Archive for March, 2009
Homeschool an Option for Tough Times
Spouse out of work? Can’t keep up private tuition for the kids? Try homeschooling:
Christopher Klicka of Warrenton, Va., senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association and co-teacher along with his wife of seven homeschooled children, says hard times enhance homeschooling’s appeal as private school tuition becomes unaffordable and some public schools contemplate cutbacks.
“People are looking to homeschooling as an alternative more now in light of economic circumstances,” he said, citing its low cost and potential for strengthening family bonds.
At Allendale Academy in Clearwater, Fla., which provides resources for homeschoolers, enrollment has risen 50 percent over the past two years to about 900 students as families desert private schools, says academy director Patricia Carter.
“Often one parent has been laid off,” she said. “That makes private school tuition impossible, and they don’t want to send their kids back to public school.”
Her academy charges $65 per year to support students through 8th grade, $95 for high school students, compared to private school tuitions often running many thousands of dollars per year.
For frugal families, homeschooling can be a good fit. Used academic material is available at low cost; free research resources are on tap on the Internet and at libraries.
Will the ‘Rise of the Counterinsurgents’ Lead to Fewer Counterinsurgency Wars?
Matt Yglesias picks up on the Bacevich review I referenced below and points to a post from counterinsurgency (COIN) scholar Andrew Exum in which Exum argues that learning to do counterinsurgency better will lead to our doing less of it:
No one who really understands COIN wants to do it. Liberal interventionalists and neo-conservatives are likely to be much more enthusiastic than the practitioners themselves. Counter-insurgents, often knowing something of what they speak through practical and hard-won experience, realize all too well just how difficult and costly big schemes drawn up in Washington become when they have to be operationalized. Counter-insurgency is hard. Best to avoid it, actually.
This doesn’t make much sense. Exum has previously excoriated COIN skeptic Gian Gentile for pursuing an “anti-COIN crusade.” But by Exum’s reasoning above, it is Exum who should be on an anti-COIN crusade. Instead, Exum thinks that DOD needs to allocate more resources to doing COIN.
Academically, Exum is interested in insurgencies. And indeed — they’re interesting. But for the COIN clique to think that their realistic appreciation of the difficulties of COIN and their private reticence to do it is going to outweigh their technocratic advice and willingness to obey orders in the minds of policymakers, I think they’re gravely mistaken. The work of the COIN crowd is going to create the impression in the minds of policymakers that the military knows how to win counterinsurgencies and therefore we don’t need an “Iraq syndrome.” But we do need an Iraq syndrome.
Take, for one example of my argument, the thinking of Bush NSC official Peter Feaver.* He thinks, as I do, that making COIN doctrine central to American foreign policy thought is going to create a future in which US foreign policy will continue to look like that of President Bush. Except for Feaver, that’s a feature, not a bug:
The problem with Chris’s post on COIN is that it takes the existing debate at face value, as if it really were a debate about the best way to do COIN or its place in American national security. I don’t think it is.
Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda. Setting them aside, the larger debate seems driven by one of three deeper considerations. First, anti-COIN is a convenient way to argue against American military involvement in any fashion because the most urgent near-term threats requiring military operations involve COIN. So if your ideology tells you that the dominant problem in the world is American militarism; if you look at recent history and can only find cases where we did use military force and shouldn’t have and can find no cases where we did not use military force and should have; if you think that getting defeated in Iraq (or Afghanistan) would have a salutary chastening effect on American adventurism; if any or all of that applies, then it makes sense to argue against Gates’ emphasis on COIN now. If the U.S. military cannot or will not do COIN, then the U.S. military cannot and will not be operational.
Does Exum think this policymaker’s view is wrong? Aberrant? I think its descriptive content is exactly accurate and characteristic. Orienting planning and resources more toward COIN is likely to lead to more counterinsurgency wars. I’m pretty confident in this prediction. If somebody disagrees, I’d like to hear a better fleshed out argument behind the idea that telling policymakers “we now know how to do COIN pretty well” will lead to those policymakers to decide we ought to do it less.
UPDATE: Professor Feaver writes in to say that by “Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda” he meant to make the positive statement that these people are patriots with noble intentions and didn’t mean to intimate they could be insincere patriots of questionable honesty with deeper agendas. He also disputes the factual accuracy of the Times article linked above and points to this Commentary piece as the definitive account of his work at the Bush NSC.
