Archive for March, 2007
Tipping Point for School Choice in AZ?
The Arizona Republic gave an unqualified endorsement of school choice today, coupled with a stinging rebuke of the state Education-Industrial Complex, also known as “Big Ed” (yes, I will continue repeating this gimmicky label) for challenging this and other school choice laws in court.
It’s difficult to pick just one quote, but their opening will do nicely:
Of all Arizona’s attempts over the years to provide education options for poor students, the law allowing corporations to take a dollar-for-dollar credit on their taxes is the best-structured reform effort so far.
And they pull no punches on Big Ed:
Despite the indisputable value it provides students and their parents — that of real education options — the program’s opponents have gone to court against it and other education-choice programs . . . . It would be a shame to see such programs flounder on the specious fear that if you give vouchers to disabled kids, or to kids at the rocky bottom of life’s well, that public education itself will crumble. Simply put, it won’t. Education choice strengthens the underlying system. Someday, with luck, opponents of reform will figure that out.
Fewer Uninsured!
The Census Bureau just released a revised estimate of the number of Americans who lack health insurance:
The revised estimates show that, in 2005, 44.8 million people, 15.3 percent of the population, were without health insurance — about 1.8 million fewer than the Census Bureau reported in August 2006. Based on the Current Population Survey, the original 2005 estimate was 46.6 million, or about 15.9 percent of the population. . . . Conversely, an estimated 249 million Americans had coverage, up from the 247.3 million reported in August.
I think I speak for the entire health policy community when I say:
It is important that we not over-react to these numbers. The worst thing we could do would be to stop panicking about the uninsured. A lot of interest groups have spent a lot of money and misused a lot of data to convince the public that this mostly healthy bunch of people are America’s #1 health care problem. If we were to go off-message now, then Barack, Hillary, Mitt, Arnold, and all the other Chicken Littles we’ve created . . . well, they might get horribly confused. Thank you for your continued support.
In Praise of Administrative Costs
Advocates of socialized medicine, such as Physicians for a National Health Program, love to argue that America’s health care sector is less efficient than socialized systems because private insurers appear to have higher administrative costs. In yesterday’s New York Times, Tyler Cowen reveals the flaw in that logic:
The monitoring, marketing and overhead costs of private insurance are what allow more expensive medical treatments through the door. It is precisely because competing insurance companies spend money evaluating the appropriateness of claims that they are willing to pay for so many heart bypasses, extra tests, private hospital rooms and CT scans.
If European health care systems appear to have lower administrative costs, it is because, rather than scrutinizing claims, they limit the overall amount they will spend on medical services. Of course, that just means they shift costs to patients who either must pay for medical services themselves, or deal with the costs of waiting.
If the U.S. Medicare program appears to have lower administrative costs, it is because, rather than scrutinizing claims, Medicare just shovels money out the door. That merely shifts those costs onto taxpayers by driving up Medicare spending and taxes.
In Medicare Meets Mephistopheles, Cato adjunct David Hyman delights in the irony that medicine-socializers praise one of Medicare’s greatest failings (inadequate oversight of claims payment) as if it were a virtue.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health Care; Tax and Budget Policy
The Real College Sports Madness
Tonight the mighty Hoyas of Georgetown University will square-off against the Vanderbilt Commodores in a Sweet 16 hoops tilt.
In light of Georgetown’s dominance this season (28-6 overall, winners of 17 of their last 18, champions of the Big East Conference, and easy victors over the Commodores back in November), it’s probably a bit cruel to make Vandy face the Hoyas again. At least in the big picture, though, this is a fair match-up: both teams are from relatively small, private schools with pretty high academic standards, and both rely on voluntary fan and booster support to compete.
Unfortunately, a bit of breaking college basketball news on ESPN.com yesterday demonstrates that the latter is not always the case. The story was about Steve Alford leaving his head coaching job at the University of Iowa to take the reins at the University of New Mexico, a move many college hoops fans consider a bit of a step down. Iowa, after all, plays in the powerful Big Ten Conference, while New Mexico toils in the lesser Mountain West. So what was Alford’s inducement to trade corn for sand?
