Archive for August, 2011
From Avoiding the National Curriculum Debate, to Smothering It, Just When We Need It Most
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush cares about education. He made major education reforms in the Sunshine State, including many centered on private school choice. He has established the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and dedicates much of his time to education reform. Unfortunately, when it comes to national curriculum standards, it seems his genuine caring has led him to avoid—and now attempt to quash—critical debate on both the dubious merits of national standards, and the huge threats to federalism posed by Washington driving the standards train.
As I’ve complained on numerous occasions, it’s clear that supporters of national standards have employed a stealth strategy to get their way: back-room drafting of standards, content-free Language Arts, and, especially, employing the maddening mantra that national standardization is “state-led and voluntary.” Sadly, you can now add quashing debate to that, even among conservatives and libertarians with longstanding and crucial federalism and efficacy concerns. And according to Education Week, it appears that Jeb Bush—whose foundation just a couple of years ago invited me to participate in a panel discussion on national standards—is taking point on the smothering strategy:
In this space, we’ve been telling you about a few efforts in state legislatures to complicate adoption or implementation of common standards … A move that had the potential to involve many states unfolded last week in New Orleans, but was stopped in its tracks. And none other than former Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush, revered by many conservatives, was involved in stopping it.
The Education Week report links to a letter that Mr. Bush sent to a subcommittee of the American Legislative Exchange Council that was slated to simply take up discussion of model legislation opposing national standards. Mr. Bush urged members to table the proposal. In other words, he urged them to not even talk about it, because apparently even considering that the Common Core might have dangerous downsides should be avoided, even among people who believe in individualism and liberty.
Unfortunately, quashing debate arguably wasn’t the worst aspect of Mr. Bush’s letter. No, that was the fundamentally flawed pretenses he offered for why Common Core should be embraced without debate.
What Shift Right?
Liz Marlantes of the Christian Science Monitor joins other pundits in proclaiming “America’s Big Shift Right” in politics and governance. “In Washington today, when it comes to the size of government, the debate isn’t over whether to cut spending, but by how much,” she writes. That’s true, but it’s because the federal budget has doubled in just 10 years, with half the increase coming in the past three. Politics may be more conservative, but government is still getting bigger.
Some of Marlantes’s arguments are mystifying: “Instead of coming on the heels of a great liberal expansion of government, today’s shift comes after three decades of the unraveling of elements of the social safety net.” Really? The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2007 that three major “safety net” programs accounted for 45 percent of the federal budget. In this chart the red line represents “social safety net” programs:
Marlantes quotes a distinguished historian on the same point:
“The New Deal programs have been weakened and destroyed over decades, and there are just many fewer elements in the safety net,” says Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia University and author of “Liberalism and its Discontents.”
But what is he talking about? Social Security is bigger than ever, and we’ve added Medicare, Medicaid, the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, and food stamps. Farm subsidies are still in business, in far different economic conditions from those that allegedly required the creation of price supports and other payments.
Two years ago, in a review of two books on the rise of conservatism, Brian Doherty noted:
the right has shown an amazing ability to fool almost everyone, from average voters to academic historians like Schneider and Phillips-Fein, into believing that the conservative movement has won key victories and substantially achieved its most important goals….
And the free market? Under both Democrats and Republicans, the general direction of the U.S. government has been toward more spending, more taxing, and more federal control, even if Reagan did succeed in dramatically lowering the highest marginal tax rates. Otherwise smart observers such as Schneider and Phillips-Fein miss these facts, conflating the success of the Republican Party, as it comes and goes, with the success of conservative ideas.
Phillips-Fein expresses this confusion about right-wing success most baldly, declaring out of nowhere, to buttress the significance of her topic, that “the New Deal has been turned back.” Except for court packing and the National Recovery Administration, every significant practice, and certainly every big idea, behind the New Deal has only gotten stronger in the last 60 years.
