Archive for April, 2009
The War in Afghanistan Is about to Turn Nastier
While Iraq’s security situation has been improving–though the possibility of revived sectarian violence remains all too real–the conflict in Afghanistan has been worsening. The challenge for allied (which means mostly American) forces is obvious, which is why the Obama Administration is sending more troops.
But the administration risks wrecking the entire enterprise by turning American forces into drug warriors.
American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.
The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. The additional troops, the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to reverse the course of the seven-year war, will roughly double the number already in southern Afghanistan. The troops already fighting there are universally seen as overwhelmed. In many cases, the Americans will be pushing into areas where few or no troops have been before.
Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.
“Opium is their financial engine,” said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. “That is why we think he will fight for these areas.”
The Americans say that their main goal this summer will be to provide security for the Afghan population, and thereby isolate the insurgents.
But because the opium is tilled in heavily populated areas, and because the Taliban are spread among the people, the Americans say they will have to break the group’s hold on poppy cultivation to be successful.
No one here thinks that is going to be easy.
Indeed.
The basic problem is that opium–and cannabis, of which Afghanistan is also the world’s largest producer–funds not only the Taliban, but also warlords who back the Karzai government and, most important, the Afghan people. The common estimate is that drugs provide one-third of Afghanistan’s economic output and benefit a comparable proportion of the population. Making war on opium inevitably means making war on the Afghan people.
The Politics of Budget-Cutting
In Washington, the symbolic almost always trumps the substantive. Thus, legislators complain, for good reason, about pork and earmarks, which ran about $35 billion at their maximum, and ignore entitlements, which entail some $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
So it is with President Obama. He continues the endless bailouts, which cumulatively now run around $13 trillion. He proposed a $3.6 trillion budget and will leave us with a $1.4 trillion deficit next year–and nearly $5 trillion in additional debt on top of the massive deficits already projected over the coming decade. But he asked his Cabinet officers to chop $100 million in administrative expenses.
And he says he doesn’t need a new helicopter. Fiscal responsibility in action.
Alas, the helicopter, while costing billions, isn’t an easy budget target.
Reports the New York Times:
At a Washington conference on fiscal responsibility in February, President Obama tried to set the tone by saying he did not need the new costly presidential helicopters that had been ordered by the Bush administration.
“The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” he said to laughter. On a more serious note, he added, “I think it is an example of the procurement process gone amok. And we’re going to have to fix it.”
But the president is learning that in the world of defense contracting, frugality can be expensive. Some lawmakers and military experts warn that his effort to avoid wasting billions of dollars could end up doing just that.
The administration’s plan to halt the $13 billion helicopter program, announced this month, will leave the government with little to show for the $3.2 billion it has spent since the Bush administration set out to create a futuristic craft that could fend off terrorist attacks and resist the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear blast.
Critics say the Pentagon would also spend at least $200 million in termination fees and perhaps hundreds of millions to extend the life of today’s aging fleet. As a result, several influential lawmakers and defense analysts are now calling for a compromise that would salvage a simpler version of the helicopter that is already being tested.
They say it could be a more palatable alternative in tough economic times than seeking new bids for a more advanced craft, which has proved difficult to develop.
No wonder Washington is known as a place where everything about government is permanent. Once you start spending money on a program, it becomes extremely hard to stop. Part of that is the political dynamic of interest groups, the problem so well dissected by the Public Choice economists. And part of it is legal and procedural. Contracts are let, cancellation fees are due. It’s bad to waste money on a gold-plated helicopter. It seems even worse to waste money developing a gold-plated helicopter, and then getting nothing at all by canceling it.
There is, however, an amazingly simple solution, of which Congress and the president apparently are not aware.
Don’t spend the money in the first place. Eschew new programs. Say no to special interests. Let taxpayers keep more of their own money.
This approach would seem to make sense at any time. But especially today, with the federal government facing a deficit approaching $2 trillion in 2009.
Didn’t Nancy Reagan lecture us to “just say no”? We should invite her back for a return tour of Washington, only she should talk about federal spending this time.
Blogging from the Supreme Court – NAMUDNO v. Holder
I write this from the Bar Members’ line waiting to be let into the Supreme Court courtroom for the final argument of the term.
Today the Court hears Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No.1 (“NAMUDNO”) v. Holder. This is a challenge to the controversial Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires, among other things, any change in election administration in certain states and counties to be “precleared” by the Department of Justice in Washington. This is, of course, a remnant of the Jim Crow era, and southern states’ massive resistance to attempts to enforce the 15th Amendment.