One possibility is that Alford was on his way out of Iowa anyway. He had only three NCAA Tournament appearances in eight seasons there, and not every Iowa fan exactly loved him. But, important as this might have been in Alford’s decision, it wasn’t what ESPN said ultimately attracted him to Albuquerque (it also wasn’t the city’s famed petroglyphs):
Sources said Alford was thrilled with the commitment from recently hired New Mexico athletic director Paul Krebs and impressed by the university’s decision to upgrade the famed Pit, which, according to Krebs, will receive $12 million from state government for renovation. There also is hope that the figure could rise to $20 million. [Italics added]
Something about the “Health of the State”…
James Kirchick over at the New Republic’s blog provides a useful reminder why war (and Sen. Joe Lieberman) should be repellent to those of us who care about limited government.
More on this theme here.
Bob Herbert, What Are You Talking About?
Give New York Times columnist Bob Herbert credit — not many writers can pack three ridiculous claims into a single lede. Somehow he manages to do so in his latest column, which begins:
One of the weirder things at work these days is the fact that we’re making it more difficult for American youngsters to afford college at a time when a college education is a virtual prerequisite for establishing and maintaining a middle-class standard of living.
Did you catch all three? They are:
- “American youngsters” are finding “it more difficult“ “to afford college.”
- “[W]e’re” the ones who are “making it more difficult for American youngsters to afford college.”
- “[A] college degree is a virtual prerequisite for establishing and maintaining a middle-class standard of living.”
Let’s tackle these in order:
If American youngsters are finding it more difficult to go to college, that’s not showing up in college enrollment data. The enrollment rate of recent high school graduates for 2004, the most recent year for which data are available, was the second-highest in history at 66.7 percent. The years 2000, 2002 and 2003 are also among the seven highest in history, with enrollments of 63.3, 65.2 and 63.9 percent, respectively. And, looking forward, projected enrollment numbers out to the 2015–2016 school year suggest enrollment rates will continue to rise.
South Carolina Makes a Mockery of Informed Consent
Yesterday the South Carolina House passed a bill mandating that women seeking abortions sign a sworn statement that they have seen an ultrasound of their fetus before having the abortion. Rep. Greg Delleney, the sponsor of the bill and a Republican from Chester, said, “I’m just trying to save lives and protect people from regret and inform women with the most accurate non-judgmental information that can be provided.” This is an amendment to the existing South Carolina informed consent law that requires doctors to give women information about fetal development and alternatives to abortion.
Informed consent is probably the most important principle of modern medicine. Its purpose is to enable autonomous decisionmaking. The South Carolina ultrasound law does everything but empower the patient. Offering a woman the option of an ultrasound as part of the informed consent process or doing one that is medically necessary is understandable, but forcing her to watch one as a prerequisite to having an abortion is an abuse of the informed consent process. The scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex’s eyes are forcefully held open as he is shown images intended to recondition his social behavior comes to mind.
I believe abortion is morally wrong, but I also believe that current U.S. law correctly recognizes that, in a conflict between mother and fetus, the woman’s rights take precedence over those of her fetus. A human being’s rights under the law increase with maturity. That has been the tradition under Anglo-American law as well as worldwide for most of history.
The suggestion that a fetus should have the same legal standing as an adult is not only unprecedented, but unacceptable. In balancing the rights of fetuses with those of their mothers, women’s rights must always take priority; otherwise the law is treating women as second to, or of lesser value than, the fetuses they are carrying – the law would be treating women first and foremost as communally owned vessels for bringing forth life and only second as autonomous individuals.
