama traveled to Texas to attack Bush in his home state while Bush was on a humanitarian mission in Haiti at Obama's request, but it's a far cry from the "post-partisan" statesman Obama makes himself out to be.

The man has no class, and when even democratic operatives feel compelled to pen a Wall Street Journal commentary entitled Our Divisive President, it's clear that all the talk of "getting beyond 'old labels' of right and left, red and blue states, and forging compromises based on shared values" was just so much hokum.

Update: More unity from Obama:

"We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back."

Rosa Parks could not be reached for comment.

Update: More here.

We fail to report; You decide

2010-10-25T09:48:00.005-04:00

Yahoo! News:

With scientific data piling up showing that the world has reached its hottest-ever point in recorded history, global-warming skeptics are facing a high-profile defection from their ranks. Bjorn Lomborg, author of the influential tract "The Skeptical Environmentalist," has reversed course on the urgency of global warming, and is now calling for action on "a challenge humanity must confront."

This report caught my attention for several reasons. First, I've come across a number of articles recently that have scientists predicting that the earth is entering a period of cooling. Indeed, a cursory search for "is the earth cooling" confirms that this anticipated cooling trend has been widely reported. Opening the first link returned by my search, I read,

According to many scientists, Earth is in a current "cold mode" and will see temperatures fall over the next 30 years as the world enters a "mini ice age."

Second, in the wake of Climategate and similar scandals, the tendency has been for defection in the other direction. Scientists have felt freer to question the quality of research being used to stoke fears about man-made global warming, and those who do are increasingly being given more respect and media attention.

So to have a noted skeptic buck that trend by reversing course and calling for tens of billions of dollars to combat climate change is quite the deal. It has me asking myself, What made him change his mind? What new evidence has surfaced, or new insight gleaned, to make the man who wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist do a complete 180 and jump on the global warming band wagon? Why is he suddenly claiming that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" ?

Strangely, the Yahoo! article doesn't say. The real story here is not that Lomborg changed his mind, but why he changed his mind. But we're given no clue, beyond the suggestion from some of Lomborg's "former foes in the environmental movement" that he's simply engaging in self-promotion.

And that's what's odder still. Lomborg has switched sides. From the perspective of those who believe we are on the brink of doom due to global warming, he has finally seen the light. And yet they do not embrace him. And, again, the article doesn't say why.

Truly a strange bit of journalism, this, as it adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.

And, speaking of poor journalism, this bit in the article about "scientific data piling up showing that the world has reached its hottest-ever point in recorded history" is highly misleading. The "recorded history" being referenced only goes back a 150 years. The Earth has gone through several warmer periods just in its recent past. In fact, we're still coming out of the last ice age.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to remain skeptical of the alarmist claims about man-made global warming until someone can explain how man is causing global warming on Mars.

New evidence of WMD in Iraq

2010-10-24T15:08:00.003-04:00

Wired:

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

This doesn't surprise me in the least. In fact, I've been expecting reports of additional WMD discoveries for years and I'm surprised it's taken so long. I also predict that there will be more of them.

Note that I said additional WMD discoveries. That's because the accepted "fact" that there were never any WMD to begin with has been a willful distortion from the very start. In truth, there were a number of reports citing evidence of WMD in the early part of the war. There were satellite pics of truck convoys exiting Iraq across the Syrian border on the eve of the invasion. There were AP reports of WMD being captured as they were smuggled out of Iraq into Kuwait. There was evidence of WMD projects found in documents of which millions of pages had yet to be translated. But all these stories, and the logical follow up to them went largely ignored as the "official" story emerged that there simply weren't any WMD. I remember linking to an Investor's Daily story which concluded,

Oh, but we didn't find WMDs?
On the contrary, U.S. troops found more than 500 weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. True, we didn't find an operational nuclear weapon, but U.N. inspectors found lots of equipment and plans clearly showing that Iraq had been working on one — and intended to do so again.

I recall reading one report disclosing the discovery of tons of chemicals buried underground. These chemicals were described as "dual use" agents because they could technically be used as either WMD or fertilizer. The fertilizer explanation was given as the more likely one, without any speculation as to why it might be necessary to hide tons of fertilizer in an underground bunker, or why said "fertilizer" was buried next to a bunch of warheads which could be used as delivery devices.

So the fact that there is more of this stuff out there is hardly surprising. Maybe Bush has been out of office long enough now so that it's finally okay to start reporting on it.

