Archive for August, 2011
U.S. Credit Rating Downgraded by S&P
… which makes this video out of date by about 20 minutes, but it’s instructive nonetheless.
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“A Closed ‘Super Congress’? Oh, I Don’t Think So.”
That was my inner conversation when I heard that the “Super Congress”* (or “Super Committee”) created by the debt ceiling deal might operate behind closed doors.
Congress is free to create any committee it wants, of course. Congress determines the rules of its proceedings. But ordinary committees and subcommittees are too opaque. A “Super Committee” should lead—not lag—in transparent operations.
In a forthcoming report on government transparency, we’ll be looking at the kinds of things committees should be publishing in computer-useable formats, and in real time or near-real-time: meeting notices, transcripts, written testimonies, live video, original bills, amendments to bills, motions, and votes. There are ways that many of these documents and records can be optimized for transparency, including by flagging agencies, programs, dollar amounts, and so on in the texts of published documents.
That’s why I’m glad to see transparency stalwart the Sunlight Foundation calling for a transparent Super Committee. “Congress pushed through the ‘Debt Ceiling’ bill with almost no transparency,” they say. “Let’s make sure the new ‘Super Congress’ committee created by this bill operates in the open.”
The things they highlight, reflecting priorities of transparency groups across the ideological spectrum, include: live webcasts of all official meetings and hearings; the committee’s report being posted for 72 hours before a final committee vote; disclosure of every meeting held with lobbyists and other powerful interests; Web disclosure of campaign contributions as they are received; and financial disclosures of committee members and staffers.
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:
- Republicans and Democrats have come together on a “historic” budget deal that cuts federal spending by more than $2 trillion over 10 years. However, the budget deal doesn’t cut federal spending at all.
- Even if Congress holds to the debt deal’s spending caps — and even if the “deficit reduction” targets established in the bill are achieved — the federal government’s spending binge will continue.
- Debt deal to slow the economy? Nonsense: biggest stimulus, slowest recovery. Keynesianism isn’t working.
- Centrist and liberal columnists are lamenting the lack of tax increases in the debt deal. But the hollowness of the deal itself provides a good justification for Republicans to oppose all tax increases in such bipartisan deals.
- The FAA’s problems should be solved by privatization.
- What does the debt deal mean for military spending?
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Kudos to Carnevale!
About a month ago, Anthony Carnevale and his associates at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce released a report that, in my estimation, significantly oversold the value of college degrees. As I wrote, it focused too much on median earnings by educational attainment, and made some considerable leaps of faith about the value of degree-holding people who have jobs that do not require college degrees.
Today, in contrast, I’m grateful to Prof. Carnevale for producing a new report that goes a long way toward correcting the first flaw in his June offering.
The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings, released today, does nice work breaking earnings down by both employment category and educational attainment, and showing the significant overlaps in earnings that result. Overall, for instance, Carnevale and company found that 14 percent of workers with no more than a high school diploma earn at least as much as the median Bachelor’s holder. Especially striking, 1.3 percent of people with less than a high school education rake in more than the median possessor of a professional degree (think doctors and lawyers), the highest-earning educational category.
Looking at specific job categories, The College Payoff identifies some of the major occupations you can go into with lower educational attainment that out-earn job categories with higher ones. For instance, driver/sales workers and truck drivers who maxed out at a high school diploma earn an average of $1,531,000 over their lifetimes. That beats the earnings of secretaries, retail sales managers, accounting and auditing clerks, customers service reps, retails salespersons, and nursing and home health aids with some college under their belt. It also beats secretaries, customer service reps, retail salespersons, and accounting and auditing clerks with Associate’s degrees.
There’s a lot more data than that in the report, of course, and it would reward perusal.
Unfortunately, the report’s concluding section starts with this:
No matter how you cut it, more education pays.
As the report itself reveals, there are in fact lots of ways to “cut it” that enable you to earn more with less formal education. Alas, old habits die hard for Carnevale. But just for providing these data, he and his team are to be thanked.
A Look at the Balanced Budget Amendment
As the Balanced Budget Amendment once again comes to the front of political debates, I wondered what David Primo thought about the return of the BBA to public notice. Primo is the author of Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions.
John Samples: David, you have studied the history and politics of budgeting by Congress and the federal government. Your studies led to your book Rules and Restraint which, as I recall, was somewhat skeptical of the constitutional solutions requiring a balanced budget. What did you think of the importance the House Republicans attached to the Balanced Budget Amendment?
David Primo: Supporters of the BBA are certainly correct that constitutional restraints on Congress will help restore fiscal discipline to the federal government. It’s unfortunate, however, that the BBA has become so politicized. Without buy-in from Democrats, the chances of ratification are nil. I understand the fear of compromise here; we don’t want a poorly constructed rule placed into the Constitution, after all. That said, I’d love to see serious reformers like the Gang of Six get together and craft a constitutional budget rule that has a chance of being ratified. Rep. Justin Amash has also introduced an amendment that is a twist on traditional BBA proposals, and it deserves to be part of the debate.