For those, like myself, who believe abortion is fraught with moral difficulties, the correct course of action is to teach, communicate, and discuss our views with our daughters, our female neighbors, and our friends. We must use the strength of our convictions and good clear reasoning to help them come to the right conclusions. To force someone to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth unwillingly is not far from slavery, no matter what the rationale. Pregnancy and birth are the most dangerous things most women will ever do in their lives. Not to give them the choice to escape those dangers, let alone plan their lives, is to treat them with the greatest disrespect.
The NCLB Backlash
David Broder delivers a pile of Beltway Consensus in his column today. Broder insists that Bush fight his fellow Republicans on the Hill who have come back round to realizing that the Feds 1) Aren’t authorized by the Constitution to direct the education of the public, 2) Don’t improve education with their involvement, and 3) Just spend more money and make more trouble the more they’re involved. Return to the consensus, he admonishes. These folks, some of whom recently announced their legislative intentions at a Cato event, are leading what Broder refers to as a “backlash” against No Child Left Behind.
The column is rather unremarkable, but I love this closer:
“But the dissenting Republicans’ idea of letting every state set its own standards and measure its own progress is a certain way to consign many youngsters to second-class educations. And that would be a serious step backward.”
Getting a second-class education is bad, and sunny days are good! Indeed. But one can’t step backward if he doesn’t have the room.
The only way forward for education is to walk down the path of educational freedom. That means states putting parents back in charge of their children’s education and getting the Feds out of the issue entirely.
Market Education Is Not a Theory
Two weeks ago, I sat beside Andrew Rotherham at a Cato Institute forum. After he provided several thoughtful, empirically-supported answers to questions on teacher training and certification, I was surprised to hear him declare that there is essentially no such thing as a truly free market in education, and that education must be extensively regulated to succeed (audio and video are here).
This evening, I read a blog post by Sara Mead, the Senior Policy Analyst with Rotherham’s Education Sector organization, in which she asserts that
Vouchers are all about allocation of children amongst spaces in existing schools and do almost nothing to expand the supply of high-quality options…. Some voucher proponents claim that making vouchers available will create market incentives that expand the supply of high-quality schools in these communities, but there’s not really evidence to bear that out.
One thing that these statements (and several others made in Mead’s post) have in common is that they are directly contradicted by decades of empirical research. Another is that they make no mention of that research. Rotherham and Mead do not seem to be disagreeing with the relevant literature. They seem unaware of it.
Taking the latter point first, there are two well-established nationwide school voucher programs, one in the Netherlands, the other in Chile. The first was created in 1917, the second in 1982. In both cases, the supply of private schools rose dramatically to meet demand. Roughly three quarters of Dutch students are now enrolled in private schools. In Chile, private sector enrollment doubled within the first decade and passed the 50 percent mark in December of 2005.
Sweden and Denmark enacted voucher programs more recently, and both are seeing the creation of new private schools as a result. Swedish private sector enrollment rose from 1 percent to 10 percent of the student population in a decade, and continues to rise. I discuss this issue at greater length in my chapter in the Cato book: What America Can Learn from School Choice in other Countries.
Turning to Mr. Rotherham’s assertion, I pointed out at our forum that there are vibrant, unregulated, rapidly growing education markets all over the world. In some areas, such as the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, these are niche markets – mainly after-school tutoring. In other parts of the globe, particularly South Asia and Africa, they are mainstream elementary and secondary schools.
In 2004, I reviewed the empirical research on the relative performance of market versus monopoly provision of elementary and secondary schooling. That research favors market systems in the areas of academic achievement, efficiency, responsiveness of the curriculum to parents’ demands, and even the maintenance of physical facilities. In the achievement and efficiency areas, where the most research has been done, the statistically significant results favor markets by a ten to one margin.
Subsequently, the Cato Institute published a paper by James Tooley and Pauline Dixon showing that private schools serving the poorest people on Earth, in the urban slums and rural villages of Africa and India, are doing a better job, at a far lower cost, than their government-run competitors. These schools are not simply unregulated. In many cases, their respective governments did not even know that they existed. They are also the fastest-growing part of the education sector in the developing world, already enrolling majorities of students in several of the areas studied – including several of the poorest areas.
