Archive for August, 2011
Education Tax Credits More Popular Than Vouchers & Charters
As Neal wrote about earlier, Education Next has released their new poll, and there are some interesting results.
Surprisingly, the authors buried the lede in their writeup; education tax credits consistently have more support and less opposition than any other choice policy.
This year, donation tax credits pulled in a 29-point margin of support (that’s total favor minus total oppose). In contrast, charter schools had a 25-point margin of support.
The authors added a new, less neutral voucher question that boosted the margin of support to 20 points. They couched the policy in terms of “wider choice” for kids in public schools, and the implication was that it was universal. All three of these additional considerations tend to have a positive impact on support for choice policies.
The standard low-income voucher question showed a big jump this year from a -12 in 2010 to a 1-point margin of support. The last time Education Next asked a low-income tax credit question, it garnered a 19-point margin of support.
Last year, tax credits had a 28-point margin of support (that’s total favor minus total oppose). In contrast, charter schools had a 22-point margin of support and vouchers for low-income kids went -12 points (more respondents opposed).
Public opinion is consistently and strongly in favor of education tax credits over vouchers and even charter schools. And thankfully, they’re a much better policy as well.
Public Right on Choice, Wrong on Standards, But Always Well Intentioned
Today the good folks at the journal Education Next released their annual survey of education opinion. What follows is a quick summary of many of the things the pollsters found, followed by a little commentary about the national-standards results. (Adam Schaeffer, I have it on good authority, will be flogging the tax credit and voucher findings in an upcoming post.) Bottom line: The public usually has the right inclinations, but gets some answers wrong as a result.
One note: As is always the case with polls — but I won’t go into great detail with Education Next’s questions – remember that question wording can have a sizable impact on results.
So what did Education Next find?
- Almost everybody reports paying at least some attention to education issues
- 79 percent of Americans would grade the nation’s public schools no better than a “C”
- 54 percent of Americans, and 43 percent of parents, would grade their communities’ public schools no better than a “C”
- Even when told how much their district spends per pupil, 46 percent of respondents think funding should increase. But that’s down from 59 percent when the current expenditure isn’t given
- Pluralities of Americans favor charter schooling and government-funded private-school choice (without mention of the sometimes toxic word “voucher”), and a close majority supports tax-credit-based choice
- A huge majority, even after having been given the average teacher salary, thinks teachers should get paid more or about the same as they currently do
- A plurality thinks teachers should pay 20 percent of the cost of their health-care and pension benefits
- Large pluralities – and for one question a majority – support judging and rewarding teachers based on performance, as well as easing credentialing and tenure rules
- The public is about evenly split on whether teachers’ unions are good or bad for their districts
- Big majorities support federal testing demands (without mention of the often-toxic No Child Left Behind Act) as well as states adopting the “same set” of standards and tests (without mention of federal incentives to do so)
- A plurality of Americans oppose taking income into account when assigning students to schools
- Only 16 percent of respondents think local taxes for their district should decrease
All of these results demonstrate good reflexes by the public. They know, for instance, that overall the public schools are performing poorly, but they are a little happier with the districts they often chose when selecting homes. They want to spend more money on schooling because education is generally a good thing, but that drops when they are told how much is actually being spent (a slippery figure few hard-working Americans have time to pin down themselves). They recognize the need for choice, something they benefit from in almost every other facet of their lives. They believe in judging and rewarding people based on their performance. They oppose forcing physical integration — in this case based on income – on students and communities. And they even, reasonably, want all states to have the same academic standards.
About that last point: Intuitively, it seems to make sense. Why should kids in Mississippi be asked to learn less than those in Massachusetts? If I didn’t get paid to analyze education policy — if I had to do other work for 40-plus hours a week — I, too, would probably support national standards because I wouldn’t have time to look at the evidence, or cogitate over the politics behind such a fair sounding proposal. But I do analyze education policy full time, and I know that (1) there is little evidence supporting calls for national standards; (2) many states have adopted national standards mainly in pursuit of federal money; (3) even if you can get initially high standards, they’ll be dumbed-down by politics; and (4) states can perhaps be standardized, but unique, individual students never can be.
Of course, the good-intentions problem is not unique to education. The huge opportunity costs — among other disincentives – that keep members of the public from being able to sufficiently analyze complicated political issues is a major problem in all public policy matters. That’s why good intentions — which the public demonstrates in spades in this poll — can often lead to bad outcomes. But we cannot blame the public for that. We must, instead, inform the public as best we can.