In 1965, Congress included Section 5 — which would otherwise be an unconstitutional infringement on peoples’ right to run their own elections locally — as a temporary remedy to an emergency situation. The section has been amended and extended several times (e.g., to add linguistic minorities, Pacific Islanders, etc.), most recently in 2006. But in this last renewal, Congress, despite introducing more than 15,000 pages into the record, failed to even allege the existence of the type of systemic voting discrimination as existed in the 1960s — because, of course, it doesn’t exist any more, and other parts of the VRA exist to cover specific discriminatory incidents.
Accordingly, a small utility district in Austin, Texas, contests Section 5′s continuing validity (if it cannot escape the section’s clutches via a confusing and little-used “bailout” provision). Specifically, NAMUDNO wants to change the location of its polling station to a public garage (from a less convenient location) — a move that obviously lacks discriminatory intent, and showcases the minutiae that the DOJ now has to micromanage.
Cato legal scholars support NAMUDNO’s challenge because, barring the widespread systemic unconstitutional actions of the Civil Rights Era, Section 5 violates our most basic principles of self-government and federalism, and is emblematic of governmental overreach.
New at Cato
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute.
- Dan Ikenson and Scott Lincicome argue in a new study that restoring the pro-trade consensus must be a top priority for the Obama administration.
- In the DC Examiner, Gene Healy discusses Obama’s first 100 days and argues that he’s massively expanded the power of government in a short period of time.
- In the Asia Times Online, David Isenberg discusses private security contractors in the war in Iraq.
- Watch Patrick J. Michaels discuss energy on CNBC.
- In Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Peter Van Doren discusses the interaction between Congress and regulators on the issue of food safety.
The Global Economy Is Not Immune to Swine Flu
World governments should be careful not to play politics with the Mexican swine flu outbreak. The health consequences should of course be rigorously addressed—but without adding economic consequences, which is what several countries appear poised to do.
Public health scares have a history of seeping into trade policy without anything resembling sufficient consideration of the evidence. Governments in Russia and East Asia are already banning pork exports from Mexico, even though there is zero evidence that they pose a health hazard. It hearkens back to unfounded bans of U.S. beef in recent years by the European Union and South Korea.
If the U.S. government jumps on board, U.S. exports could be targeted for retaliatory trade actions. One quarter of U.S. pork production is exported, as well as billions of dollars of our soybeans used as feed by foreign hog farmers.
Exploiting this crisis could turn what is so far a manageable health problem into an unnecessary trade and diplomatic conflict. Obviously the global economy does not need the extra strain.
How Serious Is U.S. Ed. Productivity Collapse
A commenter at Joanne Jacobs’ edu-blog wonders “how serious this ‘collapse’ is.” I offered the following response:
How serious of a collapse is it? Total k-12 expenditures in this country were about $630 billion two years ago (see Table 25, Digest of Ed Statistics 2008). The efficiency of our education system is less than half what it was in 1971 (i.e., we spend more than twice as much to get the same results — see Table 181, same source).
So if we’d managed to ensure that education productivity just stagnated, we’d be saving over $300 billion EVERY YEAR. If we’d actually seen productivity improvements in education such as we’ve seen in other fields, we’d be saving at least that much money and enjoying higher student achievement at the same time.
My guess is that most people would consider saving $3 trillion per decade and more fully realizing children’s intellectual potential are both very important.
Another commenter observes that spending has of necessity increased due to the combination of rising salaries and a failure to deploy new technologies to lower costs. This is true to a point, but the total employee/student ratio in public schools has also grown dramatically over the same period. A few years ago I calculated that taxpayers would save more than $100 billion annually if the public schools just went back to the employee/student ratio of 1970. And the savings are still massive even if you account for a roughly 10% increase in teachers for expanded special education services.
Ultimately, though, you have to ask WHY public schools have failed to use technology to lower costs as virtually every other field has successfully done. The answer is that doing so is difficult and so won’t happen without the freedom and powerful systemtic incentives to MAKE it happen. The only system of freedoms and incentives that makes productivity growth the norm is the free enterprise system.
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Bloggers from all over are discussing Cato’s research and commentary. Here are a couple we found:
- Stephen Littau wrote about Glenn Greenwald’s paper on drug decriminalization at The Liberty Papers.
- At the U.S News and World Report‘s “Risky Business” blog, Matthew Bandyk discussed Ilya Shapiro’s Supreme Court coverage in the Washington Examiner.
- Net Right Nation editor Adam Bitely has linked to Cato commentary and analysis regularly over the past few months.
- Writing for the Libertarian Party Blog, Donny Ferguson discussed the new Cato study, “Bright Lines and Bailouts: To Bail or Not To Bail, That Is the Question.”
- Tom Jackson just started The Libertarian News Network and has linked to many Cato events and commentaries.
- At the Show-Me Institute Blog, Sarah Brodsky wrote about charter schools, citing a Neal McCluskey’s post about the drawbacks of charter school education programs.