Marlantes seems to make the same mistake. She notes that the percentage of self-described conservatives has risen in the Gallup Poll. But considering how much the federal budget has increased, the increase in conservative sentiment is pretty modest. Shouldn’t people who call themselves “moderates” when the federal budget is $2 trillion (about 2002) be “conservatives” now that it’s approaching $4 trillion? And yet most of them don’t.
By the way, Marlantes does note that “generational changes are clearly pushing public opinion to the left when it comes to certain moral and cultural issues, most notably gay rights,” a point that I’ve also made.
A shift to the right? In politics, maybe. In the actual size of government, no.
Want an Amateur Doing Your Splenectomy?
You’re on the operating table, trying to remain calm. The anesthetist holds the mask over your face with her left hand, while adjusting the flow of gasses with her right. Just before you slip under, she says: “Your splenectomy will be performed by Dr. Killdare, who received his degree in Surgery Appreciation from MSU. He’s never actually operated on anyone, but he knows everything there is to know about the way surgeons think about surgery.”
According to software architect and former Department of Education adviser Ze’ev Wurman, that’s essentially the way the national “Common Core” standards treat science:
This framework does not expect our students to be able to do any science, or to be able to solve any science problem. [It] simply teaches our students science appreciation…. It expects our students to become good consumers of science and technology, rather than prepare them to be the discoverers of science and creators of technology.
After reading through the document (twice), Wurman was deeply distressed to discover only a single mention of algebra, a single equation, and no mention of calculus or trigonometry. Most people would not want to be cut open by someone who has only studied Surgery Appreciation. Similarly, a student who has only learned to appreciate science, rather than to actually do it, is not well equipped for a career in research or engineering.
This is one of the utterly obvious problems with homogenizing educational standards at the national level: get them wrong, and you ruin education from sea to shining sea.
The other utterly obvious problem is that children learn different subjects at different paces. Some are ready to study algebra in elementary school, while others might have to wait for high school. And, as demonstrated by Khan Academy and others, it is easy to allow each child to learn as fast as they are able.
The fact that many intelligent people have nevertheless convinced themselves that uniform national standards tied to age/grade are a good idea bears witness to the impressive human capacity for self-deception.
Yes, math is the same from Connecticut and Colorado (as national standards advocates are so eager to point out), but children vary dramatically in their aptitudes and interests even within a single family. In generations to come, people will marvel at our inanity for plunking every student down on the same conveyor belt moving through every subject at a pace determined by their age. Current efforts to elevate this travesty from the state to the federal level, through national standards, will no doubt elicit the fiercest scorn and most profound incomprehension.
Responding to the Downgrade
Cato Senior Fellow Jagadeesh Gokhale argues today that S&P has left little doubt that credit rating agencies’ credibility has suffered because of the recent downgrade of U.S. Treasuries. He argues that the response from the President leaves much to be desired. On the tax increases proposed by the President today to cover entitlement spending, he says
It’s basically impossible to tax our way out of this commitment. If we try to impose huge taxes on the backs of workers and younger generations, we will destroy the incentives to work and destroy the incentives to people who can provide capital to provide it in the U.S. They would take that capital and migrate to other shores.
In other words, the taxes required to pay for past promises are uncollectible. Listen to the whole thing (and subscribe!):
The Road to Czardom
Back in 2009 there was a lot of hysteria over the Obama administration’s many “czars,” and we at Cato tended to dismiss it; as Gene Healy said in the Washington Examiner, “the conservatives’ current bout of czar mania elevates symbolism over substance…. Often, czars are mere figureheads, appointed to signal concern over the latest hot-button issue. ”
But just this week I’ve noticed a couple of examples of actual czardom — the exercise of arbitrary and autocratic power — from two of President Obama’s Cabinet secretaries.
Last week Sen. Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner made a deal under which the Senate would pass the House’s bill to fund the Federal Aviation Administration through September and end the brief partial shutdown of the agency. They agreed that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood would waive the small-airport subsidy cuts. But where does a Cabinet secretary get the authority to waive legislation passed by Congress — even if two members of Congress say it’s OK with them? The administration can’t spend money Congress hasn’t appropriated, and it can’t spend money in defiance of clear legislative language. LaHood is assuming the powers of a czar.
