Archive for March, 2011
Help Break My Common Curriculum Fever
Over at Flypaper, Chester Finn suggests that people like me are either crazy or on the verge of it for fearing that the Shanker Institute’s “common content” manifesto might very well be another step toward federal control of American education.
“Over in the more feverish corners of the blogosphere, and sometimes even in saner locales,” he writes, ”the Shanker Institute’s call for ‘common content’ curriculum to accompany the Common Core standards has triggered a panic attack.”
Now, I wouldn’t say “panic attack.” To panic is to “be overcome by a sudden fear,” but I’ve been watching the move toward federal curriculum control for some time. Back in 2008 many of the groups behind the Common Core called for Washington to “incentivize” adoption of national standards. In 2009, the Obama administration made adopting common standards critical to compete in the so-called Race to the Top. In 2010, the administration put common standards front-and-center in the accountability piece of its No Child Left Behind reauthorization blueprint. Finally, that same year the U.S. Department of Education chose two consortia to develop national assessments to go with national standards. So when I read the Shanker Institute’s proposal, with its recommendation that the federal government spend taxpayer money to help implement ”purely voluntary” curriculum ”guidelines,” I didn’t panic. I saw the same obvious movement toward federal curriculum control I’d been observing for years.
But maybe I am a bit “feverish.” Maybe I do need to chillax a bit. Thankfully, I know just the thing to help me do that: National-standards fans should pronounce publicly and unequivocally — perhaps issue another manifesto! — that they do not want federal money in any way connected to common standards, and state that they will oppose any effort to “incentivize,” “support,” “cajole,” “threaten,” or do anything else to states or districts to push them to adopt common curricula. Were national-standards champions to do that – you know, just demand that all this be as purely voluntary as they say it is – and I and others like me would no doubt be well on the road to recovery.
Somehow, I don’t expect my forehead to cool off anytime soon.
The Dean of Liberal Interventionism on Libya
Prof. Anne-Marie Slaughter
Anne-Marie Slaughter, recently head of the State Department’s policy planning staff and now having retreated to her post as the dean of the liberal interventionists at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, laments that her former boss’s boss is “fiddling while Libya burns.” Slaughter thinks the United States should implement a no-fly zone over Libya, with the UN’s blessing if we can, or with a coalition of the willing if we must. She takes up five arguments made by skeptics and claims they are all wanting. I want to take up a few of them below.
First, in making the case that intervention is in America’s interest, she writes that “we have a chance to support a real new beginning in the Muslim world—a new beginning of accountable governments that can provide services and opportunities for their citizens in ways that could dramatically decrease support for terrorist groups and violent extremism.”
What does Slaughter know about the Libyan opposition that the rest of us don’t? On what basis is she judging that were they to prevail, they would necessarily institute accountable government that provides services and opportunities for their citizens in ways that could dramatically decrease their support for terrorist groups and violent extremism?
Second, she says that a no-fly zone will accomplish America’s objectives in Libya, despite the critics’ skepticism. Interestingly, Slaughter’s former boss Hillary Clinton said the following in testimony to Congress last week:
I want to remind people that, you know, we had a no-fly zone over Iraq. It did not prevent Saddam Hussein from slaughtering people on the ground, and it did not get him out of office. We had a no-fly zone, and then we had 78 days of bombing in Serbia. It did not get Milosevic out of office. It did not get him out of Kosovo until we put troops on the ground with our allies.
Finally, Slaughter admits that we have no idea what would follow Qaddafi, insisting that this misconstrues the problem: “the choice is between uncertainty and the certainty that if Colonel Qaddafi wins, regimes across the region will conclude that force is the way to answer protests,” which doesn’t really deal with concerns about what may follow Qaddafi.
Curiously, in the very next paragraph, she warns against arming the rebels, calling them “ragged groups of brave volunteers who barely know how to use the weapons they have.” If these are the people who we’re supposed to help overthrow Qaddafi, who is going to run the Libyan state once he goes? Slaughter’s Gang that Can’t Shoot Straight?
I haven’t written much about Libya because there’s so much that I don’t know about the country and I certainly don’t know what is likely to follow Qaddafi. In particular, though, the focus on a no-fly zone is bizarre. If people think that it is in the national interest to be rid of Muammar Qaddafi, then get rid of him, already. Why start with half-measures? Or is it that openly making the case for forcible regime change in Tripoli would weaken public support for the policy? Or would weaken international support? If either of those is true, what does that tell us about the policy?
Given Washington’s track record with this sort of thing, I think we should terribly skeptical about intervening in the Libyan conflict. If the arguments above are the best the interventionists can do, our policy should remain one of no new wars.
