Archive for April, 2009
I Swear I’m Not Making This Up
From today’s Washington Post:
In another sign that the Department of Agriculture is embracing sustainable food, the agency today will unveil expanded plans for a People’s Garden that will include the entire six-acre grounds of the Whitten Building, the department’s neoclassic marble headquarters on the Mall.
The plans, to be announced at the agency’s Earth Day celebrations, include a 1,300-square-foot organic vegetable garden — slightly larger than the one at the White House — as well as ornamental flower gardens and bioswales, or mini-wetlands designed to reduce pollution and surface water runoff.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find out exactly what a “bioswale” is, and why I should pay for one in our new “People’s Garden.”
Arne Duncan Wins the Chutzpa Award . . .
Arne Duncan has an op-ed in the WSJ today headlined, “School Reform Means Doing What’s Best for Kids: Let’s have an honest assessment of charter schools.”
So how about an honest assessment of how the DC voucher program is doing?
I guess I won’t hold my breath, since Duncan already neglected to bring the findings to light during the debate in Congress and then he tried to bury and spin away the positive results when they did come out. And then he needlessly prevented 200 poor kids from enjoying good schools for at least next year.
President Obama and Duncan’s unwillingness to address the facts show that they have been hypocritical and dishonest on education.
I can’t say it any better than Juan Williams did:
By going along with Secretary Duncan’s plan to hollow out the D.C. voucher program this president, who has spoken so passionately about the importance of education, is playing rank politics with the education of poor children. It is an outrage . . .
This reckless dismantling of the D.C. voucher program does not bode well for arguments to come about standards in the effort to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. It does not speak well of the promise of President Obama to be the “Education President,’ who once seemed primed to stand up for all children who want to learn and especially minority children.
And its time for all of us to get outraged about this sin against our children.
What Is a “Fifth Column” Anyway?
@RadleyBalko points to a Washington Examiner column in which Jim Kouri, Vice President and Public Information Officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, says that Obama administration policy changes with regard to the “global war on terrorism” allow “suspected Fifth Column-type groups . . . to make symbolic demands on agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.” He says the Council on American-Islamic Relations has called on the FBI to confirm or deny that a number of Long Island mosques are under law enforcement surveillance.
It’s hard to find the answer to the first question this raises: “So what?” Kouri does not make the case he implies: that something sinister lurks because this group, having a suspicion of something they see as wrongdoing, asks the agency in question whether it’s happening or not.
But the piece raised another question for me: “What’s a ‘Fifth Column,’ anyway?” The expression has been around forever, but what does it really mean?
Ahead of the Siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War, a general under Francisco Franco claimed that he would take the city with the four columns of troops under his command and a “fifth column” of nationalist sympathizers inside the city.
The city never fell to the nationalists, but fear of this “fifth column” caused the Republican government under Francisco Caballero to abandon Madrid for Valencia and it led to a massacre of nationalist prisoners in Madrid during the ensuing battle.
So a “fifth column” is not so much an insidious group of spies or traitors as it is the threat of such a group which causes the incumbent power to miscalculate and overreact. That doesn’t clear up what Kouri is trying to get across, but it does have the air of unintended confession.
9th Circuit Imitates Marcel Marceau
Last month, I warned that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals would soon be handing the school choice movement a legal setback. Well, it’s here.
As expected, the 9th Circuit has reinstated a lower court challenge to Arizona’s scholarship donation tax credit program. The program allows taxpayers to contribute to non-profit Scholarship Tuition Organizations (STOs) that provide financial assistance to families choosing private schools. The taxpayers can then claim a dollar for dollar credit for their donation.
While this ruling leaves the program intact for the time being, it would almost surely require the tax credit program to be amended if it is allowed to stand. Fortunately, as I noted in my earlier post, the 9th Circuit is overturned as often as a caber at the Highland Games. Its ruling is unlikely to stand if appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
At issue is the fact that taxpayers are free to choose the STOs to which they donate their money, and private STOs are free to set criteria for the schools at which their scholarships can be redeemed. There are thus some STOs that offer scholarships only to religious schools. This is essentially the same situation that obtains when taxpayers claim deductions for contributions to non-profit charities. The charities can legally be religious or secular, and they can infuse the services they offer with religion, or not, as they choose. The whole thing is constitutional because it is the taxpayers, not the government, that decides which charity gets their funds. This is all settled law.