And now Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014. We’ve criticized that unrealistic requirement ourselves. But unrealistic or not, it’s the law. According to the New York Times:
Mr. Duncan told reporters that he was acting because Congress had failed to rewrite the Bush-era law, which he called a “slow-motion train wreck.”
Again, I too think Congress should rewrite — or repeal — this law. But alas, it hasn’t done so. Even the Times, often comfortable with the exercise of federal and executive power, notices that
The administration’s plan amounts to the most sweeping use of executive authority to rewrite federal education law since Washington expanded its involvement in education in the 1960s.
Which is a little misleading; in the 1960s Congress passed laws that extended federal power over local schools. The exercise of executive power is a different issue.
Duncan’s plan to waive bad provisions of a law is reminiscent of the more than 1,000 waivers from the provisions of the new health care law that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has already granted. One problem with such waivers, of course, is the suspicion that they will be granted to the politically connected or even to political supporters. Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School says waivers raise “questions about whether we live under a government of laws. Congress can pass statutes that apply to some businesses and not others, but once a law has passed — and therefore is binding — how can the executive branch relieve some Americans of their obligation to obey it?” The rule of waivers is not the rule of law.
Congress has far too often been supine in the face of executive power. In fact, it could be argued that Congress is as eager to avoid responsibility for lawmaking as presidents are to arrogate it. Duncan’s argument that he was acting because Congress had not brings to mind former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s statement a year ago:
“We are reviewing a list of presidential executive orders and directives to get the job done across a front of issues.”
“To get the job done” — that is, to pass laws that the people’s elected representatives have declined to pass. That’s not separation of powers, that’s the road to czardom.
Standard & Poor’s $2 Trillion Error Was Political Lobbying, Not an Innocent Mistake
The infamous $2 trillion error involved in the Standard and Poor’s downgrade was no mistake. It was largely the result of an unseemly urge to take sides in the partisan struggle over near-term tax policy, with no weight at all given to longer-term entitlement spending. “Our ratings,” the agency later explained, “are determined primarily using a 3-5 year time horizon,” and “the ratings decision to lower the long-term rating to AA+ from AAA was not affected by the change of assumptions regarding the pace of discretionary spending growth.” In other words, it’s all about taxes.
Amazingly, the S&P analysts adopted the Congressional Budget Office “alternative” scenario as their so-called baseline. In that scenario all Bush tax cuts remain in place until 2035 and (because bracket creep and cashed-out IRAs would nevertheless cause revenues to rise) “unspecified policy adjustments [i.e., tax cuts] will be made after 2021 to keep revenues constant as a share of GDP [18.4 percent].”
The reason for adopting that unlikely scenario as a the S&P baseline was to make an unsubtle political point. As the S&P analysts explained, “our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues.”
Standard and Poor’s completely disregard the same baseline Congress and the Administration used, which assumes that all of the 2001-2003 tax cuts expire in 2013 as current law requires. That would mean doing away with such genuine revenue losers as $648 billion from cutting the lowest tax rate to 10 percent, $316 billion for marriage penalty relief, $238 billion from the enlarged child credit. Instead, the S&P “upside scenario” adopted a wildly optimistic view of the revenue potential of President Obama’s hoped-for taxes on high earners: “Our revised upside scenario . . . incorporates $950 billion of new revenues on the assumption that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high earners lapse from 2013 onwards, as the Administration is advocating.”
In reality, the Obama health bill already imposes an extra 0.9 percent payroll tax on high earners and a 3.8 percent surtax on their investment income. The President’s proposed taxes on higher incomes go far beyond a mere lapse of the 2003 tax cuts for high earners. In addition to reverting to phasing-out exemptions and deductions, for example, Obama’s 2012 budget would have limited any remaining deductions to 28 percent, supposedly raising $293 billion.