Corporate Tax Rate Dropping to 28 Percent in England
Bowing to the pressure of tax competition, Gordon Brown announced that the corporate tax rate will be reduced by two percentage points. This is a very small cut, and it will be at least partially offset by other tax hikes (especially on manufacturers), so the United Kingdom is not exactly poised to become the next Estonia, Ireland, or Slovakia. Nonetheless, it is always amusing to see politicians who want higher tax rates being compelled to lower tax rates instead. Tax-news.com reports:
Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown surprised many yesterday by announcing a 2% reduction in the rate of corporation tax and a 2% cut in the basic rate of income tax, representing the first major cut in these taxes in many years. Brown has been on the receiving end of growing criticism of his handling of the public finances and his propensity to add complexity to an already unwieldy tax system, but many of the more cynical observers believe that the Chancellor’s generosity has more to do with securing his place as the next Prime Minster than it does with giving the UK’s tax competitiveness a much-needed fillip. Taking centre-stage in what is likely to be Brown’s last budget speech was the announcement that corporation tax would be cut by 2% to 28%. According to the Chancellor, this would bring the UK’s corporate tax rate below both the OECD and EU15 average. However, tax experts observe that while the Chancellor has given with one hand, he will claw back much of this lost revenue with the other through changes in capital allowances. …Paul Davies, UK Head of Tax at Ernst & Young noted that while the Chancellor appears to have finally woken up to the pleas of the business community for a tax cut, the overall result of the budget is a “mixed bag of changes that may affect different taxpayers in different ways.” “The cut in the main rate of Corporation Tax is welcome, showing that the UK is once again on a competitive path. This will reassure those companies thinking of moving offshore. However, the gain from the rate reduction will be more than clawed back by the change in plant and machinery capital allowances. As a result it is clear that the main beneficiaries of the rate cut will be in the service sector rather than the manufacturing sector,” he stated.
Regulatory Excess in the States
George Will’s Townhall.com column describes some of the more inane efforts to impose cartels at the state level:
In New Mexico, anyone can work as an interior designer. But it is a crime, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to a year in prison, to list yourself on the Internet or in the Yellow Pages as, or to otherwise call yourself, an “interior designer” without being certified as such. Those who favor this censoring of truthful commercial speech are a private group that controls, using an exam administered by a private national organization, access to that title. This is done in the name of “professionalization,” but it really amounts to cartelization. Persons in the business limit access by others — competitors — to full participation in the business. …in Las Vegas, where almost nothing is illegal, it is illegal — unless you are licensed, or employed by someone licensed — to move, in the role of an interior designer, any piece of furniture, such as an armoire, more than 69 inches tall. A Nevada bureaucrat says that “placement of furniture” is an aspect of “space planning” and therefore is regulated — restricted to a “registered interior designer.” Placing furniture without a license? Heaven forfend.
Will notes – quite accurately – that businesses are in favor of regulation when it means they can raise prices on consumers and/or disadvantage competitors. This is why there is a big difference between being pro-market and pro-business:
It is not true that businesses, as a matter of principle, want to fend off government regulation. Businesses have a metabolic urge to make money, which is as it should be. But when a compliant government gives them the opportunity to use government regulations to enhance their moneymaking, businesses’ metabolic urge will overpower any principles about the virtues of free (from government intervention) enterprise.
Update on Hillary 1984
The mysterious creator of the Orwellian YouTube ad about Hillary Clinton has been unmasked. He is Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, a digital consulting firm with ties to rival Sen. Barack Obama. The ad ended with a plug for Obama, but the Obama campaign had denied any knowledge of it. Blue State designed Obama’s website; the company fired de Vellis yesterday. And Democratic operative de Vellis was properly chastened: “I want to make it clear that I don’t think that Hillary Clinton is Big Brother or a bad person or anything.”
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