Budget Deals and Tax Increases
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 federal debt crisis is being caused by spending increases, not revenue shortfalls. When the economy recovers, revenues will rise to the normal level of about 18 percent of GDP, even with all current tax cuts in place. It is spending that is projected to rise to abnormal levels, as I discussed in my recent Senate testimony.
However, let’s say a fiscal conservative in Congress was willing to swap, say, $1 of tax increases for $3 of spending cuts in a deficit-reduction deal. Most likely, the tax increases would turn out to be real and damaging, but the spending cuts would probably be phony or overstated, as the deal just passed illustrates.
In the debt-limit deal, discretionary spending rises over time. It isn’t cut. Economist Larry Summers seems to agree that the cuts in the deal aren’t real:
Despite claims of spending reductions in the range of $1 trillion, the agreements reached so far are likely to have little impact on actual spending over the next decade. The deal confirms the very low levels of spending already negotiated for 2011 and 2012 and caps 2013 spending about where most would have expected this Congress to end up. Beyond that, outcomes are anyone’s guess — Congress votes on discretionary spending annually, and the current Congress cannot effectively constrain future actions. True, there are caps and sequester threats in the debt deal, but these are virtually certain to be reformulated in 2013.
Deficit deals during the Reagan and Bush I years typically promised the public more spending cuts than tax increases. But the tax increases stuck, while the spending cuts were either smoke-and-mirrors or they didn’t last.
Consider the big budget deal in 1990, the one where Bush I infamously reneged on his “read my lips” promise. Bush claimed that the deal delivered two and a half dollars of spending cuts for each dollar of tax increases. But the cuts to defense in the deal were against an inflated baseline, and nondefense spending increased 15 percent in the two years following the deal.
Looking ahead to the special congressional committee that will report in November, I don’t see any incentive for a fiscal conservative to agree to tax increases. Democrats will call for a “balanced” plan, but that makes no sense because the cause of the government’s problems is not balanced. In addition, the idea that giving in a bit on taxes in order to leverage larger spending cuts has not worked in the past, as noted.
I’d like to be an optimist about spending cuts in a November deal, but most current political leaders show no interest in real cuts. Leaders in both parties continue to be positively allergic to naming any actual programs that they want to cut. Indeed, in the Washington Post today, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner calls for more federal spending, not less. He wants more for “education and innovation.” He wants to “strengthen” Medicare. He decries the “extreme agenda” of policymakers who want to “dismantle” programs for the elderly and less fortunate. And he wants “short-term measures to strengthen the economy,” by which he means spending on infrastructure and unemployment subsidies.
Good grief. Geithner’s op-ed reflects the administration’s intransigence in defending the bloated welfare state, not any willingness to make serious budget reforms.
Debt Deal Signed, Fights over Military Spending Next
The legislation signed by President Obama yesterday, as a solution to the debt ceiling debate, includes the possibility of cuts to military spending. But as Chris Preble points out, the legislation guarantees no defense cuts. Republicans will try to dump all the required cuts on non-defense areas. And the White House has already distanced itself from the prospect of any real defense budget cuts, as did Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Both support only the first round of cuts, which will at best halt Pentagon growth at roughly inflation.
On The Skeptics blog, I take a more detailed look at deal’s likely impact on military spending. I also examine its political effect, arguing that it will cause at least four political fights.
The first concerns war funding. As Russell Rumbaugh notes, hawks will be tempted to shift the Pentagon’s bill into the war appropriations (overseas contingency operations, officially), which the bill does not cap. That problem is not new, but the bill worsens it. We’ll see if the White House and Congressional Democrats fight to stop it.
Second, for the two years while the security cap is in place, the bill pits security agencies and their congressional advocates in zero sum combat. For obvious electoral reasons, no one will go after veterans. Defense hawks and top military officers will push to make DHS and State eat the minor cuts required. House Republicans negotiated to expand the security category for this reason. DHS, State and the subcommittees that pass their appropriations will fight back. Republicans and thus the House will tend to the first camp; Democrats and the Senate to the second. So the fight will occur in the appropriation committees, conference, and probably White House-Hill discussions. The paucity of cuts limits the carnage, of course.