There is no way to confirm or justify Standard & Poor’s unsourced estimate of “$950 billion of new revenues on the assumption that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high earners lapse.” That $950 billion figure is an outright fabrication – indefensible even as matter of simplistic bookkeeping and quite absurd once tax avoidance (the elasticity of taxable income) is taken into account. Many have pointed to sloppy errors in the S&P analysis, but they neglect to mention that the alleged $950 billion revenue windfall from adopting the President’s tax plans is one of those sloppy errors.
As Ezra Klein pointed out, correcting the mistake “improved our deficit outlook by more than [the wildly exaggerated estimate of] letting the high-end tax cuts expire, which S&P had said would raise enough money to stabilize our rating. If the numbers mattered, then by S&P’s own logic, that should have changed their opinion of our finances.”
If the real point of this ill-timed S&P publicity stunt was to promote a rosy scenario for Obama’s tax plan, then the reputation of Standard & Poors has now been deeply downgraded.
Obama’s Failed Response to the Downgrade and the Outlook for Fixing America’s Spending Crisis
President Obama just spoke about the downgrade and his remarks were very disappointing. He uttered some empty platitudes, offered no plan, (amazingly) called for more government spending, and continued his advocacy of class-warfare taxation.
So what does this mean? Other than expecting volatility, I have no idea what will happen in financial markets over the next few days. But I can opine about the downgrade, Obama’s unserious response, and what it means in terms of public policy over the next few years and into the future.
Notwithstanding the President’s cavalier attitude, America is in trouble. But while the crisis is severe, we have some breathing room.
Our fiscal crisis is akin to a very dangerous, but slow-developing cancer. It is not a car wreck with immediate life-threatening injuries.
And there are solutions, as explained in this good news-bad news-bad news-bad news-good news-good news analysis.
1. There is virtually zero chance of the United States defaulting in the next 10 years (heck, probably the next 20 years). Yes, fiscal policy has been reckless and irresponsible during the Bush-Obama spending binge, but I’m guessing it will take another 10-20 years of additional over-spending to bring America to the point of Greek-style collapse. Simply stated, the U.S. economy is so large and so rich that it can’t be destroyed quickly.
…but…
2. The United States does not deserve a triple-A rating, at least for long-term debt. The nation has a giant fiscal problem, but it’s not the annual deficit or the national debt. The true crisis is the $100-trillion-plus unfunded liability for entitlement programs – especially Medicare and Medicaid. This is why America deserved to be downgraded.
…and…
3. The left in America, as exemplified by Obama’s vapid press statement, has no serious intention of addressing this problem. The President has failed to present any sort of plan. His budget early in the year was a business-as-usual document with no reforms and even the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected it 97-0. But while Senate Democrats joined Republicans in deep-sixing Obama’s joke budget, they have failed to produce a budget of their own for more than two years.
…moreover…
4. The left is treating America’s fiscal crisis is an opportunity to trick Republicans into a tax increase. That would be smart politics, to be sure, since it would automatically give Democrats the upper hand, but higher taxes would probably worsen the problem of excessive government since politicians would spend any additional revenue. And the kind of class-warfare taxes Obama has in mind would further undermine growth, adding to the nation’s fiscal woes.
…however…
5. After eight years of being corrupted by “big-government conservatism,” the GOP may finally be sincere about reducing the burden of government. Led by Congressman Paul Ryan, House Republicans approved a very serious budget plan that would have reformed both the Medicare and Medicaid and substantially reduced the long-run burden on the U.S. economy.
…fortunately…
6. America is not at the point of no return. I’ve periodically commented about the dangers of a nation reaching a tipping point, which occurs when the people riding in the wagon outnumber those pulling the wagon. But even though dependency has jumped in America, the national spirit of self-reliance, independence, and freedom remains strong. Indeed, I think that’s what the Tea Party largely represents.