The Bridge to Your Wallet
The airwaves and Intertubes are filled with images of this bridge in Missouri – the first transportation project in the nation to be funded through the stimulus bill signed by president Obama last month. In their coverage of this project, the media uniformly point to the jobs it has created for local workers, and neglect to reflect on its economic costs.
As Doug Bandow pointed out in his earlier post, even Congress’s own Budget Office expects the stimulus to shrink our economy in the long term. And the CBO’s analysis is arguably too rosy, neglecting the crucial psychological effect of Washington’s unprecedented spending spree on American consumers.
An NBC/WSJ public opinion poll found in January that “60 percent say they’re concerned that the government will spend too much money in trying to stimulate the economy, ultimately increasing the size of the debt.” That’s up from 57 percent who were already terrified by Bailout Mania back in November of 2008. What do people do when they’re scared about the state of the economy? They. Stop. Spending.
Supporters of bailouts and “stimuli” imagine that they can overcome consumers’ tight-fistedness in the short term, but they fail to realize that each new lavish increase in federal spending makes taxpayers more nervous about their ability to repay the ballooning federal debt and about the future of the U.S. economy. So while the Bridge to Your Wallet may have created a handful of local construction jobs in Missouri, it is almost certainly costing many others around the nation.
Cautious taxpayers look at that bridge project, at the mind-boggling accumulation of federal bailouts and stimuli and the biggest federal budget in history, and they cancel major purchases and family vacations. They eat at home instead of supporting their local restaurants. They do exactly the opposite of what the president and Congress are expecting.
If the media insist on doing more stories about the Bridge to Your Wallet, they should look at the polling and spending data showing how Washington’s spending spree is scaring the public into spending less — defeating the very purpose of the stimulus. They should interview restaurant and hotel owners and ask them just how economically stimulated they feel at the moment.
A ‘Stimulus’ Bill that Makes Us Worse Off
Even after being in Washington for nearly three decades, I still occasionally marvel at the stupidity and foolishness of the denizens of Capitol Hill. Like the recent “stimulus” bill. There’s no doubt that it is waste and abuse personified, much of it derived from the standard big-spending liberal wish list. But we were told that wouldn’t matter, since spending, any spending, is what was necessary to get the economy moving.
But it turns out that even the Congressional Budget Office–the legislative branch’s own analytical agency–figures the legislation will make us worse in the long-term. On Monday CBO reaffirmed its earlier conclusion:
In contrast to its positive near-term macroeconomic effects, the legislation will reduce output slightly in the long run, CBO estimates. The principal channel for that effect, which would also arise from other proposals to provide short-term economic stimulus by increasing government spending or reducing revenues, is that the law will result in an increase in government debt. To the extent that people hold their wealth as government bonds rather than in a form that can be used to finance private investment, the increased debt will tend to reduce the stock of productive private capital. In economic parlance, the debt will “crowd out” private investment. (Crowding out is unlikely to occur in the short run under current conditions, because most firms are lowering investment in response to reduced demand, which stimulus can offset in part.) CBO’s basic assumption is that, in the long run, each dollar of additional debt crowds out about a third of a dollar’s worth of private domestic capital (with the remainder of the rise in debt offset by increases in private saving and inflows of foreign capital). Because of uncertainty about the degree of crowding out, however, CBO has incorporated both more and less crowding out into its range of estimates of the long-run effects of the stimulus legislation.
Since CBO expects the U.S. to return to full employment, the impact of the lower GDP will be lower wages:
The reduction in GDP is therefore estimated to be reflected in lower wages rather than lower employment, as workers will be slightly less productive because the capital stock is slightly smaller.
So, we are going massively into debt and mortgaging the future of the young for the purpose of … shrinking the economy! Workers will find themselves paying higher taxes to fund wasteful spending while … earning less! No wonder Washington is such an alien place to most Americans. Even after spending most of my adult life here, I still don’t get it.
Your Government at Work
In case you are the careless sort who doesn’t ask who is funding all of those wonderful government projects around you, the Obama administration intends to create a special stimulus brand. Really.
President Obama announced today that his administration will begin stamping an emblem on projects funded by the economic stimulus package so that people can easily recognize the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
All projects will be stamped with the ARRA logo (short for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) and lists the recovery.gov website on the emblem.
In remarks at the Department of Transportation this morning, Mr. Obama referenced the new emblems.
