Pretty Sure It’s Already Divisive
When you’ve been fighting over the same thing for well-nigh 90 years, there’s a good chance some new policy won’t suddenly make it divisive. Nonetheless, that’s what an L.A. Times article, citing critics, suggests about a new law in Tennessee allowing in-class discussions critical of evolutionary theory and other scientific topics:
The measure will allow classroom debates over evolution, permitting discussions of creationism alongside evolutionary teachings about the origins of life. Critics say the law, disparagingly called “The Monkey Bill,” will plunge Tennessee back to the divisive days of the notorious Scopes “Monkey Trial’’ in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925.
You don’t have to be Charles Darwin—or God—to figure this one out: the law was passed because the topic is already divisive. Government-schooling defenders might not want to acknowledge that, and they have been able to keep it slightly hidden by having discussion of creationism de jure forbidden in public schools, but hard evidence reveals that Americans are mightily torn.
Time after time, surveys expose the deep split. Most recently, a 2010 Gallup poll found that 40 percent of Americans believe that “God created humans in present form”; 38 percent accept that ”humans evolved, with God guiding”; and 16 percent believe that “humans evolved, but God had no part in the process.” Those numbers have stayed pretty consistent since 1982, the first year for which Gallup has data.
Clearly, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, Americans are already very divided on evolution, and have been for quite some time.
How has what peace we’ve had been kept? Generally, by avoiding evolution in the schools. As Berkman and Plutzer have found, about 60 percent of high school biology teachers either completely avoid or soft-pedal evolution so as not to stir up controversy.
Public schools haven’t been happily chugging along, teaching rigorous evolutionary theory and eschewing any alternative explanations for human origins. A large number have been either teaching evolutionary pap, or nothing.
One of the major arguments government schooling defenders employ against school choice is that choice would lead to a balkanized, divided America. To make that argument, they have to ignore the history of American education—it was largely government-free for about two centuries, and public schools were long grounded in homogeneous communities—and assume that if you force diverse people together they will give up their conflicting values and ultimately engage in a gigantic, society-wide group hug.
Our endless battling over evolution—not to mention incessant fighting over countless other matters—reveals that that just doesn’t happen. You cannot force conscience uniformity, and you can’t have peace or rigor without educational freedom. Tennessee is just helping to make that clear.
ALEC’s Rich States, Poor States
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released the fifth edition of its “Rich States, Poor States” report yesterday. For fiscal wonks the report is a fun read, as it is chock full of tax and economic comparisons between the 50 states.
The first part of the report is a “Supply Side 101” lesson on the advantages of low marginal tax rates and the mobility of labor and capital. One point that policymakers often overlook is that a high tax rate on one tax base tends to shrink not just that tax base, but other tax bases as well. Thus, high income tax rates shrink reported incomes, and in turn that shrinks both income and payroll tax bases. Similarly, high corporate income tax rates shrink the corporate tax base and the individual and payroll tax bases as corporate investment, hiring, and wage growth are reduced.
The ALEC report explores these sorts of effects in detail for death taxes, which are taxes on estates and inheritances. States that impose death taxes induce people with substantial assets to relocate to states without those burdens. When people move, the death-tax states lose not just death-tax revenues, but also revenues from income taxes and other taxes. They also lose the productive contributions that high-earners often make in their communities, such as their aid to start-up businesses and charities.
I agree with the ALEC report’s authors—Art Laffer, Steve Moore, and Jon Williams—that taxpayers can be very responsive to marginal tax rates, especially over the longer term. I might quibble with them, however, with the overwhelming importance they seem to assign to the effect of state tax rates on economic growth as compared to other state policy factors such as regulatory burdens. The authors present statistical tables showing that high-tax states tend to grow more slowly than low-tax states. But in those correlations, I wonder whether tax rates are serving as proxies for broader state policy environments? In other words, states with high taxes often tend to be the states that impose an array of anti-market policies. Low-tax states often tend to be more broadly growth-friendly.