Most education research is unreliable

2010-10-23T08:27:00.005-04:00

I've been reading through the archives at D-Ed Reckoning, a blog with lots of good discussion about education policy and research. This post makes the point that not all research is equal and provides a basic checklist a layman can use to spot a poorly designed study. Unfortunately, concludes the author,

There is very little education research (and subsequent advocacy) that meets all these criteria. Typically, when any serious meta-analysis of education research is conducted, about 90% of it has to be discarded as lacking. Journalists and edu-bloggers should be very leery relying on shaking [sic] education research.

Poverty, crime, and unwed birth rates

2010-10-23T07:24:00.004-04:00

America declared "war" on poverty and crime decades ago, but they remain intractable problems. The connection between these social ills and unwed birth rates is well documented, but this connection is often ignored or glossed over for reasons of ideology or political correctness. Here are a few links to web sites that present some alarming facts about crime, poverty, unwed birth rates, and related issues that should be a part of any serious discussion. I highly recommend reading and bookmarking them for future reference.

Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty - Robert Rector

A Crime Theory Demolished - Heather Mac Donald

Relationship Between the Welfare State and Crime - Michael Tanner

Single Mothers: The Statistics From Guilty - Ann Coulter

The key to economic growth?

2010-10-22T18:30:00.004-04:00

Carl Schramm of the Kauffman Foundation:

The single most important contributor to a nation’s economic growth is the number of startups that grow to a billion dollars in revenue within 20 years.

If this is true, we need to keep taxes and regulations on businesses to a minimum, to give individuals every incentive to launch new businesses, and to give those businesses every chance to make billion dollar profits.

Update: To put a sharper point on this, Team Obama is currently championing a tax increase on individuals who earn more than $200,000 a year. By definition, a start-up that has enough promise to grow into a billion dollar business over the next 20 years falls directly in the path of this proposed tax increase. Econ 101 says that if you tax something, you get less of it. You do the math.

Michelle Rhee-turns?

2010-10-21T10:04:00.003-04:00

Associated Press is reporting that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has offered the former District of Columbia's schools chancellor Michelle Rhee the job of New Jersey education commissioner.

Rhee brought monumental reform to an abysmally performing D.C. school district. Even the liberal Washington Post lauded her achievements. In retribution for her stellar performance, she was given the proverbial ax. (Apparently, she wasn't black enough or something.) I figured she would quickly land on her feet. There are still people who appreciate blatant talent when they see it.

My prediction is that she'll be secretary of education one day. I'd have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand it would be great to have someone serious in the position. On the other hand it would mean that the wretched Department of Education would still exist and Washington would still be meddling in education.

The wisdom of Milton Friedman

2010-10-21T09:45:00.004-04:00

George Stephanopoulos:

Chris Coons changed his previous position on the Bush era tax cuts this morning telling me that he would support extending all of the tax cuts for everyone for "several years."
. . .

That contradicts President Obama’s position and Coons’ own campaign website, which states “High-Income Bush Tax Cuts Should Expire on Schedule.”

. . .

With Coons shift he now joins a growing list of Democrats who support extending all of the tax cuts.

Milton Friedman:

It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.

Grim numbers and meaningless comparisons

2010-10-21T07:45:00.006-04:00

A new Gallop poll limns a grim picture of President Obama's political performance:

Barack Obama averaged 44.7% job approval during the seventh quarter of his presidency. His average approval rating has declined each quarter since he took office, falling by more than two percentage points in the most recent quarter to establish a new low.

. . .

Obama's decreased popularity is also evident in his favorable rating. . . For the first time, more Americans view the president unfavorably (50%) than favorably (47%), and his favorable rating is the lowest of his presidency.

. . .

Since his inauguration, positive opinions of him have declined by 31 points.

. . .

[A]t this point in his presidency, 39% of Americans believe Obama deserves re-election and 54% say he does not. Earlier this year, between 46% and 48% of Americans said Obama should be re-elected.

This is obviously terrible news for Team Obama, both as a snapshot of his current standing and in terms of the big picture of a long term trend.

Gallop's comparisons of Obama's numbers to those of other contemporary presidents, however, while superficially interesting, strike me as pretty meaningless on reflection. For example,

By comparison, in September 2002, 62% of Americans thought George W. Bush deserved re-election. Two years after his party's strong showing in the 2002 midterms, Bush won a narrow victory over John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

I'm not sure this tells us much, as these numbers are highly sensitive to conditions over which a president has little or no control. In September of 2002, the country was observing the first anniversary of a devastating attack on American soil. Emotions were still raw. Under those circumstances, I would expect Americans to rally solidly behind their president, no matter who he was. By 2004, memories of the attack were starting to fade, rationales for the war in Iraq were being questioned with brutal partisanship ("Bush lied; men died"), and the media kept a running tally of American casualties. What president would have maintained wide spread support under such a barrage?