To get around the fact that the legal precedents were against it, the 9th Circuit decided to do a compelling impression of Marcel Marceau, pretending to hem itself into an invisible legal box. Specifically, the 9th Circuit decided to pretend that the constitutional restrictions limiting government expenditures (as in school voucher programs) also apply to the private funds at issue under tax credit programs.
That box, of course, does not exist. No government money is spent under the tax credit program, and the tax credits are themselves available on an entirely religiously neutral basis, in scrupulous conformance with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
So here’s my next legal prediction: the constitutionality of the Arizona education tax credit program will ultimately be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and opponents of educational freedom will have to resort to some new ploy in their efforts to herd American families back onto the public school plantation.
New at Cato
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here.
- “Bright Lines and Bailouts: To Bail or Not To Bail, That Is the Question”: Vern McKinley and Gary Gegenheimer have a new Policy Analysis that discusses the failure of bank bailouts.
- In a new piece at National Interest (Online), Doug Bandow offers a new strategy for dealing with Kim Jong Il.
- Nat Hentoff reports on Obama’s broken promises of transparency in the Washington Times.
- Make no mistake: “Of course it was torture,” says Gene Healy in this week’s Examiner column.
- In Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, foreign policy analyst Benjamin Friedman discusses the record of Defense Secretary Robert Gates under Obama.
NEA Asks President to Nationalize Industries
The NEA demands that “a dying laissez faire must be destroyed,” and calls on the president to nationalize the credit agencies, utilities and major industries (see AP story at right), and we hear hardly a peep from the punditocracy. Strange.
Well, okay, I’m not actually surprised. This is a real story that actually ran on March 1st… 1934. I tweaked the image to refer to president Obama rather than FDR.
It’s taken three quarters of a century, but the NEA’s plan to nationalize the credit agencies and major industries seems to have finally gotten under way, particularly given the recent assertion of federal control over GM.
One advantage of the delay is that we now have generations of experience with another state-run industry, education, as a guide for what to expect from the latest state takeovers.
And since the president (Obama, not FDR) is starting with GM, it seems only fitting to take a look at the public schools of Detroit. Rather than give you the typical statistical wonkery, though, I thought I’d point readers to this compelling photo essay.
After flipping through it, do you think the Detroit auto industry would have worked better over these past 75 years if it had been run like the Detroit public schools?
Cato on CNBC
Health care, Jonathan Cohn, and me. All in one place on CNBC at 8pm tonight.
UPDATE: Here’s the video.
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Here’s a round-up of bloggers who are writing about Cato research and commentary:
- National Review‘s Mark Hemingway quoted Ilya Shapiro about the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal’s recent decision on gun laws. He also posted David Boaz’s reaction to the New York Times blog that stated that Cato has been “remarkably silent on bailouts.”
- QandO‘s Michael Wade offered his own thoughts on the New York Times blogger who said Cato’s voice against bailouts has not met her “expectations of adequate noise.”
- Blogging about high-speed rail, The Reason Foundation’s Samuel Staley cited Randal O’Toole’s study, High-Speed Rail: The Wrong Road for America.
- At The New Republic’s “The Plank” blog, James Kirchick discussed last week’s Cato event, “Left Turn? South Africa after the Election.”
- The Atlantic‘s Clive Crook reviewed the new Cato book, The Beautiful Tree, which explains how private education efforts are empowering children in Third World nations.
- Blogging on Tax Day, Jacob Grier cited Charlotte Twight’s essay in Cato Journal on the history of income tax withholding in the United States.
One Small Step for Private Airports
The New York Times reports that the nation’s only privately financed commercial airport is set to open in Branson, Missouri.