“We’re also making it easier for Americans to see what projects are being funded with their money as part of our recovery. So in the weeks to come, the signs denoting these projects are going to bear the new emblem of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Obama said. “These emblems are symbols of our commitment to you, the American people — a commitment to investing your tax dollars wisely, to put Americans to work doing the work that needs to be done. So when you see them on projects that your tax dollars made possible, let it be a reminder that our government — your government — is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of recovery.”
Of course, I’m sure the program has nothing to do with the desire to win political points for bringing goodies to the voters. No one in Washington thinks like that. On the other hand, when the inevitable abuse and waste emerges, the administration might begin tearing off its brand as quickly as it once put it on.
Grand Juror Got Too Uppity
Peter Atherton was thrown off a grand jury for asking too many questions of the prosecutors. Here’s an excerpt from Legal Times:
Back in 2001, fellow grand jurors quickly became irritated with Atherton, saying he was disruptive and was holding up the process with all of his questions about probable cause and burden of proof, according to court records.
It was Atherton’s first time on a grand jury when he showed up for service that April. He says he became concerned the jury was rushing through cases, indicting individuals without having a full understanding of the crimes.
Filing an indictment against someone is serious stuff. The process should be slow and deliberative. Alas, the old saw is that prosecutors can get grand juries to indict anything–even a ham sandwich. Atherton’s experience lends support to that–skeptics who question authority apparently can’t be tolerated. For a related case, go here. For my primer about the grand jury process, go here.
‘Real Regulators’ Redux
Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes featured a man named Harry Markopolos who repeatedly reported Bernie Madoff’s scam to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC did not investigate.
Steve Croft: How many times did you send material to the SEC?
Markopolos: May 2000. October 2001. October, November, and December of 2005. Then again, June 2007. And finally, April 2008. So, five separate SEC submissions.
Croft: And in spite of all of the things that you did, it still ended up in disaster.
This is a reminder of what I observed in a recent post here called “A Real Regulator.” CNBC’s Erin Burnett had called for a “real” regulator in the wake of Madoff, to which I replied:
When regulators fail to address a problem ahead of time, when they regulate inefficiently, when they hand their rulemaking organs to the industries they are supposed to oversee, those are all the actions of real regulators. That’s what you get with real regulation.
Markopolos isn’t grinding this same ax against goverment regulation. He says, “. . . [S]elf-regulation on Wall Street doesn’t work.”
So the question is posed: What allowed this to happen?
I don’t think this huge fraud occured in a “self-regulatory” environment. It occured in a regulated environment. Regulators failed to do their jobs, but investors had abandoned their responsibility to look into the people and firms with which they placed their money. They believed that the SEC was taking care of that.
It wasn’t, so nobody was minding the store. Ultimately, the SEC served as a partner to the crime, providing the “confidence” that made a success of Bernie Madoff’s confidence game.
Back to Markopolos:
That’s typically how the SEC does it. They come in after the crime has been committed, they toe-tag the victims, count the bodies, and try to figure out who the crooks were, after the fact, which does none of us any good.
Is “self-regulation” the alternative to government regulation? No. And neither is deregulation. The alternative is market regualtion, where individuals, responsible for the soundness of their purchases and investments, investigate and study who they do business with. Scams like Madoff’s would have shorter duration and do less damage if investors were not under the impression that they were protected by government regulators. Of course, our policymakers are likely to double-down on the bet on governmental regulation, even though we all just witnessed its failure.
I’m Speechless
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, testifying today to the House Ways and Means Committe, said that the Obama administration had inherited “the worst fiscal situation in American history” but that “additional spending is necessary because the previous administration was unwilling to make long-term investments in health care, energy and education.”
Since these ridiculously inconsistent statements have left me speechless, I’ll refer you to Tad’s previous entry.
New Podcast: ‘Climate of Extremes’
With a polarized debate among the scientific community over climate change, what about experts who admit that climate change is real, but don’t think it’s the end of the world?
In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Cato Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies Patrick J. Michaels explains the problem with the global warming debate.
Either it seems you think the world is coming to an end from climate change, and pronto, or you say there is no such thing as climate change.…Now it’s gotten to the point where if you say climate change is real, but it’s not the end of the world, both poles of the debate get angry at you.…But, in fact, that is the truth: climate change is real; it’s modest. It’s proceeding at a rate that is below the statistical rates predicted by the climate models; in other words, those models are in the process of failing.