Quick Thoughts on the Damon-ized Education Debate
Last Saturday, a movement called Save Our Schools held a rally in DC. You probably wouldn’t know it, save for one thing: actor Matt Damon addressed the participants, was interviewed by Reason.TV, and suddenly cable anchors and others declared that Mr. Damon had wiped the floor with anyone who’d dare say anything negative even slightly connected to teachers. That Mr. Damon had uttered little of substance — that he had mainly delivered assertions about teachers working themselves to death for an, um, fecal-matter salary — seemed irrelevant. He had delivered his thoughts with conviction, and the matter, apparently, was settled!
This is a sad commentary on the state of the education debate. For one thing, that a rally largely objecting to top-down standards-and-testing dictates (though also school choice and “privatization”) will likely be remembered mainly for a movie star’s impassioned talk is unfortunate. There are numerous potent reasons to object to government-imposed standards and tests — reasons I’d love to see get lots more attention – but, unfortunately, many SOSers seem content to simply frame the problem as evil “corporatists” trying to attack and punish teachers. That’s some weak sauce, but the primary meme of the event was basically that anyone who’d dare critique public schooling is really assaulting Howard Hesseman. It was, essentially, an ad hominem attack on anyone who advocates reforms that some teachers don’t like, and as a result it’s a message that, sadly, deserves little attention.
Which brings me to the lack of substance in Damon’s most celebrated assertion, the one about salaries. As Nick Gillespie at Reason elucidates and I explore at length in a recent Policy Analysis, it’s not true that public school teachers, on average and based on hours worked, make small money relative to other professionals. That’s in no way to say individual teachers are making the “right” salary — that can only be determined in a free market, in which salaries are ultimately determined by the priorities of both education producers and consumers — but it is, to say the least, a stretch to describe teachers’ salaries as Damon did. Indeed, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, I found that teachers made more per-hour than accountants and auditors, registered nurses, and insurance underwriters. Even first-year teachers, as I illustrate in the PA, make enough to live quite comfortably.
Oh, and Damon’s assertion about teachers working “really long hours”? Many absolutely do, and teaching can be a very draining job. It’s one of many reasons we need to move away from rigid, union-demanded salary ladders that keep good teachers from getting rewarded for their hard work. We also, even more importantly, need a free market so that parents can direct money to schools that succeed with their children, and all their teachers can get rewarded. That said, according to a 2008 BLS “time diary” study, on average, during periods when teachers are working — so not including vacation times — teachers do not toil longer than other professionals, including work beyond contract hours.
It’s sad that it takes a contentious interview with a celebrity going viral on the Internet to get attention paid to what are real, and complex, problems in education. It is even more depressing that when attention is paid, the message one hears is so divorced from evidence and substance.
The Kelly Thomas Killing
The New York Times reports on the protests that are underway as a result of the beating and killing of one Kelly Thomas. Several witnesses reportedly saw several cops savagely beat Thomas after he was already in handcuffs and subdued. Here’s an excerpt from the Orange County Weekly on the incident.
On a beautiful Southern California Saturday more than 250 outraged local citizens ignored the chance to spend a sunny day at the beach, swim in their pools, shop at the mall or sip Mimosas on their porches.
Instead, for six hours a diverse group of citizens–grandmothers, little kids, lawyers, college students, businessmen and women, housewives, ex-cops, young parents, a mechanic, a dentist, a construction worker, a guy who looked like he’d just left a gay leather bar–hell, you name a group and they were probably represented–stood outside the Fullerton Police Department, waved homemade signs and shouted in protest against a grotesque case of police brutality.
When one sees the photo of what Kelly Thomas looked like in the hospital bed after the awful beating, one can better understand why people are so outraged and in the streets protesting. Here’s the photo (caution: viewer discretion advised!).
Anoka-Hennepin “Battleground” is Government Schooling in Microcosm
The Star-Tribune has a telling article about the Anoka-Hennepin school district, Minnesota’s largest and, after a recent string of suicides, the subject of a lawsuit and federal investigation over its handling of sexual orientation-based bullying. What led to the suicides and how the district dealt with bullying remain open questions, but in the absence of concrete evidence on those matters, perhaps nothing nails Anoka-Hennepin’s root problem as squarely as this article subhead: “Diverse and large.”
Anoka-Hennepin, in other words, appears to be the nation in microcosm, and the firestorm enveloping it sadly but starkly illustrates the destructiveness of forcing diverse people to support a single system of government schools.
Beyond its succinct subhead, the Star-Tribune piece expands on its main point:
The spotlight isn’t a surprise to [Superintendent Dennis] Carlson, who recalls the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone telling him that politicos and cultural observers look to the disparate school district as a bellwether not just for the state, but the nation.
“That’s why we’ve been chosen for this political battleground,” Carlson said. “[But] it’s not a battle we want to fight. That’s not why we’re here.”
One flashpoint is the district’s 10-sentence Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy, which allows teachers to discuss sexual orientation issues but requires them to remain neutral. Two national civil rights groups sued the district this month on behalf of five current and former students, seeking removal of the policy, which they say doesn’t do enough to prevent harassment.