Third, if the legislation remains in place after two years and a single cap covers all discretionary spending, the fight will shift and become more partisan. To get under the cap, Republicans will push domestic spending cuts. Democrats will prefer defense cuts. The 2012 elections will determine the institutional contours of this fight.
The fourth fight will center on the Joint Committee, with the most interesting conflict among Republicans. Democrats will likely advocate taxes and more defense spending cuts. Even if they can get a deal including taxes with Republican committee members, the House is unlikely to pass it. Democrats’ most attractive option may then be sequestration. Anti-tax Republicans will accept that outcome but clash with neoconservative Republicans happy to raise taxes to pay for military expenditures.
Those that see this plan as a disaster for defense ought to explain why hawks, like Rep. Buck McKeon (Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee), Rep. Bill Young (a leading House defense appropriator), and Senator John McCain, support it. They evidently prefer this deal to any available alternative and are gambling that they can protect military spending from the knife.
My guess is that defense spending will be level in 2012, growing roughly with inflation, but get hit by sequestration, meaning real defense cuts in 2013. After that, who knows? The political dynamics will then be quite different.
An original version of this post appeared on the National Interest.
Stop the Hate
People in Washington are hurling harsh words at other Americans: words like terrorists, Satan, suicide bombers, Hezbollah, gone off the deep end, “recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States.” No doubt the president and the mainstream media have denounced this sort of divisive, extremist language, right?
Yes, they have, many times. Except this week the divisive, extremist language has been directed at Tea Party members, the House Republican freshmen, libertarians, and other people determined to rein in federal spending, after deficits of $4 trillion in three years. The political and media establishments just can’t believe that anybody would actually try to use a debt ceiling increase to get a commitment to fiscal responsibility in the future.
Columnist Bart Hinkle has some thoughtful words on the subject:
If there is anything The New York Times hates, it is hate….
But as it turns out, there is one thing The New York Times hates more than hate itself: the tea-party wing of the GOP.
“Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people,” fumes columnist Joe Nocera in his Tuesday column, “Tea Party’s War on America.” Has the GOP ”gone insane? … Why yes, it has,” writes Krugman several days before, going on to denounce the party’s “fanaticism” and lack of rationality: “It has gone off the deep end,” he concludes. The editorial board agrees, terming the tea-partiers an “ultraorthodox” and “extremist” group who “are not paying close attention to reality,” who are “willing to endanger the national interest” and who show no “signs of intelligent life.”
To Thomas Friedman, the tea-partiers are the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP. According to Maureen Dowd, “The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House.” They are “adamantine nihilists,” and “political suicide bombers.”…
What could possibly explain all of this “vitriolic rhetoric” — this “widespread squall of fear, anger, and intolerance” — this “gale of anger”? Not the budget deal alone. While it’s true that progressives did not get the tax hikes they wanted, it’s also true that the federal budget will continue to grow, year over year. The deal gives President Obama an immediate hike in the debt ceiling, in return for mere promises of a reduction in the rate of spending growth later.
Hmmmm. Perhaps Paul Krugman can explain what has elicited this drumbeat of hate and vituperation.
[Shuffle of papers. . . .]
Ah, yes — here’s what Krugman wrote seven years ago, in “Feel the Hate”:
Why are [they] so angry? One reason is that they have nothing positive to run on. . . . But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of [those] people . . . for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation’s freedom, diversity and complexity.”
Krugman was writing about the 2004 GOP convention. Funny how resonant those words sound today.
When the vice president of the United States calls his political opponents “terrorists,” when the president of the United States calls them “hostage takers,” when prominent media pundits call those same people extortionists and suicide bombers who are willing to destroy the country — isn’t that the sort of hateful language that we’ve often been told could lead to violence? As Hinkle notes, when one disturbed young man in Arizona went on a killing spree, the New York Times knew whom to blame:
“It is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger” that set the nation “on edge,” the anti-hate paper said.
Isn’t it time for a return to civility by those who so often lecture their opponents on civility?
SCOTUSblog Tackles Obamacare
Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies has been involved in the ongoing Obamacare litigation since the beginning. Befitting the magnitude of the law and its negative effects on our economy, our health, and our Constitution, for the first time Cato filed amicus briefs at every level of litigation.