School Choice Support Has Media Mainstreamed
When an issue that used to be considered free-market fringe is embraced as a moral litmus test for politicians by liberal editorial boards (or idealized fictional Democratic Presidents), you know the issue-argument has been won. That’s certainly not to say the policy war has been won, but an important battle toward realizing that goal has been.
Last week the Washington Post denounced the recent attempt by Congress to kill the DC voucher program with a poison pill buried in the omnibus spending bill.
Today the Chicago Tribune editorializes in support of DC vouchers, noting in the process the strong of achievement gains from school choice, the financial advantages of choice, the corrupting influence of the teachers unions on the Democratic Party, and the rank hypocrisy of a President Obama who sends his own children to an expensive private school while kowtowing to the unions in his opposition to school choice for those without independent means.
The editorial is remarkable, quite heated, and particularly hard on the President. Here are the highlights, but it’s worth a full read:
[The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is] in Washington, D.C., which has among the worst schools in America. . . It’s a modest undertaking, providing just $7,500 per child—less than a third of what the District of Columbia spends per pupil in public schools.
But vouchers are anathema to many in the Democratic Party because teachers unions feel threatened by the prospect of more children going to non-union private schools. . . Democrats to kids: Tough luck. . .
Of the 10 studies of existing voucher systems, says Wolf, nine found significant academic improvements. . . President Obama doesn’t need to be told about the deficiencies of Washington’s public schools: He rejected them in favor of a private school for his daughters. Ask how many members of Congress send their children to public schools in D.C. . . If they want to end the experiment at such an early stage, it’s not because they think it’s failing, but because they fear it’s working.
Holder’s “Assault Weapons” Folly
Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that the Obama administration will seek a new federal “assault weapons” ban. This is an ill-advised policy that defies common sense.
The ban would be a revival of a law passed in the early years of the Clinton administration that expired in 2004. The law prohibited the sale of newly-manufactured magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition and having two of five cosmetic features on semi-automatic rifles. If you had a pistol grip and a detachable magazine, you couldn’t have a bayonet lug. More recent proposals have attempted to ban “barrel shrouds,” which the rest of the world calls “handguards” – the place you put your hand (instead of on a hot barrel) to prevent burning it while firing.
The emphasis here is on the cosmetic – any rational discussion of the issue ought to note that an “assault weapon” is any object you use to assault someone with – and banning the presence of a bayonet lug on the barrel of a rifle is senseless. Knives, tire irons, and bricks can all serve as “assault weapons.” This is an instance where quotation marks are not just appropriate, they are required.
Much of the public support for the law was based on a warping of the issue by gun control proponents to make the public believe that these firearms are machine guns. The fully automatic weapons that gun controllers use to push this agenda have been heavily regulated by the federal government since 1934 and not produced for civilian sale since 1986. Don’t take my word for it – here’s Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center: “The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons-anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun-can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”
This intentional distortion has moved from advocacy groups to the attorney general’s office. Attorney General Eric Holder claims that the law is needed to counter Mexican Drug War violence, that American gun laws support “cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades.” Again, these devices are already illegal. It is far more likely that these weapons of war are from Mexican Army troops who deserted their posts for the higher pay that drug kingpins offer. The drug cartels have even taken the brazen step of setting up billboards meant to draw soldiers and police officers from their government jobs and into the drug trade. My colleague Ted Galen Carpenter wrote the book on how to deal with this issue. Holder’s War on Everything is not it.
It defies reason to think that multi-billion dollar criminal syndicates will not be able to get their hands on guns because of an American law banning cosmetic features and dictating lower magazine capacity. If the Mexican government gets better control of its own armaments, the cartels will simply go to the black market and buy the guns. Or make them. Guns are hand-crafted in the frontier provinces of Pakistan, and there is no reason that the cartels could not do the same in a country with far more industrial know-how. Three minutes of internet research will reveal plans to make fully automatic sub-machine guns, so enough capital to set up a machine shop and buy some sheet metal is all it would take.
The expired ban did not demonstrably impact crime anyway. The Centers for Disease Control conducted a study in 2003 that found no reduction of crime attributable to the law. This should come as no surprise, since most criminals’ weapons of choice are cheap, small caliber pistols. They traditionally dominate the ATF’s top crime gun list. There are some bad apples out there selling guns to people they know to be “straw buyers,” people who have clean records and re-sell the guns to those who don’t. Prosecute them. Enforce the existing laws before deciding to restrict the freedom of law-abiding citizens.