Obama came into office riding a wave of singular support. Not only was he replacing an extremely unpopular president, but as the first black president, he enjoyed an unprecedented degree of goodwill, even from those who opposed him. How could he not fall from such lofty heights as the realities of governing set in and the practicalities of politics reasserted themselves? As the economy has continued to founder, would any president not see his image and support plummet along with it?

It's true that both Bush and Obama had a hand in their fortunes. Bush chose to wage the war; Obama chose to impose unpopular policies. But every president acts in a different role upon a different stage and must find his motivation in a plot largely driven by external players.

These numbers may tell us something about how well Obama is doing, but comparisons to this or that other president at "this point" in his presidency seem rather vacuous. I expect Republicans will try to make hay out of these comparisons, but there really is no such thing as "this point" in someone else's presidency.

I wonder

2010-10-21T05:38:00.003-04:00

The French are rioting in the streets because they think it's a bad idea to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. I wonder how many of them have paused to consider that perhaps it was a bad idea to give the government the authority to dictate when they can retire in the first place.

Conservatives give more ground

2010-10-20T07:15:00.004-04:00

The Hill:

A top Senate Republican suggested Monday night that the party's prevailing strategies to curtail the new healthcare law might not be good ideas.

Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said that repealing the new healthcare reform law — or looking to defund it — were not good options.

"I don't think starving or repealing is probably the best approach here," Gregg said on the Fox Business Network. "You basically go in and restructure it."

More of the same. The left gains five yards; the right vows to win back two. Rinse and repeat.

Remember the "Reagan Revolution?" It's considered the golden age of conservatism of the past century, but how big a difference did it make? When you look at a graph of government growth, you see a long, steep trend upward. The Reagan years are an inconspicuous, slightly flatter spot on the side of that steep slope, a hiccup that conservatives look back on with fondness and pride, but that made nary a difference in the larger scheme of things.

Will the Tea Party Revolution fare any better? Color me glum.

Obamacare continues to prove its critics right

2010-10-19T12:41:00.003-04:00

Associated Press:

Aerospace giant Boeing is joining the list of companies that say the new health care law could have a potential downside for their workers.
In a letter mailed to employees late last week, the company cited the overhaul as part of the reason it is asking some 90,000 nonunion workers to pay significantly more for their health plan next year. A copy of the letter was obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

"The newly enacted health care reform legislation, while intended to expand access to care for millions of uninsured Americans, is also adding cost pressure as requirements of the new law are phased in over the next several years," wrote Rick Stephens, Boeing's senior vice president for human resources.

It's all Bush's fault

2010-10-19T12:35:00.002-04:00

CBS News:

New numbers posted today on the Treasury Department website show the National Debt has increased by more than $3 trillion since President Obama took office.

The National Debt stood at $10.626 trillion the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated. The Bureau of Public Debt reported today that the National Debt had hit an all time high of $13.665 trillion.

The Debt increased $4.9 trillion during President Bush's two terms. The Administration has projected the National Debt will soar in Mr. Obama's fourth year in office to nearly $16.5-trillion in 2012. That's more than 100 percent of the value of the nation's economy and $5.9-trillion above what it was his first day on the job.

Dvorak's New World Keyboard

2010-10-19T04:02:00.002-04:00

It was in the mid-1990s that I first heard of the Dvorak keyboard. The idea of an alternative to the popular QWERTY keyboard intrigued me, as I'd never considered there might be another option. The story is that the QWERTY layout was actually designed to slow you down, putting an upper limit on typing speed so as to prevent jamming of the old mechanical typewriters. With the advent of the computer, jamming is no longer an issue, so it makes sense to consider alternatives that maximize speed or offer other advantages.

You can read more about the Dvorak layout via the link above, but the short version is that August Dvorak and his brother-in-law William Dealy spent over a decade exploring word and letter patterns in the English language and studying the way the human hand moves to come up with a layout that is scientifically designed to increase speed, decrease errors, and reduce fatigue. The promise of superior performance, combined with the ~~geek~~ cool factor, have had me wanting to check it out for some time.

Unfortunately, the Dvorak keyboard never caught on. It has joined the Betamax as a keen example of the Mousetrap Fallacy. Introduced during the Great Depression, and battling the entrenched popularity of the QWERTY keyboard, Dvorak's better mousetrap didn't offer enough perceived advantages to lure businesses and typing schools out of their respective comfort zones. It's expensive and time consuming to replace and retrain, and there is risk in breaking away from a standard that already serves you well.