Cato Chairman Robert A. Levy signed and contributed to every brief we’ve filed. Today, as part of a symposium on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act hosted by the indispensable SCOTUSblog, Levy has posted an essay clearly and convincingly explaining why the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. One passage that particularly caught my eye:
The Commerce Power is expansive. But PPACA’s mandate stretches beyond dictating how a product may be produced, distributed, exchanged, or consumed. The mandate actually compels that a transaction occur – the purchase of health insurance, which cannot legally be acquired across state lines. Neither an act nor an interstate market exists to be regulated. Essentially, the PPACA mandate is regulatory bootstrapping. Congress forces someone to engage in commerce so it can regulate the activity under the Commerce Clause.
For those without the time, patience, or desire to read our legalistic briefs, I highly commend it.
Other viewpoints on the constitutionality of Obamacare will be posted throughout the week. The esteemed Charles Fried of Harvard weighs in for the constitutionality of Obamacare here. Those interested in the nitty gritty of the Obamacare litigation should keep an eye on the symposium.
Debt Deal to Slow the Economy?
The Washington Post reports that spending cuts in the budget deal threaten to slow the economy. The article quotes a number of economists who seem to harbor a rather extreme Keynesian bias in their thinking.
The deal would cut discretionary spending by just $21 billion in 2012, or just 0.6 percent of total federal spending that year. And that’s after federal spending has risen 22 percent since 2008 ($2.98 trillion in 2008 to about $3.63 trillion this year). Even if you believe that government spending helps the economy, it seems rather bizarre to claim that a 0.6 percent retrenchment after a 22 percent increase would hurt.
The other thing to note about these spending-cut worries is that, for Keynesians, it is the total amount of deficit spending that is the amount of economic “stimulus.” We’ve had deficit spending of $459 billion in fiscal 2008, $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009, $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2010, and $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2011. That is a colossal amount of “stimulus.”
In fiscal 2012, we’ve got even more “stimulus” coming, with a projected federal deficit of about $1.1 trillion, per the CBO March baseline. So a spending cut of $21 billion will reduce the giant Keynesian stimulus in 2012 by just 2 percent. And yet the Washington Post says that this will “endanger the anemic economic recovery,” according to “many economists.”
Those “many economists” who believe in Keynesianism might be more believable if their theories hadn’t so obviously failed in recent years. Despite the enormous deficit-spending “stimulus” of recent years shown in the chart, U.S. unemployment remains stuck at high levels and the recovery is the slowest since World War II by numerous measures. (See cites in my testimony here.)
Biggest stimulus, slowest recovery. Keynesianism isn’t working.
A Turning Point?
Greg Sargent cites a CNN poll question:
As you may know, the agreement would cut about one trillion dollars in government spending over the next ten years with provisions to make additional spending cuts in the future. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the cuts in government spending included in the debt ceiling agreement?
Approve 65
Disapprove 30
Sargent continues:
Sixty five percent approve of deal’s spending cuts. But it gets worse. Of the 30 percent who disapprove, 13 percent think the cuts haven’t gotten far enough, and only 15 percent think the cuts go too far. One sixth of Americans agree with the liberal argument about the deal.
About 20 percent of Americans self-identify as liberals. This would suggest that all non-liberal Americans and one-fourth of self-identifying liberals approve of the deal or think the cuts have not gone far enough. It could also mean that some non-liberal Americans disapprove of the deal and more than one-quarter of liberals approve of it. Either interpretation will not encourage those who believe government should be larger.
Still, the political agenda is defined as cuts, and the public seems willing to go along. 2008 seems like a generation ago.
Saving a Baby Woodpecker: The Legal Consequences
Federal law makes it illegal to “take,” “possess,” or “transport” a migratory bird except under permit. If you worry that this sweeping language might give the federal government too much enforcement power, perhaps you are one of those horrid House Republicans who, according to Bryan Walsh in Time magazine, are in the grip of “antigreen ideology” and want to “essentially prevent” agencies like the Department of the Interior “from doing their jobs.” Who else would object to laws meant to protect Nature?
It’s a pretty safe bet that Walsh hasn’t met the Capo family of Fredericksburg, Virginia. According to a report on broadcast station WUSA, and now being picked up far and wide by other news outlets, 11-year-old Skylar Capo saved a baby woodpecker in her back yard from the family cat and decided to keep it for a day or two to make sure it wasn’t injured before letting it go. The family’s problems began when Skylar took the bird into a Lowe’s to keep it out of the hot sun and was spotted by a woman in the store who confronted her and said she was a Virginia state game officer. Two weeks later, says Skylar’s mother Alison, the woman showed up at their front door accompanied by a state trooper with the news that the family owed a fine of $535; the federal law also carries possible jail time. (The bird itself was long gone by this point, having been released the same day of the store visit, the family says.)