NB: People whose judgment I trust far more than Slaughter, like Bob Pape and Mike Desch, are making separate cases for various types of intervention. I am left with lots of unanswered questions after reading their pieces, but it bears noting that it is not just the normal gaggle of neoconservatives and liberal imperialists agitating for American involvement. Still, “it won’t be as bad as Iraq” is a rather soft case for a new policy.
Economic Freedom in India
Today Cato released the Economic Freedom of the States of India 2011 report (co-published with Indicus Analytics and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation) in Washington and New Delhi. India has been growing at high rates since it implemented market reforms in the early 1990s thus notably improving its level of economic freedom.
Yet India is an enormous country with some regions making more progress than others. The new report shows that there is a great diversity among Indian states in terms of economic freedom. Parallel to the findings of the Economic Freedom of the World report, the new study on India finds that states with more economic freedom tend to have better economic performance. As the graph shows, states that have increased their level of economic freedom in the past five years have also tended to grow faster.
Andhra Pradesh, India’s fifth largest state with a population of 84 million people, is the state that most increased its level of economic freedom since 2005, achieving an average annual growth rate of more than 9 percent. My colleague Swami Aiyar, co-author of the report, documents how that government reduced the level of its spending as a share of the economy and has made it easier to do business.
India has a long way to go before establishing a free economy (it ranks 87 out of 141 countries in the economic freedom index), and the current government has been rightly criticized for not pushing forward further necessary reforms of the kind that have led to high growth. We hope this new report will show that Indian leaders at the state level can still do much to improve economic freedom despite the national government’s lacking reform agenda.
Monday Links
- How can we have an “adult conversation” on the budget if the White House won’t release its budget and deficit projections to the public?
- A new guide to India’s uneven spread of economic freedom could help state-level policymakers there improve the welfare of citizens there.
- “When the Cato guy tells you someone is corrupting the idea of HSAs, pay attention.”
- Despite having the bully pulpit, and despite touting opinion polls in favor of reform, the Obama administration finds it necessary to use taxpayer funds to tell Googlers what’s best for them.
- Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has doubled down on the social issues truce–Cato’s John Samples talked about this on Friday on the Cato Daily Podcast:
Tax-consumers Use Our Money to Lobby for More of Our Money
I have two items published today about how governments and other tax-consumers use taxpayer dollars to lobby the government to get more taxpayer dollars. Politico Arena asks, “Will the public warm up to the health care law?” My reply:
I’m amused — at best — that the vast United States government is using my tax dollars to try to persuade voters that the signature legislative accomplishment of the president’s term is actually a good idea. Search Google for the term “Obamacare,” and the first paid link is for healthcare.gov, a government propaganda site for the Affordable Care Act. They’re also using Medicare.gov that way. And roping in poor old Andy Griffith for a TV ad that Factcheck.org says uses “weasel words” to “mislead” seniors.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the administration had a “lot of reeducation to do.” If administration officials were confident that their health care scheme was a good idea, they wouldn’t need to spend tax dollars — in a year when the deficit exceeds $1.5 trillion — to try to sell it to the citizens. And this raises a real question for democratic governance: Are the people supposed to tell policymakers what policies they want, or should policymakers use the people’s money to tell them what they should want?
Meanwhile, at the Britannica Blog I cite other examples of tax-funded lobbying:
Between broadcasts of “Downton Abbey” and “Frontline,” PBS viewers are implored to call their congressman and keep the money flowing. Public radio websites blare “Protect KCRW, Write your representative, write your senator.” Announcements on the radio carry the same message….
My colleague Richard Rahn complains, “Taxpayer dollars are also used to fund international organizations, which, in turn, lobby the U.S. Congress for not only more money for themselves, but also for higher taxes on the American people.”…
The Hill newspaper reported in 2009, “Auto companies and eight of the country’s biggest banks that received tens of billions of dollars in federal bailout money spent more than $20 million on lobbying Washington lawmakers in the first half of this year.” Later in the year the Huffington Post found, “Twenty-five top recipients of government bailout funds spent more than $71 million on lobbying in the year since they were rescued.”
And I ask:
Lobbying is constitutionally protected. The First Amendment guarantees not just freedom of speech and of the press but also “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” But does that mean the government itself has a right to petition itself for a piece of the pie?
Mitch Daniels and ObamaCare, Round Two
In a March 4 article for National Review Online titled, “Mitch Daniels’s Obamacare Problem,” I explain how Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) is undermining the effort to repeal ObamaCare, and how he might do even more damage to that movement as the Republican nominee for president. My article came under fire from Daniels’ policy director Lawren Mills (in the comments section of my article), Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, and Bob Goldberg of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.