Predictably, both Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have temporarily quashed the issue. Let’s hope they keep it out of the halls of Congress, and focus instead on a sensible drug policy that impacts the demand created by an illicit drug market.
Pelosi and Reid realize that this proposal will do is come back to haunt Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections, which historically trend against the president’s party anyway. Many Democrats attributed the flip of the House of Representatives to Republican hands in 1994 to the first “assault weapons” ban. Numerous experts believe that the reason Al Gore could not carry his home state of Tennessee in the 2000 election was his push for broader gun control. Blue Dog Democrats that ran on pro-gun platforms in conservative districts must be rolling their eyes. The rest of the country should do so as well, and send this proposal to the dustbin.
UPDATE: Since I started writing this, the “ban guns for Mexico’s sake” narrative has taken on a drumbeat’s tempo. 60 Minutes did this piece echoing the gun ban crusade, and the Wall Street Journal published this. Expect more of this nonsense.
Why Are We Trying to Get Better at Counterinsurgency?
Chris Preble and I have long wondered why American foreign-policy experts believe that “fixing failed states” is important for U.S. national security. History (and the literature on “state failure”) is replete with dozens of poorly- or ungoverned places that present no threat whatsoever to U.S. national security. “Failedness” and “threatening” generally are not correlated.
Afghanistan, the one failed state which indeed posed a threat to us, was a problem not because of its educational programs or its agricultural methods, but rather because its government was cooperating with a terrorist group that was planning to attack us. In order to head off that threat, we didn’t need girls to be in school, a strong national government, or to crack down on poppy production, although if the Afghans want my opinion I think it’s obviously wiser to have girls in school. (Nay on the other two.) What would have prevented that threat was killing or capturing the people planning it–a result that would have left Afghanistan just as “failed,” but non-threatening. So why, if what we’re trying to do is fight terrorism, have we suddenly gotten so gung-ho about nation building and counterinsurgency?
It’s a puzzle that Andrew Bacevich is scratching his head over in reading COIN guru David Kilcullen’s memoir. It’s worth a read. (Your only known alternative for insights like these and projections as to what the future holds for U.S. foreign policy in this regard is to come to Chicago to attend Chris’s and my talk at the Midwest Political Science Association convention April 2.) In lieu of that, give Bacevich a read:
According to a currently fashionable view, the chief operative lesson of the Iraq War is that counterinsurgency works, with U.S. forces having now mastered the best practices required to prevail in conflicts of this nature. Those who adhere to this view expect the Long War to bring more such challenges, with the neglected Afghan conflict even now presenting itself as next in line. Given this prospect, they want the Pentagon to gear itself up for a succession of such trials, enshrining counterinsurgency as the preferred American way of war in place of discredited concepts like “shock and awe.” Doing so will have large implications for how defense dollars are distributed among the various armed services and for how U.S. forces are trained, equipped and configured. Ask yourself how many fighter-bombers or nuclear submarines it takes to establish an effective government presence in each of Afghanistan’s 40,020 villages and you get the gist of what this might imply.
Yet given the costs of Iraq—now second only to World War II as the most expensive war in all U.S. history—and given the way previous efforts to pacify the Afghan countryside have fared, how much should we expect to spend in redeeming Afghanistan’s forty thousand villages? Having completed that task five or ten years hence, how many other villages in Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Egypt will require similar ministrations? And how many more accidental guerrillas will we inadvertently create along the way?
Kilcullen the apostate knows full well that an approach that hinges on wholesale societal transformation makes no sense. The consummate counterinsurgency professional understands that the application of technique, however skillful, will not suffice to salvage the Long War. Yet as someone deeply invested in that conflict, he cannot bring himself to acknowledge the conclusion to which his own analysis points: the very concept of waging a Long War as the antidote to Islamism is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed.
If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda’s game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?
When it comes to dealing with Islamism, containment rather than transformation should provide the cornerstone of U.S. (and Western) strategy. Ours is the far stronger hand. The jihadist project is entirely negative. Apart from offering an outlet for anger and resentment, Osama bin Laden and others of his ilk have nothing on offer. Time is our ally. With time, our adversary will wither and die—unless through our own folly we choose to destroy ourselves first.
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