Unlike government transportation projects such as the Big Dig, this private project has gone well so far: “‘I think it’s some kind of record,’ Jeff Bourk, executive director of the airport, said of the speed of the construction. ‘On other projects I’ve been involved in, there’s a lot more red tape.’”
On the broader issue of America’s airports, the Times notes:
Every one of the 552 airports providing commercial air service in the United States receives some kind of federal money, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, and these airports are owned by public entities, municipalities, transportation districts or airport authorities.
In airports, America embraces socialism, while free enterprise has taken hold abroad. Many major cities around the world have privatized their airports in recent decades, as I discuss here.
The growth in private airports faces a number of hurdles in America. One problem is that government airports receive federal, state, and local subsidies, which makes it hard for private companies to compete. Another problem is the tax-deductibility of state/local (“muni”) bonds, which gives government facilities a financing advantage over private projects.
Thus, two reforms are obvious: end all federal subsidies for state/local infrastructure and repeal the tax deductibility of muni bonds. (Note that the Branson airport found an interesting way around the second problem).
Over time, these two steps would likely create a giant leap forward for privatized infrastructure in America.
Hat tip: Harrison Moar.
Why President Obama Won’t Save Urban Catholic Schools
In today’s Washington Post, Checker Finn and Andy Smarick ask President Obama to save the nation’s vanishing urban Catholic schools. Their commentary does a good job of explaining why he might want to do that: Catholic schools are typically bastions of excellence in otherwise educationally blighted inner-city areas. Economist Derek Neal has shown that black children attending these schools are 26 percentage points more likely to finish high school, and twice as likely to graduate from college, than similar students attending urban public schools.
Finn and Smarick also suggest ways that president Obama could bring the option of private schooling, including Catholic schools, within reach of all families — supporting the spread of state tax credit and scholarship programs around the country, for instance.
What Finn and Smarick don’t do is explain why the president will continue to ignore the evidence and their plea, instead letting the educational prospects of inner-city children erode even further. Three possible explanations occur to me:
- The president is unfamiliar with the evidence on the superiority of private and especially urban Catholic schools
- He thinks that his administration will succeed in dramatically improving public schools all over the country, despite the failure of all his predecessors’ efforts
- He thinks that making it easier for poor parents to choose private schools would hurt him politically
Personally, I don’t believe the first explanation. I can believe the second, but wish I couldn’t (wouldn’t it be nice to have a realist in the Oval Office)? And I can certainly believe the third, but if so, the president simply hasn’t done the political math.
Coming out strongly in favor of public and private school choice at the state level would win Barack Obama substantial new support from independent and moderate swing voters who seem to have been drifting away from him, while costing him very little from his base. The NEA might reduce its level of support, but they’re not going to flip and back Republicans. And few if any Democratic voters would switch party allegiance over a Democratic president’s desire to help poor kids with the most effective policies.
Senate Negotiates REAL ID Revival Bill with Anti-Immigrant Activists
Anti-immigrant groups have done nothing but lead Republicans off the electoral cliff, but they are very aggressive and vociferous. This has evidently convinced Senate staff to negotiate with them about reviving the moribund REAL ID Act. REAL ID lobbyist Janice Kephart reports the state of play on the Center for Immigration Studies blog.
Interestingly, the National Conference of State Legislatures may join the National Governors Association in seeking to sell state authority over licensing and identification policy to the federal government, exchanging state power for the right to beg for federal funds evermore.
I wrote a little bit in a previous post about the dynamics at play when a group that supposedly represents state interests in Washington, D.C. begins to represent Washington, D.C.’s interests to states.
Does Big Government Breed Corruption and Sleaze?
Washington is riddled with both legal and illegal corruption, but why?
Perhaps it is because government is too big and has too much power. The federal budget redistributes $3.5 trillion through more than 1,800 subsidy programs. The regulatory burden is $1.2 trillion and there have been 51,000 new regulations since 1995. And there are more than 70,000 pages of tax law and regulations.
These are the reasons why Washington is a hornet’s nest of deal-making, influence-peddling, and back-scratching.
In this new video, produced by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, I argue that reducing the size and scope of government is the only effective way to control Washington sleaze.
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