The second part of the ALEC report presents state-by-state policy and economic data. Here, the authors do examine numerous non-tax factors. State right-to-work laws, for example, affect business location decisions in labor-intensive industries that are prone to unionization. With policy levers such as right-to-work laws, worker compensation costs, and the quality of state legal systems, state policymakers have the power to attract or repel business investment and thus spur or hinder economic growth.
There are substantial differences in income levels and economic growth performance across the states, and those differences stem partly—or mainly—from state policy differences. As such, it is the job of state policymakers to explore and pursue reforms that can make residents of their states more prosperous. The ALEC report provides a useful prod to state governments to roll up their sleeves and get to work.
TED Goes to School
In this new TEDx video, University of Newcastle (England) lecturer Pauline Dixon takes viewers on a tour of schools serving some of the poorest people on Earth. Private schools … that charge fees … that are paid for by the poor parents themselves … and that outperform local government schools spending far more per pupil. I know. You’ll just have to watch it.
If your curiosity is piqued afterwards, check out her colleague James Tooley’s wonderful book, The Beautiful Tree, which tells the story of their travels and research. It will blow your mind.
A Market Solution for the Falklands
The Falklands just won’t go away. Bret Stephens’ piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal “Why the Falklands Matter” makes that clear.
To solve the question of the Falkland’s sovereignty once and for all, I proposed a market solution in “A Market Solution Will Save Money and End the Dispute over Falklands Sovereignty,” which was published by London’s City A.M. in February.
About Those Postal Retiree Health Benefits
While Congress is busy trying to figure out how it’s going to continue screwing up the U.S. Postal Service, postal expert Michael Schuler has been busy analyzing the reasons why it’s so screwed up to begin with. Last week, Michael released a paper on congressional micromanagement of the USPS. A new paper looks at the complicated and controversial topic of postal retiree health benefits.
A common claim made by the postal unions and other defenders of the unsustainable status quo is that the USPS would be a-okay if a 2006 law hadn’t required the postal service to start setting aside money for future retiree health benefits. Here’s the background from Michael:
Before enactment of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA, P.L. 109-435), the U.S. Postal Service had been promising generous retirement health benefits to its workers without setting aside any money to pay the costs it would owe in future years. Because the Service was ignoring a very expensive fringe benefit in its income statement, its reported costs were artificially low and its reported income artificially high. The unfunded retiree health care obligation had mushroomed to $74.8 billion by September 30, 2006.
The 2006 law addressed the unfunded liability by requiring the USPS to annually set-aside an average of $5.6 billion from 2007 to 2016. However, USPS revenues began plummeting shortly after the PAEA’s enactment. The annual “prefunding” payments have been exacerbating the USPS’s financial woes. Naturally, postal management and the unions would like Congress to make the payments disappear. The problem is, eliminating the payments won’t put the USPS in the black, and it would merely set the stage for a major taxpayer bailout down the road. As Michael explains, moving to pay-as-you-go financing for retiree health benefits is a bad idea:
First, prefunding is always more transparent than pay-as-you-go. Prefunding shows the costs of commitments when they are made instead of ignoring the costs until years later. Second, pay-as-you-go with regard to deferred postal compensation is unfair because it transfers costs incurred for today’s mail service to future mail users or taxpayers. Third, pay-as-you-go is extremely risky for an organization like the Postal Service where the future obligations are huge while income is stagnating or declining. (It would not be dangerous if future obligations were small or if income were growing rapidly enough to easily pay future bills.) Fourth, a sometimes overlooked hazard of the pay-as-you-go method is that costs can appear deceptively low for many years and then suddenly climb as more workers retire and as retirees, with increasing age, need more medical care. In that vein, OPM estimated that if retiree health care financing had reverted to pay-as-you-go in 2010, the Postal Service’s pay-as-you-go expense would have been only $2.3 billion in 2010 but almost tripled to $6.4 billion by 2020. If PAEA had not moved toward prefunding, insolvency and the need for a massive taxpayer bailout would be virtually inevitable for USPS, although that might not have become clear to the public for several more years because of pay-as-you-go’s lack of transparency.