But none of this should suggest optimism. We know the solutions, but that does not mean that the politicians will do the right thing. As I said in the beginning of this post, America is at a crossroads. We can either continue a descent into Greek-style fiscal morass or, at some point in the next few years, we can implement reforms.
But, barring some remarkable change in attitude, Obama is mostly irrelevant except to the extent that he can make matters worse by luring Republicans into a phony tax-hike deal.
International Law and the Founding Era
In an Atlantic series on supposed “constitutional myths,” former Washington Post reporter Garrett Epps has been dispensing his opinions on such matters as why the Supreme Court misunderstood the First Amendment most terribly in the Citizens United case, and why the shooting spree of Tucson madman Jared Loughner proves the need for a Second Amendment that accommodates gun control. The series as a whole is marred by a tone of misplaced condescension in which Epps lectures his opponents as though they were all know-nothing newcomers to the field of constitutional debate.
He’s at it again with a new post on international law and the Constitution. Epps might have been on solid ground had he confined himself to criticizing a badly wrongheaded ballot measure enacted by Oklahoma voters last fall that purports to forbid Oklahoma judges from considering international law or foreign national law in their decisions. As almost any libertarian or Federalist-Society-leaning constitutional scholar could have warned those voters — and as many did at the time — measures of that sort are not only unwise as policy but also rest on a seeming misunderstanding of the many ways in which American courts since the founding have found it appropriate and legitimate to handle some disputes (to take an obvious example, disputes arising in part abroad) under the “law of nations” or the domestic law of a particular foreign country. Justice Antonin Scalia, surely the highest-profile critic of the overuse of international law concepts by the Supreme Court, has been equally outspoken in acknowledging the many uncontroversial, legitimate, and long-established uses of foreign law.
Epps, however, does not stop there, and proceeds to a rhetorical move nicely parried by Michael Ramsey at the Originalism Blog:
It’s true, as [Epps] says, that founding-era Americans had an attachment to international law (what they called the law of nations) and built it into the Constitution in various respects. … But none of this history has anything to do with the modern purpose to which Professor Epps wants to put it. … [While] the founders had an appreciation for international law, they did not constitutionalize it – that is, they left it under the control of Congress, rather than incorporating it directly into constitutional law. … [As] this book describes, using international (or foreign) law to expand domestic rights has (with minor exceptions) roots only in the latter half of the twentieth century. Thus Professor Epps’ critique of conservatives on this point doesn’t really work – acknowledging the Constitution’s original relationship with international law doesn’t require one to accept where the modern Supreme Court has been trying to take it.
If one is going to pose as the scourge of know-nothingism, one ought not to engage in it oneself.
What Are the Consequences of the Downgrade?
Even though I predicted it had to happen at some point because of the Bush-Obama spending binge and America’s giant long-run entitlement crisis, I confess that I’m somewhat surprised that the United States has suffered a debt downgrade for the first time.
That being said, I don’t think the downgrade will matter. Everyone knew the U.S. was heading in the wrong direction before the announcement by Standard & Poor. Moreover, big investors have very few attractive options for where to place their money – thanks to a weak global economy. As such, I suspect the federal government will still be able to borrow money at very low rates.
What does matter, however, is that the American economy is burdened with a bloated public sector that is sapping the nation’s economic vitality. And this problem will get worse every year because of a toxic combination of poorly designed entitlement programs and demographic change.
As the government gets bigger, this hinders growth by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy. The damage is then compounded by the fact that the two main ways of financing the public sector – taxes and borrowing – both have additional adverse economic consequences.
In other words, the United States has fiscal cancer. Yet rather than try to cure the disease, politicians are – at best – kicking the can down the road. Here is my dour assessment on Bloomberg.
The only glimmer of hope, as I wrote yesterday, is that House Republicans have made serious efforts to restrain the burden of federal spending.
Is Medicare Sustainable?