- SWGA Politics blogger Jeff Sexton wrote about airport privatization based on a Cato@Liberty post by Chris Edwards.
Let us know if you’re blogging about Cato by emailing cmoody@cato.org.
You Just Can’t Say That
Let’s get one thing straight: As I’ve noted on numerous occasions, you can’t look just at National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results – especially only between two years – and attribute gains or losses to specific laws or programs. There are simply too many variables at play in education – federal laws, state laws, school choice, child nutrition, teacher quality, parents’ attitudes, the weather – to confidently assert that any one is responsible for changing scores. Indeed, it is possible that nothing government has done has had any effect, and every trend just reflects changing attitudes toward education among students themselves.
And yet, some reporters identify something akin to a god variable anyway, as the Associated Press did in its coverage of the new NAEP long-term-trends report:
The biggest gains came from low-achieving students. That is probably not an accident — the federal No Child Left Behind law and similar state laws have focused on improving the performance of minority and poor children, who struggle the most.
Now, there are a lot of problems with this statement, including that several of the lowest-achieving percentiles by age and subject saw no statistically significant changes in scores between 2004 and 2008; many groups had periods of faster gains before NCLB (though we don’t even have clear before and after-NCLB data points); and NAEP offers no income-based score breakdowns, only the proxy of parents’ education – and that just for 13 and 17-year-olds in mathematics. But the biggest problem is that, all of these factual problems aside, there is no way to ascribe score changes to specific laws or government policies. The data just aren’t there.
Fortunately, most of the coverage of the NAEP report has been pretty reasonable, including from the Washington Post and New York Times. But the AP reaches a lot of people, and that means many Americans are going to get “news” about the latest NAEP findings that is little more than unsupportable conjecture.
First 100 Days: More of the Same
President Obama campaigned on a promise of change. But the first 100 days of his administration have seen a continuation of the Bush administration’s irresponsible fiscal policies: more bailouts, higher spending, and mounting debt.
The president has already signed a tax hike that disproportionately hurts lower-income people, and is seeking additional tax increases to fund a transition to a more centrally-planned, European-styled economy.
Just as previous administrations have done, the president is using the current economic ‘crisis’ to justify further government encroachment upon the private sector. In doing so, dangerous precedents are being set that could have negative repercussions for future economic growth and individual liberty.
In Defense of “Libertarian Crusades”
We in the public interest legal community — especially on the libertarian or conservative side — are used to taking slings and arrows from all quarters. The media doesn’t understand our quaint obsession with following the text of the Constitution. The so-called progressives seethe at our evil defense of property rights and the freedom of contract. Even the business community blanches at our refusal to leave their sacred regulatory protections untouched in our attack on statism.
But what we don’t expect is to see federal judges openly and wantonly question our motives — least of all in an actual opinion. Yet this is precisely what Judge Jacques “Jack” Wiener did last Thursday in dissenting from a Fourth Amendment seizure/Fifth Amendment takings case. The case, Severance v. Patterson, involves a challenge to a Texas law that caused the seizure of beachfront property after Hurricane Rita pushed the vegetation line landward. The purpose of the law, the Open Beaches Act, is to ensure public access to the beach regardless of erosion and other natural land migrations (a.k.a. a “rolling easement”). The Fifth Circuit panel ended up affirming the dismissal of part of the claims and asking the Texas Supreme Court for a ruling on state-law issues implicated in others.
But the legal details aren’t important. What I want to highlight is Wiener’s dissent, which begins with the following “Context” (a section title not commonly found in judicial opinions; see pages 22-23 here):
Although undoubtedly unintentionally, the panel majority today aids and abets the quixotic adventure of a California resident who is here represented by counsel furnished gratis by the Pacific Legal Foundation. (That non-profit’s published mission statement declares that its raison d’être includes “defend[ing] the fundamental human right of private property,” noting that such defense is part of each generation’s obligation to guard “against government encroachment.”) The real alignment between Severance and the Pacific Legal Foundation is not discernable from the record on appeal, but the real object of these Californians’ Cervantian tilting at Texas’s Open Beaches Act (“OBA”) is clearly not to obtain reasonable compensation for a taking of properties either actually or nominally purchased by Severance, but is to eviscerate the OBA, precisely the kind of legislation that, by its own declaration, the Foundation targets. And it matters not whether Ms. Severance’s role in this litigation is genuinely that of the fair Dulcinea whose distress the Foundation cum knight errant would alleviate or, instead, is truly that of squire Sancho Panza assisting the Foundation cum Don Quixote to achieve its goal: Either way, the panel majority’s reversal of the district court (whose rulings against Severance I would affirm) has the unintentional effect of enlisting the federal courts and, via certification, the Supreme Court of Texas, as unwitting foot-soldiers in this thinly veiled Libertarian crusade. It is within this framework that I shall seek to demonstrate how the panel majority misses the mark and why Severance’s action should be dismissed, once and for all, for her lack of standing to assert either a Fifth Amendment takings claim for reasonable compensation (because Severance has had nothing taken by the State) or a Fourth Amendment unreasonable seizure claim (because that which was putatively seized did not belong to Severance at the time; and even if it had, there was nothing unreasonable about the purported seizure).