For these and other reasons, I've never made the effort to try out a Dvorak keyboard, despite my curiosity. Then, recently, I learned that all major computer operating systems allow you to make the switch with a simple settings change. And so I did.

The change in settings doesn't change the labels on the keys of course, but I figure that's a good thing. I could opt to buy an actual Dvorak keyboard, attach homemade (or store-bought) labels to my existing keys, or even pop the existing keys off and snap them into their new homes. But why bother? A quick search pulled up a number of web sites that offer hands-on introductions to key assignments. I used this one. Not being able to "cheat" by peaking at the keys helped me learn the key assignments quickly, and once I had that down I switched to this site, which lets me practice while reading folk stories from around the world.

I made the switch a couple of weeks ago and, so far, things are going well. I haven't worked at it hard, but I've been chipping away at it a bit each day. I'm up to around 30 words per minute, so I have a way to go before I reach my QWERTY level of around 60. I had a couple of times when I had to get something typed up quickly, so I temporarily switched back to QWERTY. The switch back took a bit of concentration, but wasn't too bad. I've read that it's fairly easy to switch back and forth once you get the Dvorak system "under your fingers." I'm not there yet; I still have to pause sometimes to reestablish my bearings -- especially when my mind is tired. I am, after all, not just forming new muscle memories but overriding old ones.

I don't know if I'll ultimately stay with the Dvorak layout or revert back to QWERTY. I'll have to wait until I'm up to speed to make a true comparison. I'll report back as the experiment continues.

Race to the bottom

2010-10-17T15:45:00.005-04:00

Joanne Jacobs:

Singapore, Finland and South Korea, all countries with high-performing school systems, recruit teachers from the top third of college graduates. In the U.S., only 23 percent of teachers are top graduates; that falls to 14 percent in high-poverty schools. A majority attend colleges that admit virtually all applicants. So concludes a report by the McKinsey consulting firm.

I've been reading Thomas Sowell's Inside American Education -- the Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas, and his research tells a similar story. According to Sowell, public school teachers in the U.S. consistently score at the very bottom academically compared to their peers in other fields. This has been the case for as long as we've had public schools. Similarly, U.S. school of education professors are weaker academically than those in other university disciplines. Additionally, ed school courses are notoriously nonacademic and lack both the robustness and relevance of their counterparts in other departments.

This very much jives with my personal experience. I simply couldn't wait to get through my education classes. My classmates and I commonly referred to one of the more notorious of these as "Romper Room" due to its lack of substance and juvenile presentation -- a complete waste of time and money.

Jacobs quotes an article from Education Week:

By contrast, in Finland, the process for becoming a teacher is “extremely competitive,” and “only about one in 10 applicants is accepted to become a teacher,” according to the McKinsey report. Applicants to education schools are drawn from the top 20 percent of high school classes and must pass several exams and interviews. In Finland, “teaching is the most admired profession among top students, outpolling law and medicine,” it says.

The McKinsey report suggests that U.S. public schools could attract higher caliber teachers by offering better training, working conditions, and compensation. Sowell is more pessimistic, concluding that such incentives would be insufficient to overcome the systemic hurdles maintained by ed schools and teachers unions.

Considerable quote

2010-10-17T08:35:00.002-04:00

M. Stanton Evans:

We have two parties here, and only two. One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party. I'm very proud to be a member of the stupid party. Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that's both evil and stupid. That's called bipartisanship.

Buying votes

2010-10-15T09:00:00.004-04:00

The House is considering a bill which would send payments of $250 to Social Security recipients. According to Nancy Pelosi, the payments are needed because the Social Security Administration has decided not to provide a cost of living increase this year.

The reason there will be no increase? Because there shouldn't be. The cost of living has gone down, meaning SS recipients come out ahead if their payments stay the same as last year.

So why do we need to send them an extra $250 when they're already better off than they were last year?

Wait. It gets worse:

Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) has introduced a bill to provide another round of $250 payments.
"Seniors who rely on their modest Social Security payments need these cost-of-living adjustments for their day-to-day survival," said Pomeroy, who chairs the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security. "Passing this bill will ensure that the lack of cost-of-living adjustment will not jeopardize seniors' ability to survive on their benefits."

Pelosi says passage of the bill would be "fiscally responsible."

I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that there's an election in November.