Michael says that the prefunding payment schedule should be stretched out given the USPS’s financial woes. However, the extended schedule should come with reforms that would “lower the extraordinary cost of USPS’s health care fringe benefit.” I think a common sense reform would be to eliminate retiree health care benefits for new employees. As I noted in an essay on the U.S. Postal Service, the health benefit is something that a decreasing number of private sector workers receive:
Opponents of pre-funding USPS retiree health benefits argue that private companies and the rest of the federal government are not legally required to do so. That is largely irrelevant. Retiree health care coverage is an increasingly rare perk in the private sector, and the federal government’s financial management is nothing to emulate. In 2008, only 17 percent of private sector workers were employed at a business that offered health benefits to Medicare-eligible retirees, down from 28 percent in 1997.
Democracy EXPOSED!
I found a release put out by the American Legislative Exchange Council today a little too meek. So let’s talk about the debate around ALEC, a group I’ve been involved with as a volunteer advisor since before I joined Cato. (The Communications and Technology Task Force used to be called “Telecommunications and Information Technology,” but that didn’t work well in our acronym-happy world.) ALEC is under seige because of alleged ties between its backing of “Stand Your Ground” laws and the Trayvon Martin case, in which a young black man was killed by a neighborhood watch officer of…uncertain ethnic background.
Tim Lynch and Walter Olson have made us aware that the Martin tragedy does not actually implicate Stand Your Ground. Tim has also made us aware of a case in which Stand Your Ground is implicated, that of an elderly Detroit man who shot and killed an 18-year-old entering his home armed with a handgun at 1:30 a.m.
There’s no question, as Tim said, that Zimmerman’s taking of Trayvon Martin’s life warrants intense scrutiny. (The very latest: Prosecutors intend to charge Zimmerman.) While that plays out, Cato will address self-defense law and gun rights at an event entitled “‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws: Self-Defense or License to Kill?” on April 23rd, which I encourage you to attend or watch.
But ALEC is an odd target for scrutiny of the quality it’s getting. ALEC describes itself as dedicated to “the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty.” Toward this end it “enlist[s] state legislators from all parties and members of the private sector who share ALEC’s mission.”
Anti-ALEC site ALECExposed.org characterizes things differently: Read the rest of this post »
Stand Your Ground: Law and Evidence
One objection that has been raised repeatedly against the “Stand Your Ground” laws is that gun owners can kill a person and then all we have is the shooter’s side of the story! The police will then have nothing to go on and so people are going to easily get away with murder. It seems to me that that objection just plays on the average person’s ignorance of the criminal law and how it works in practice.
Here’s an item about a killing from today’s Washington Post. A jury must decide whether a stabbing was self-defense or manslaughter. Excerpt:
Did a District woman stab her ex-boyfriend to death because he refused to roll over and share the bed? Or was the woman, who had allegedly been abused by the man before, fearful for her life and protecting herself?
That’s what a jury will have to decide in a trial that began Tuesday in D.C. Superior Court. Patricia A. Cave, 50, is charged with voluntary manslaughter while armed in the June 2 death of Lamont Warren, 36.
Prosecutors plan to use Cave’s words against her. After Cave was arrested, she told detectives in a videotaped interview — a portion of which was played for the seven-man, seven-woman jury — that when Warren visited her on the night he was killed, she allowed him to sleep in her bed while she smoked, drank and watched television in the living room.
When she returned to her bed, she told the detectives, she found Warren sprawled on top of her covers. “I said, ‘Can you get on the couch or just scoot over?’ ”
Cave said Warren refused to roll over and began berating her. Then, she said, he grabbed her by the throat and choked her. Cave said she reached for a knife on her nightstand, the two started wrestling and the knife plunged into Warren’s chest.
Although Warren was able to seek assistance from a neighbor in a nearby apartment, there’s no indication that we got his “side of the story.” All we have is Cave’s account! Why isn’t this case receiving more attention?! Maybe because it is receiving the level of attention it deserves–local crime trial, metro section.