Today, NRO runs my response. An excerpt:
In brief, the trio believes that Daniels’s expansion of government-run health care is a conservative triumph. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation…
Daniels has an ObamaCare problem that could hurt the repeal movement if he doesn’t deal with it. Turner is creating more ObamaCare problems. This isn’t the first time conservatives have danced with the devil on health-care questions (see Massachusetts), but with health-care freedom now at its moment of maximum peril, that needs to stop. It will probably, however, take more than just the usual voices of protest to stop it. Tea Party and traditional conservative groups should perhaps spend less time attacking congressional Republicans over relatively minor tactical disagreements, and more time educating the governors, state legislators, and (yes) policy wonks who are actively implementing ObamaCare in their own backyards.
I’ll be speaking tonight at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by the Galen Institute (among others).
Mitch Daniels and That Social Issues ‘Truce’
Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is surprisingly alone as a conservative beating up on Gov. Mitch Daniels this week for his reiterated call for a “truce” on social issues while the country confronts the “new Red Menace” of deficits and debt. The Post‘s “Fix” reports the latest:
In a new interview for the online television program “Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson“, Daniels expands on the idea he first laid out in a profile for the Weekly Standard that economic issues — and the debt in particular — should take precedence over social issues.
“If you don’t believe that the American public is mortally threatened — as I do — by this one overriding problem we have built for ourselves, then of course I’m wrong,” Daniels told Robinson in an excerpt of the interview, which is set to air on Monday. “All I was saying was, we’re going to need to unify all kinds of people, and we’re going — freedom is going — to need every friend it can get.”
The NBC-Wall Street Journal poll finds that Republican voters like the idea of focusing on fiscal issues.
Meanwhile, look at the letters in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in response to the article “Americans Don’t Want a ‘Truce’ on Social Issues” by Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention. Every one of them defends Daniels, in language like this:
“Man cannot live on bread alone, but man cannot live if the monetary and fiscal structure of the nation collapses on top of him.”
“Mr. Land’s statement that, ‘Most social conservatives are also fiscal conservatives’ did not seem to be in effect during the George W. Bush administration and the Republican Congress. Those social conservatives significantly increased the size of our government and our debt.”
“What Mr. Land fails to understand is that most fiscal conservatives in the 50 states are social moderates.”
“I congratulate Gov. Daniels for having the courage to acknowledge that there is only so much government can do—a welcome confession to Christians who believe that absolute certainty in one’s own correctness is less an expression of profound faith than human hubris.”
On Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast, John Samples discusses Mitch Daniels and the changing politics of social issues.
Pielke’s Problem
I generally admire the work of Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist in the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. His new book on climate change is refreshingly honest and non-ideological, if a bit overly technophilic. His broader work offers the important insight that science alone cannot direct public policy, but rather it can only lay out possible results of different policy choices.
Given the quality of his work, I was disappointed by Pielke’s op-ed in today’s NYT defending Congress’s legislated obsolescence of the incandescent light bulb. He argues that government standard-setting is an important contribution to human welfare, and the light bulb standard is just part of that standard-setting (though he does suggest some minor policy tweaks to allow limited future availability of incandescents).
To justify his argument, Pielke points out the great benefit of government-established standard measures, as well as quality standards:
Indeed, [in the United States of the late 19th century] the lack of standards for everything from weights and measures to electricity — even the gallon, for example, had eight definitions — threatened to overwhelm industry and consumers with a confusing array of incompatible choices.
This wasn’t the case everywhere. Germany’s standards agency, established in 1887, was busy setting rules for everything from the content of dyes to the process for making porcelain; other European countries soon followed suit. Higher-quality products, in turn, helped the growth in Germany’s trade exceed that of the United States in the 1890s.
America finally got its act together in 1894, when Congress standardized the meaning of what are today common scientific measures, including the ohm, the volt, the watt and the henry, in line with international metrics. And, in 1901, the United States became the last major economic power to establish an agency to set technological standards.
Alas, this argument doesn’t support Pielke’s light bulb standard.
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
- A new Cato video puts $61 billion in spending cuts in perspective.
- Republicans and Democrats are arguing over the 17 percent of the federal budget known as nondefense discretionary spending. We take a look at what constitutes that spending.
- Merely capping federal spending growth at 3 percent a year would get the budget under control without having to raise taxes.
- A look at what has caused the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s budget to boom.