It can't get here soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

Spreading the wealth around

2010-10-15T08:35:00.002-04:00

There's a new Gallop poll out that adds support to the theory that we're in for a double-dip recession. This passage caught my attention:

Although upper-income spending hasn't been increasing in response to the best September on Wall Street in 71 years -- at least to this point -- upper-income Americans have maintained their spending, while that of other Americans has declined.

This seems to argue against the Democrats' plan to increase taxes on upper-income earners. We want that money pumping through the economy.

America, we have a problem

2010-10-15T06:34:00.005-04:00

Jonah Goldberg:

Back in early 2009, President-elect Barack Obama was asked on "Meet the Press" how quickly he could create jobs. Oh, very fast, he said. He'd already consulted with a gaggle of governors, and "all of them have projects that are shovel-ready." When Obama revealed the members of his energy team, he explained that they were part of his effort to get started on "shovel-ready projects all across the country." When he unveiled his education secretary, he assured everyone that he was going to get started "helping states and local governments with shovel-ready projects."
In interviews, job summits and press conferences, it was shovel-ready this, shovel-ready that. Search the White House website for the term "shovel-ready" and you'll drown in press releases about all the shovels ready to shove shovel-ready projects into the 21st century, where no shovel is left behind.

It turns out, as Obama admits in a pending New York Times magazine article, "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects."

So, either the president lied when he hyped all these "shovel-ready" projects as a justification for pushing through his "stimulus" plan or he was duped as badly as the rest of us. I don't see how it can be any other way. Either the man conned us or he was himself conned. Whichever is the case, we're out a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) and stuck with two more years under a president with no credibility.

Astonishingly, Obama still insists that he got the policy right. He is "supremely sure" of this, according to the Times article. His only regret is that he didn't market it better:

"Given how much stuff was coming at us," Obama explains, "we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration -- and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top -- that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and PR and public opinion."

This makes no sense. The policy was predicated on the existence of legions of "shovel-ready" jobs, jobs the president now confesses never existed. We've charged trillions of dollars to an already maxed-out credit card and the economy is still tanking. No amount of "marketing and PR and public opinion" can change any of that. In what sense -- or in what alternate reality -- does that constitute "getting it right?"

Or, as Goldberg concludes:

The only problem with that: facts. Obama's health-care plan raises taxes on Americans (though Obama says this is not so, they're merely mandatory fees and premiums) and will cost trillions. He wants to raise taxes on "the rich" -- defined so that a cop married to a nurse might well count as rich -- and on small businesses.

Meanwhile, Washington is now spending 23 percent more than it did two years ago. As the Washington Post recently editorialized, Congress' "emergency" bailout to avoid "a teachers crisis" was a fraud to simply transfer billions to the teachers' unions in advance of the midterms.

And then, of course, there's the stimulus that paid for all of those "shovel-ready jobs" that Obama now admits never existed. Los Angeles County deployed $111 million in stimulus money to "save" 55 jobs at the cost of $2 million apiece. The White House has spent $192 million on road signs that brag about how the construction delays ahead were paid for by the stimulus. Meanwhile, unemployment is a full three points higher during Obama's "recovery" than it was during the "worst recession since the Great Depression."

I love that last line, and I intend to use it. Rattling off a crisp line like that every now and then brings a bit of cheer to help me brook the madness.

Does this make sense?

2010-10-15T05:46:00.005-04:00

Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is stepping down at the request of newly elected Mayor Vincent Gray. This makes no sense. Even the liberal Washington Post lauds the "important work" Rhee has done in affecting "unprecedented change and unqualified improvement" during her 3 1/2 years at the helm of one of the nation's historically worst school districts.

The Post editorial concludes:

We worry that there's a tendency by some to think that most of the hard work of school reform has been accomplished. Ms. Rhee did much of the heavy lifting that her predecessors either avoided or were dissuaded from taking on -- from cleaning out the central office to closing underutilized schools to setting high standards to demanding accountability. New resources went into refurbished schools, and the results were seen in higher student test scores, better graduation rates and, for the first time in decades, an increase in student enrollment. Ms. Rhee's successor will inherit a teacher contract centered, for the first time, on advancing the interests of children. But despite these strides, a majority of D.C. students are still woefully deficient in even the most basics of reading and math. The system is still inadequate, and it will take someone as fearless as Ms. Rhee to continue her work.

So they finally found someone who is making a real difference and they are giving her the boot while hopping to find a successor who is as effective as she is.

This is madness, and thousands of kids will be the victims of it.