With publicity about the case hitting the wires, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has now announced that it has rescinded the fine—the ticket had been mistakenly issued, it insists, in spite of a decision not to pursue charges. That also presumably takes care of the worry about jail time. But really, if you’re the parent of a youngster fascinated by backyard wildlife, why take chances? Order them back indoors to play video games and watch TV. It’s much legally safer that way.
For more from Cato on overcriminalization, see posts like this, this, and this.
On Debt Ceiling, Congress Kicks the Can
This week’s bipartisan deal to raise the debt limit will do little in the way of actual spending cuts, it defers all the tough decisions on spending and debt to a “SuperCongress” committee and the deal will do little to protect the United States credit rating. Cato’s Dan Mitchell, Jagadeesh Gokhale and Chris Edwards comment on the debt deal.
Debt Deal: Spending in Perspective
The following chart looks at total projected federal spending according to the Congressional Budget Office’s adjusted March baseline and its score of the debt deal. The chart only considers the reduction in outlays resulting from the deal’s cap on discretionary spending, which the CBO says will save $917 billion over the next ten years. It does not consider the $1.2-$1.5 trillion in future “deficit reduction” that Dan Mitchell discusses here.
Excluding outlays for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are unlikely to materialize, total spending over the next ten years would be about $43 trillion under the discretionary spending caps instead of $44 trillion. In other words, even if Congress holds to the caps — and even if the “deficit reduction” targets established in the bill are achieved — the federal government’s spending binge will continue. If this is a “win” for the limited government crowd, I’d hate to see what the Beltway establishment would consider a “loss.”
In Class War, It’s the “Middle” Ground that’s Key
Want to know a major reason Washington won’t make the cuts we need? Because winning elections is largely about getting “middle-class” votes, and just about any program can be spun as a savior for that big — but rarely defined by politicians — chunk of Americans.
Case in point, an animosity-stoking assertion uttered last week by House education committee Ranking Member George Miller. As reported by CNN, the subject was the possibility of a cut being made to the federal Pell Grant program:
Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat, defended Pell Grant funding on Friday, calling it the “great equalizer” for millions of students.
“Pell is the reason they are able to go to college and get ahead,” Miller said. “It’s a shameful excuse and an attack on middle class families.”
Now, what’s wrong with this assertion (other than its obnoxiousness and assumption that Pell doesn’t mainly enable colleges to raise their prices)? According to the U.S. Department of Education’s description of Pell – and the long understood intent of the program — it isn’t for the middle class. It is for “low-income” Americans:
The Federal Pell Grant Program provides need-based grants to low-income undergraduate and certain postbaccalaureate students to promote access to postsecondary education.
So much for Pell-trimming proposals assaulting the middle class. Buy maybe Rep. Miller was doing more than just inaccurate, uncivil political posturing with his comments. Maybe he was revealing a dirty little secret: While Pell is better focused on low-income students than many federal aid programs, over time politicians increasingly aim all education efforts at the big mass called the middle class. Maybe Miller was accidentally acknowledging that aid for the poor morphs into aid for the not-poor because, well, that’s where the votes are.
Look at Pell, which, again, is relatively well targeted. In the 1975-76 school year, 1.2 million students received grants (table 1). By 2009-10, 8.1 million did — almost seven times more! Meanwhile, overall enrollment in degree-granting institutions grew from about 11.2 million in 1975 to 20.4 million in 2009, less than doubling. Almost certainly, there has been less precise targeting to truly low-income students. Indeed, about 6 percent of Pell recipients (table 3-A) in 2009-10 came from families making at least $50,000 a year, or about the median household income in 2009.
Such expansion has been seen in K-12 education, too, though one wonders if Pell is singled out for big bucks in the debt-ceiling deal because people get Pell personally, unlike elemetary and secondary aid which goes to states and districts. Regardless, federal K-12 funding has spread farther and wider over the decades as politicians have sought to keep money coming even as their districts have lost people, and as allocations have become less and less focused on individual students.
When waging class war, a powerful weapon is to portray your political enemy as intentionally hurting the most vulnerable people: the poor, children, etc. But the winning strategy? Sending money to the middle class, and capturing their precious votes.
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