- Alleged devotees of a more limited government often waste their time on quixotic moral crusades to “make government more efficient.” In doing so, they’re really just playing into the hands of those that want big government. They’re also helping lead citizens to believe that our budget problems can be solved with just a little house cleaning.
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NPR — A New Target for Harkin?
Secret recordings apparently revealing rampant dirty dealing. Big headlines. Taxpayer dollars wrapped up in it all. Surely all this ugliness — even if it turns out that the reality isn’t nearly as bad as inital reports make it sound — is coming from the favorite target of Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), evil for-profit colleges!
Nope. It’s National Public Radio. And I assume Harkin and his pals will give NPR the exact same over-the-coals treatment they’ve been giving for-profit schools.
OK, I’m probably not able to assume that at all — but I should be.
Norquist Is Right, Coburn Is Wrong: Tax Increases Undermine Good Fiscal Policy
There’s a significant debate now taking place in Washington — largely behind closed doors, but sometimes covered by the media — on whether fiscal conservatives should maintain a rigid no-tax-increase position. One side of the debate features Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, which is the organization that maintains the no-tax-increase pledge. The other side features Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who is part of a small group of GOP senators who might be willing to increase the tax burden as part of a deal that supposedly reduces deficits.
I’m a huge fan of Senator Coburn, who was in favor of cutting wasteful spending before it became fashionable. His office, for instance, releases a “Pork Report” every couple of days. You shouldn’t read it if you have high blood pressure, because it will confirm (and reconfirm, and reconfirm, ad nauseum) your worst fears about tax dollars getting wasted.
Nonetheless, I’m on Grover’s side on this tax debate, for two reasons.
First, we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem or a deficit/debt problem. Red ink is undesirable, to be sure, but it is a symptom of the underlying problem of a government that is too big and spending too much.
But don’t believe me. Here is a chart from the House Budget Committee showing long-run projections for spending and revenues over the next 70 years. As you can see, the long-run fiscal shortfall is completely caused by higher spending. In other words, 100 percent of red ink is due to government spending. So why put taxes on the table?
The Current Wisdom: Overplaying the Human Contribution to Recent Weather Extremes
The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
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The recent publication of two articles in Nature magazine proclaiming a link to rainfall extremes (and flooding) to global warming, added to the heat in Russia and the floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2010, and the back-to-back cold and snowy winters in the eastern U.S. and western Europe, have gotten a lot of public attention. This includes a recent hearing in the House of Representatives, despite its Republican majority. Tying weather extremes to global warming, or using them as “proof” that warming doesn’t exist (see: snowstorms), is a popular rhetorical flourish by politicos of all stripes.
The hearing struck many as quite odd, inasmuch as it is much clearer than apocalyptic global warming that the House is going to pass meaningless legislation commanding the EPA to cease and desist from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. “Meaningless” means that it surely will not become law. Even on the long-shot probability that it passes the Senate, the President will surely veto, and there are nowhere near enough votes to override such an action.
Perhaps “wolf!” has been cried yet again. A string of soon-to-be-published papers in the scientific literature finds that despite all hue and cry about global warming and recent extreme weather events, natural climate variability is to blame.
Where to start? How about last summer’s Russian heat wave?
The Russian heat wave (and to some degree the floods in Pakistan) have been linked to the same large-scale, stationary weather system, called an atmospheric “blocking” pattern. When the atmosphere is “blocked” it means that it stays in the same configuration for period of several weeks (or more) and keeps delivering the same weather to the same area for what can seem like an eternity to people in the way. Capitalizing on the misery in Russia and Pakistan, atmospheric blocking was added to the list of things that were supposed to be “consistent with” anthropogenically stimulated global warming which already, of course included heat waves and floods. And thus the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 became part of global warming lore.
But then a funny thing happened – scientists with a working knowledge of atmospheric dynamics started to review the situation and found scant evidence for global warming.
The first chink in the armor came back in the fall of 2010, when scientists from the Physical Sciences Division (PSD) of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) presented the results of their preliminary investigation on the web , and concluded that “[d]espite this strong evidence for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave.”
The PSD folks have now followed this up with a new peer-reviewed article in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that rejects the global warming explanation. The paper is titled “Was There a Basis for Anticipating the 2010 Russian Heat Wave?” Turns out that there wasn’t.
To prove this, the research team, led by PSD’s Randall Dole, first reviewed the observed temperature history of the region affected by the heat wave (western Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Baltic nations). To start, they looked at the recent antecedent conditions: “Despite record warm globally-averaged surface temperatures over the first six months of 2010, Moscow experienced an unusually cold winter and a relatively mild but variable spring, providing no hint of the record heat yet to come.” Nothing there.
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