Civil wrongs

2010-10-14T01:00:00.003-04:00

I recently had a discussion with a couple of people on Facebook about the links between poverty and crime. At one point, I said,

Something that usually gets left out of these discussions is the role played by unwed childbirth. During the Great Depression, poverty was rampant, yet crime rates remained at historic lows. The rate of unwed childbirth at the time, however, was a tiny fraction of what it is today. As late as 1964, when we began our "War on Poverty," 6.8% of births were to unwed mothers. Today, that number is 40% -- and tops 70% for Blacks. We know (from census data) that two-thirds of childhood poverty would end immediately if women were to marry the father of their children. We also know that over 70% of prison inmates grow up in homes without a father. All this suggests that unwed childbirth factors enormously into these social ills. Unfortunately, this remains a touchy subject that doesn't get the attention it warrants.

In response, a complete stranger -- a "friend" of a "friend," as Facebook allows -- introduced herself to me in this way:

Wow, way to transfer blame onto something "moral." What a bunch of bullshit! You think married parents would solve the problems of kids raised in poverty? What if both their parents are drug addicts? Or those fathers those mother's should have married abusive? Plenty of kids with unwed parents of divorcees in middle or upper class families turn out fine. The root of his is much more than marriage or lack of fathers. I'm sure just the poverty factors are huge. Mothers hat have to work three jobs to support their kids end up absentee because they aren't educated enough to get better work. A single mom with a really good job has eh luxury of being attentive to her children. I agree with Gwen, the funding and educational programs are failing. Also, the income gaps are getting bigger and bigger. The American Dream is dieing a rapid death. But hey, let's blame it on people not being married. Then lets blame it on gay people and not allow them to marry.

Yeah. I've really got to learn to stop talking to people. It's so depressing on so many levels. I have no interest in taking any of this up with my new "friend," but there's a point worth making here.

When did it become acceptable to respond to someone in this way? It would never occur to me that it's okay to launch into a complete stranger with venomous sarcasm, profanity, and suggestions of bigotry. Unfortunately, this woman's behavior is not an aberration. I don't get out of the house much these days, yet I routinely encounter people -- at the grocery store or the gas station -- who see no need to filter what comes out of their mouths. They'll curse in front of young children (often their own) or make an offensive remark about a political candidate to a stranger, never considering that they may be speaking to one of his supporters. (In my experience, those on the left are particularly bad on this last point, and more inclined toward rude behavior in general.)

It's not that I have no tolerance for sarcasm, sharp criticism, or profanity. It's that I don't assume that everyone shares my sensibilities. I draw a distinction between public and private. I give a thought to my surroundings. I have respect for my audience. In short, I have manners. And I'm old enough to remember when most everyone did.

Those days are long gone, it seems, even in small town New Hampshire. And it saddens me. Because for all the political and economic problems that plague us, it may be a lack of civility and common decency that finally does us in.

Out of the mouths of babes

2010-10-13T13:43:00.003-04:00

Neil Boortz shares this story from one of his listeners:

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President of the United States . Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there. So I asked her, "If you were President, what would be the first thing you would do?" She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people." Her parents beamed.
"Wow...what a worthy goal," I told her. "But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my driveway, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house."
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?"
I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party." Her parents still aren't speaking to me.

What did Obama say would happen?

2010-10-09T14:08:00.004-04:00

I thought I'd step into the way-back machine to be clear about what President Obama and his advisers were saying we could expect from his then-proposed economic policies. This isn't a fact checking effort. I just want to have something to refer back to when I read articles on job reports. I have highlighted some of the measurable claims that are typically mentioned in job reports.

From the Washington Post, January 11, 2009:

Facing increased skepticism from both parties about the details of his economic stimulus proposal, President-elect Barack Obama and his team yesterday laid out new claims regarding the $775 billion package, saying that 90 percent of the jobs produced would be in the private sector, including hundreds of thousands in construction and manufacturing.
Obama used his weekly radio address to continue his pre-inaugural campaign to build momentum for passage of the stimulus package, saying: "The jobs we create will be in businesses large and small across a wide range of industries. And they'll be the kind of jobs that don't just put people to work in the short term, but position our economy to lead the world in the long term."

To buttress Obama's points, two of his top economic advisers released yesterday an analysis of the president-elect's plan. The report carried the grim prediction that, while millions of jobs would be created or saved through the stimulus package, the unemployment rate would be little improved by the end of 2010 from the 7.2 percent at the end of last month -- the nation's highest rate since 1993. The advisers also warned that, without passage of the stimulus plan, unemployment could reach 9 percent.
. . .
Republicans have been wary of the potential for government payrolls to balloon, but the Obama aides wrote that less than 10 percent of the jobs created under the stimulus plan would be government positions. They also predicted that many of the new jobs would be "green jobs," involved in such tasks as retrofitting buildings -- reflecting a desire from Democratic activists and lawmakers to use some of the stimulus money for innovative projects, rather than for improving current infrastructure such as roads.