A letter in the Washington Post from Dale Everett of Ashburn, Va., makes a point about the sustainability of our entitlements programs:
At 80, I am a “poster boy” for what is wrong with Medicare and Social Security. I worked full time from 1950 until 1993, when I retired. I paid the maximum amount annually required by law. My payment from Social Security in 1993 was $1,170 per month, and it now exceeds $1,500. I paid $47,377 into the fund and have so far received more than $288,000 from it.
As for Medicare I paid $14,350 into the fund from 1966 to 1993. I have been very healthy but had cancer several years ago and a craniotomy five years ago. The costs of those exceeded $1 million. Even minor surgery would far exceed what I paid to the fund.
Please tell me how such a system can be sustained. Both programs need to be overhauled now. No one should believe that he has paid for and earned the right to such payments.
Look Out, Voluntarism! Here They Come Again!
Anyone who’s paid really close attention to the national curriculum standards debate – alas, not many people — knows that many standards-hawkers are guilty of one, unacceptable thing. It’s not just pushing for national standards, which though unsupported by meaningful evidence can still be endorsed by reasonable people. No it is constantly asserting that standards adoption is “voluntary” for states. Today, that lie is being exposed once more — if you know the code, that is.
It is being widely reported this morning that in September U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will publish criteria states will have to meet to be granted waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act. (A gross violation of the Constitutions’ separation of powers, by the way, but that is a slightly different debate.) And the administration is signaling that, among other things, it will force all states that want relief from NCLB to adopt national curriculum standards, better known as the Common Core.
But wait: At least based on this morning’s media reports, the Department isn’t actually saying that states will have to adopt the Common Core.
Ah, but it is saying that, only using the smoke-screen euphemisms that national-standardizers constantly employ to mask Washington’s foisting of a de facto federal curriculum on every public school in the nation.
Let’s clear the haze.
The Washington Post notes that “administration officials said they will grant waivers to states that adopt standards designed to prepare high school graduates for college and careers.” “College-and-career” standards means the Common Core, because it is the only multi-state standards regime that purports — dubiously, in the eyes of some experts — to represent adequate preparation for both college and work.
Bloomberg News corroborates this conclusion both by noting that the Obama administration has already pushed for “national standards,” and by quoting White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes, who said that ”low expectations, uneven standards and shifting goals are unacceptable. Those days are numbered.”
Why, however would the federal government flatten “uneven” state standards?
As Bloomberg suggests, this is not new. But again, you have to know the subtle cues. The federal ”Race to the Top” shoved states into national standards, but using the crafty verbiage of “adopting internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace.” President Obama’s proposal for reauthorizing NCLB speaks similarly; it would require states to adopt “college- and career-ready” standards. And in case that’s not enough proof for you, Washington is spending $350 million on two consortia that are developing tests to go with the Common Core, one of which just released draft curriculum “frameworks.”
All of this leads me to reissue a challenge I offered a few months ago to purveyors of the voluntarism ruse: If you really want this to be voluntary, loudly and publicly condemn federal coercion, declaring it unacceptable.
So far, the response has been thundering silence. But the Obama administration is poised to offer yet another opportunity to make things right.
Ron Paul in Iowa
People keep saying — as George Will does in today’s Washington Post — that Ron Paul will do well in next weekend’s Ames, Iowa straw poll because of his small but intense base of support. Will writes:
If Paul finishes first or second, the political community will shrug: There he goes again, the Babe Ruth of straw polls.
Well, maybe they will. But they shouldn’t. Because in fact, Ron Paul finished fifth in the 2007 Iowa Straw Poll. So if he finishes first or second or even third this year, it will in fact signal a major increase in his ability to reach and turn out voters. That might be because he’s making a far more intense effort to actually organize in Iowa than he did in 2007-8. Or it might be because, as Will did acknowledge, “events seem to be validating his message, which is that the country’s financial condition is awful.” But it won’t be something to shrug at.
Of course, it also won’t put him on a straight line to the nomination. In 2007 Mike Huckabee won the Iowa Straw Poll, and John McCain finished tenth.
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