Meanwhile, a parents group is seeking to keep the policy in place and accuses the lawsuit sponsors of using children as pawns.
All the problems with forcing diverse people to support a single system of government schools are here: The inevitable conflict; the hopelessness of “neutrality” (which itself requires taking a stand not to act on something); and schools becoming battlegrounds when what most people presumably want is just for them to teach their children. Oh, and as usual with politically controlled schooling, there’s politics thrown in: Anoka-Hennepin is in Michele Bachmann’s district, and people are starting to connect its problems to her.
Anoka-Hennepin is, save for being the home of a major presidential candidate, not an outlier: As I laid out in a 2007 report, in just a single year battles sparked by the zero-sum contest of whose rights and morals win in government schooling raged across the nation. Subsequent to publishing that, I have collected information on hundreds more throwdowns around the country, which I hope to have posted on Cato’s website in the coming months.
This is not how education in a free country should operate — government picking rights winners and losers – yet based on fuzzy notions of all-togetherness many education thinkers and pundits blithely assert that government schooling is the “foundation of our democracy.” It’s a conclusion that simply isn’t supported by either logic or evidence, and Anoka-Hennepin exemplifies both crucial failings.
I don’t know if the Anoka-Hennepin district intentionally failed to combat bullying based on sexual orientation — if it did, that is clearly unacceptable — but from what is known, Anoka-Hennepin, like public schooling generally, is doomed to war. And there is only one way to meaningfully foster peace: Let parents control education dollars and choose schools that share their values, rather than forcing citizens to come to blows.
An Unprecedented Expansion of Federal Power
That’s how I describe the individual mandate in my contribution to SCOTUSblog‘s online symposium on Obamacare, which Trevor Burrus has already highlighted. Here’s an excerpt:
All the Obamacare legal challenges boil down to Congress’s authority – or lack thereof – to require people to buy private insurance. Although unfortunately not dispositive of modern judicial decisions, the text of the Constitution demands that the Supreme Court strike down the individual mandate as an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. Finding the mandate constitutional would be the first interpretation of the Commerce Clause to permit the regulation of inactivity – in effect requiring an individual to engage in an economic transaction.
Moreover, upholding Obamacare would grant the federal government wide latitude to mandate that Americans engage in activities of its choosing. An expansive holding here would fundamentally alter the relationship between the government and the people. If the challenges fail, there will be no principled limits on federal power.
I go on to describe the current state of play at the appellate and outline what we can expect going forward, as well as providing links to useful resources on this issue. Read the whole thing.
More Cost Data and Better Debt Insight
Data-transparent government is still a ways off, but some small steps forward are underway. To wit, my project WashingtonWatch.com, which is adding new data going to the costs of bills in Congress.
As detailed in an announcement that went up this morning, many more bills on the site will have cost estimates associated with them, the product of research being done at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Some bills spend pennies or less per U.S. family. Some spend $5,000 per family and more. Wouldn’t you like to know which are which?
The site has also begun displaying national debt information on a per-family, per-person, and per-couple basis. Your individual (official) debt—just for being an American—is about $45,000 dollars, your real debt far higher.
I’ll have much more to say on government transparency in the coming months. In the meantime, people may do their part to avoid the next calamitous debt ceiling debate by following the day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year in Congress using resources like WashingtonWatch.com. Shrinking our disastrously run and bloated government is a long game that starts with small steps. Channel your outrage productively, friends.
Solve the FAA Problem by Privatization
Everyone agrees that it’s rather stupid for a federal funding dispute to idle about 70,000 workers on airport-related construction. Just as absurd, there have been 20 stop-gap funding bills passed for the FAA since 2007. News stories are digging into the political disputes surrounding the FAA, but they aren’t addressing the root problem.
The root problem is that we have federalized the funding of airports in this country, when there is absolutely no need to. Airports are generally owned by state and local governments, and it should be up to them to figure out how to finance them. By federalizing infrastructure financing, we are simply encouraging the misallocation of resources through the political pork barrel.
We should get the federal government out of financing airports. Then state governments should look to the advantages of airport privatization, which is a reform that has swept the world from London to Sydney. Private airports can plan their investment programs in an efficient manner, balancing costs and the market demand for services. Privatized airports can raise revenue from debt, equity, fees on airlines and passengers, advertising, retail concessions, and other items. There is no need for taxpayer funding of airports.
The FAA dispute doesn’t affect current air traffic control operations, but it is affecting investments in ATC upgrades. Our ATC system needs large new investments in technology, but it is a battle in Congress to secure funding and to make sure the funding is spent efficiently. The FAA has a very poor record at making cost-efficient investments. The solution is to privatize our ATC system, as Canada has done.
When the federal government is like an octopus with tentacles stretching into every area of the economy, the economy gets dragged down by political dysfunction in Washington. We see the same sort of dysfunction in the federal government’s other business activities, such as passenger rail and mail delivery.
A lot of people worry about the quality and quantity of the nation’s infrastructure investments. But we don’t need to rely on disorganized and indebted governments to fix the problems. We can move ahead with privatization and let America’s entrepreneurs take on the challenge.
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