Obama aides said the stimulus plan would create millions of jobs while preventing layoffs of already-employed workers, particularly in state government. The advisers estimated about 137.6 million Americans would be employed at the end of 2010 if the stimulus were implemented, 2 million more than the current employment of 135.5 million. Without the stimulus, the aides predicted, about 133.9 million people would be employed, leading them to conclude that the plan could create or save nearly 4 million jobs.

Racialist nonsense

2010-10-09T12:18:00.002-04:00

Via Joanne Jacobs:

If schools discipline more blacks or Hispanics than white students, federal officials warn they’ll use “disparate impact analysis” to charge civil rights violations, reports Education Week.

Under “disparate impact,” schools can be in violation if discipline policies affect one racial group more than others, even if there’s no evidence of unequal treatment for the same offense or an intent to discriminate. An education agency would be found out of compliance if an equally sound policy would have less of a disparate impact, Russlyn Ali, an Education Department official, told Ed Week. [emphasis mine]

So it's racist to enforce discipline policies, even when they're not, you know. . . racist.

Are there any sane people left in the world? Anywhere?

For what it's worth

2010-10-08T11:28:00.003-04:00

An Instapundit reader observes that in October, 2006 -- just before Democrats took office -- unemployment was 4.4%.

This reminds me of another stat I recently came across: the lowest unemployment has been in the past 20 months was on January 20, 2009 -- the day Obama took office.

Damn that George Bush!

3 Reasons Obama's Education Vision Deserves an F

2010-10-08T11:07:00.002-04:00

ReasonTV presents a video report card of the president's education policies and gives Obama a failing grade. Until we break the government monopoly on education, we'll see more of the same, and pay more for it.

Wisdom from Daniel Hannan

2010-10-08T07:55:00.005-04:00

National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews British conservative Daniel Hannan about his book, The New Road to Serfdom -- A Letter of Warning to America. I'm frustrated in wanting to quote an excerpt or two; there's simply too much that is golden.

Do take the time to read the whole thing.

Considerable quotes

2010-10-07T16:27:00.002-04:00

John Hawkins put together a nice collection of quotes from P.J. O'Rourke's new book, Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards. Here are a few of my favorites:

The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That's all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can't pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can. -- p.36

I have a twelve-year-old daughter, Muffin. All I hear is, "It's not fair! It's not fair! It's not fair!" I say to her, "Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. You're smart. That's not fair. You were born in the United States of America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you." -- P. 47-48.

Power, freedom, and responsibility are the main features of our politics. We pay with our freedoms to relieve ourselves of our responsibilities, and this is how others get their power over us. -- P.60

There's only one thing about a government proposal of this complexity that we can be sure of: it won't work. No government proposal more complex than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works, and that one hasn't been working lately. -- P.145

Nice work if you can get it

2010-10-06T23:42:00.002-04:00

Jeff Carter takes a look at teacher salaries in Illinois:

The average teacher in the state of Illinois makes $61,402. Illinois teachers work around 176 days, 300 minutes, or 5 hours, per day. That's just over 35 weeks per year. On average, they make $348.88 per day, $1.16 per minute, or $69.60 per hour guaranteed. Teachers in Illinois work an average of 12 years. They can retire at age 55.

In order to find out what they really make though, you should take their pension benefits, net present value them and amortize them over their career. As of 2010, the average pension for an Illinois teacher is $43,164. It compounds annually for life at 3% per year.

Now it's time to do some math and make some assumptions. Assume that the lifespan of the teacher is no different than the average American, 78 years. If they start teaching at age 22, on average they will quit at 34. This means they will wait 21 years to collect their pension. The discount rate for the cash flows is a conservative 5%.

When you crunch all the numbers, the net present value of that pension is $290,756. Amortizing that over a twelve year career adds $24,229.64 to their average salary, making their actual salary before health benefits are added in a tidy $85,631.67, or $97.31 per hour.

I'm reading Jay Greene's Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools--And Why It Isn't So, and the evidence he points to makes a similar case. When you do an honest comparison of actual hours worked, teachers do surprisingly well relative to jobs requiring similar backgrounds and experience.

Note to government: Stop helping already!