Apparently in Judge Wiener’s world, it is beyond the pale for an organization to provide pro bono legal services that also advance some larger ideological mission. Somebody tell the NAACP or ACLU — or the Supreme Court for that matter, which invites amicus briefs from just the kinds of groups Wiener excoriates. Cato itself routinely files such briefs, of course, and on several occasions has joined with PLF.
Chief Judge Jones pithily dispatches her colleague’s grandiloquence in the majority’s first footnote (see bottom of page 2 here):
Notwithstanding the hyperbolic and unsupported assertions in Part I of the dissent (“Context”), the judges of the court endeavor not to decide appeals based on who the litigants are, who their lawyers are, or what we may believe their motives to be. Whether that rule is observed in light of Part I of the dissent, however, the reader must determine.
And I won’t even get into Wiener’s mixed metaphors and schoolboy Latin – he meant qua, not cum – other than to say “hit the road, Jack.”
(Full disclosure: I clerked on the Fifth Circuit and am familiar with Wiener’s squishy, unreliable jurisprudence; he’s very nice in person, but something happens in chambers — left-wing clerks? — that detracts from his effectiveness. One caveat: Wiener is a great friend of the taxpayer; the IRS does not win in his courtroom.)
For commentary from the Volokh Conspiracy, see here. For PLF’s press release, see here. Hat tip: Cato adjunct scholar Tim Sandefur (whose day job is with PLF, though he did not work on this case).
Barbarians Inside the Gate
I watched the congressional conference committee on the budget yesterday on CSPAN, and it seemed like the final fall and sacking of Rome. Two of the remaining generals defending fiscal sanity, Reps. Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling, pled with the invading barbarians to limit their fiscal pillaging and warned that the Treasury was empty. But the barbarians, in the form of Rep. Rosa DeLauro and others, had visions of spreading the empire’s gold widely, and were not deterred by talk of damage to future generations.
The barbarians are inside the fiscal gate. The gate is the 60-vote margin usually required for big, new spending programs to pass in the Senate. Ryan and Hensarling were right that the Democrat budget plan could be a major turning point in the nation’s fiscal history. The “reconcilation” process approved by the Democrats lowers the bill passage margin in the Senate to a simple majority. The procedure was put in place in the 1970s to control spending and reduce budget deficits. But the Democrats may try to use that budget-restraint mechanism for the opposite — to pass a massive new health care subsidy program.
Ryan and Hensarling have proposed an alternate fiscal vision, but their troops have left the field, and they will need to rebuild their armies before they can put that vision in place.
Support For Choice in SC Probably Even Higher Than Reported
I just wanted to follow up on a question Andrew Coulson raised last week about a poll showing a plurality of South Carolina African Americans in support of school choice. Andrew notes:
A new poll released today reveals that 43 percent of African Americans in South Carolina support private school choice while only 40 percent oppose it. What’s even more interesting, however, is that 53 percent said that “giving parents a tax credit or scholarship to choose the best school for their children — public or private — would improve the state’s dismal high school graduation rate.”
So an additional 10 percent of respondents think the program will work but don’t currently support it. Why? Perhaps because many black religious and political leaders in South Carolina have criticized the concept for years.
Certainly opposition from black leadership has probably softened support, but I don’t think that explains the difference in support between the first and subsequent questions. As Andrew notes, the other results peg pro-choice responses consistently at 53 percent.
Here’s the question in full: “Should parents, grandparents or custodial relatives be allowed to receive state scholarships for their children to go to private school if they feel the public school is not meeting their children’s needs?”
First, the description of the tax credit program instead implies a state voucher program. This is bad wording, but probably doesn’t drop support since black support for vouchers tends to be equal or higher than support for credits.
I think the real problem here is the phrase phrase “state scholarships.” This sounds to me like there very well could be conditions, such as academic merit, placed on who is eligible for the “state scholarships.” There are need-based and merit-based scholarships, but they are typically not available to all, and the question is at the very least confusing. This ambiguity, with the suggestion of limited availability, might have softened support/increased undecideds.
In the context of consistent 53 percent support on other, better-worded choice-related questions, I think we can reasonably conclude that poor question wording on the first question likely dropped support for school choice about 10 points.
We really need to be careful with public policy questions . . . small changes can have a serious impact on the results.
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