2010-10-06T15:06:00.003-04:00

Marc Siegel, an associate professor of medicine at NYU, writes at National Review:

Last year, I ordered a CT scan of the chest on a 63-year-old patient whose chest X-ray had revealed a lung nodule. I had no problem getting the test approved by his private insurance company. The radiologist suggested that I repeat the CT scan this year to make sure the nodule hasn’t turned into cancer.
But this year, the same insurance company is denying the test, having clamped down on several elective services while also raising its premiums. This company now has to cover children with pre-existing conditions and can place no lifetime limits on care. It is struggling to preserve its profits as Obamacare kicks in — profits that, to begin with, are only approximately 4 percent of its total revenue.

Next year, my patient will have Medicare. He can’t afford a secondary insurance plan (Medicare Part B covers only 80 percent of most charges), and he doesn’t qualify for Medicaid as his secondary, so he was hoping to join a Medicare Advantage plan — a private insurance plan that seniors can choose to receive, partly at government expense, instead of Medicare. But in 2011, Medicare Advantage is due to be cut $140 billion by the new law, and it is doubtful that the plan he wants will still be available. Harvard Pilgrim, the second-largest insurer in Massachusetts, has just dropped 22,000 patients from its Medicare Advantage plan in anticipation of these cuts. Soon seniors everywhere will have the same problem. In fact, the Medicare actuary estimates that 7 million out of the 11 million people with Medicare Advantage will be set adrift over the next seven years. [emphasis mine]

These cuts and changes were predicted by opponents of Obamacare, but the president called them lies and insisted that no one would have to give up their health plans or see reductions in coverage (read rationing). We're seeing new stories like this reported every day, so it's no wonder Democrats aren't boasting about Obamacare on the campaign trail.

I'm not sure what the proper amount of cynicism is, but whether intentional or not, it's easy to see how Obamacare is exacerbating the problems with our health care system. That certainly lays the groundwork for government to swoop in and "rescue" us in a few years with the "solution" of the public option and a fully socialized health care system.

How often do we see government fail at fixing the problems they created in the first place?

HT: Betsy

How to balance the budget without raising taxes

2010-10-05T22:26:00.003-04:00

Check out this Center for Freedom and Prosperity video, which debunks the myth that we must raise taxes to balance the budget.

Interestingly, we don't have to decrease spending either, though the video does well to point out that getting spending under control should be the goal rather than simply balancing the budget.

Is this hope or change?

2010-10-05T21:09:00.005-04:00

Barack Obama:

Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you. First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan.

Today's Wall Street Journal:

3M Co. confirmed it would eventually stop offering its health-insurance plan to retirees, citing the federal health overhaul as a factor.
The changes won't start to phase in until 2013. But they show how companies are beginning to respond to the new law, which should make it easier for people in their 50s and early-60s to find affordable policies on their own. While thousands of employers are tapping new funds from the law to keep retiree plans, 3M illustrates that others may not opt to retain such plans over the next few years.

More evidence that taxing anyone is taxing everyone

2010-10-05T14:04:00.002-04:00

Washington state is talking about imposing a new tax on high income earners. I argued in an earlier post that a tax on anyone is a tax on everyone. Art Laffer underscores my point by explaining what has happened in other states that have imposed such a "tax on the rich":

To imagine what such a large soak-the-rich income tax would do to Washington, we need only examine how states with the highest income-tax rates perform relative to their zero-income tax counterparts. Comparing the nine states with the highest tax rates on earned income to the nine states with no income tax shows how high tax rates weaken economic performance.
In the past decade, the nine states with the highest personal income tax rates have seen gross state product increase by 59.8%, personal income grow by 51%, and population increase by 6.1%. The nine states with no personal income tax have seen gross state product increase by 86.3%, personal income grow by 64.1%, and population increase by 15.5%.
. . .
Each and every state that introduced an income tax saw its share of total U.S. output decline. Some of the states, like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, have become fiscal basket cases. As the nearby chart shows, even West Virginia, which was poor to begin with, got relatively poorer after adopting a state income tax.

. . .

The states that have high income tax rates or have adopted a state income tax over the past 50 years haven't even gotten the money they hoped for. They haven't avoided budget crises, nor have they provided better lives for the poor. The ongoing financial travails of California, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan and New York are cases in point.

Over the past decade, the nine states with the highest tax rates have experienced tax revenue growth of 74%—a full 22% less than the states with no income tax. Washington state has done better than the average of the nine no-tax states. Why on earth would it want to introduce a state income tax when it means less money for state coffers?