In this previous post, I argue that the Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws apply to a limited set of situations–home invasions and cases where a person is under attack. In those situations, should we be surprised by the dearth of witnesses? No, because criminals choose the time, place, and victim–and they often choose to strike when the victim is alone and the police are not on the scene. So is it sensible to repeal Stand Your Ground laws, designed to help the innocent, because of evidentiary problems brought about by the criminal attackers? I don’t think so. Critics of the SYG law need to come up with a better argument than that because the evidence problem they point to is not unique to the SYG law. True, detectives and prosecutors like cases that have videotapes and great witnesses who saw the whole thing, but that rarely happens and they deal with it by introducing other evidence to support their case for a criminal conviction in situations where a self-defense claim is contrived.
This paper has lots of examples of ordinary people using guns to defend themselves in a variety of circumstances. Related item here.
Overblown on Homegrown? Conference Friday at Cato
After the September 11 attacks, various terrorist experts warned that sleeper cells hiding the United Sates or hyper-competent terrorists abroad were poised to strike. Those predictions, happily, proved wrong. Before we could celebrate our safety, however, a new terrorist menace emerged: homegrown violent extremists. Thanks to a raft of arrests of American born jihadist attackers, plus a couple real attacks of that kind, we seem to be experiencing a homegrown terrorism boom. Congress has held hearings. The Department of Homeland Security is encouraging local authorities to be on the lookout and named a new lead person on CVE (counter violent extremism) matters and a new Counterterrorism Advisory Board to coordinate his activities. Various policing initiatives aim to find homegrown terrorists, including those ubiquitous announcements where recorded officials remind us to be vigilant and report the unusual.
Internationally, the new fear is that the virtual decapitation of al Qaeda central in Pakistan has allowed the jihadist threat to the west to metastasize, as it mingles with various regional groups. The al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, Somalia, Northern Africa and even Nigeria, are, according to this theory, coordinating with each other and threatening the west by training and radicalizing terrorist operatives, as the old al Qaeda once did in Afghanistan. So U.S. military actions, including drone strikes and training local forces, are needed to defeat these groups.
Friday morning, Cato is hosting a brief conference, consisting of two panels, that will critically examine these assumptions. Risa Brooks, John Mueller and Brian Jenkins (calling in from California) will look at the local terrorist threat in the United States. They will ask how this set of terrorists compares to past domestic terrorist threats, whether homegrown terrorist attacks are actually up—some say otherwise—and, if they are, whether that increase is largely a result of FBI sting operations where the bulk of motivation and expertise to conduct the attack comes from federal agents or informants. The world is, after all, full of impressible idiots capable of being talked into a variety of violent acts. It may be that any increase in the incidence of homegrown terrorist plots is a product of our increased efforts to find it. The panelist may also ask whether the exhortations to be vigilant against domestic terrorists are, thanks to false leads and distraction, more trouble than they are worth.
On the second panel, Glenn Carle, Mitchell Silber and Michael Kenney will look at what has become the global al Qaeda, asking whether it is withering due to weak popular support, whether there is any center directing the cells and affiliates, and how interested these various insurgent jihadist groups are in putting aside their local struggle and attacking western targets. The panel will also consider whether the absence of command and hierarchy in the al Qaeda movement breeds incompetence and makes unlikely the technologically sophisticated terrorism—like the biological or nuclear attacks—that we’ve been told to expect.
There is still time to sign up for Friday’s event. It will also be streamed live online.
NPR, Obama, and the Misleading ‘Buffett Rule’
NPR says that President Obama will propose that millionaires pay income taxes “at the same rates as average working Americans.” On the 9:00 a.m. hourly news.)
That would be good news for most millionaires:
To be sure, NPR’s longer stories on Obama and the “Buffett rule” are more precise, as in Tuesday’s story that said the proposed law “would require anyone making a million dollars a year or more to pay at least 30 percent in taxes.” Even there, though, the sentence went on to say “- about twice what some millionaires pay now.” And as the charts above show, that’s quite misleading. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2010,
The overall federal tax system is progressive—that is, average tax rates generally rise with income. Households in the bottom quintile (fifth) of the income distribution paid 4 percent of their income in federal taxes, while the middle quintile paid 14 percent, and the highest quintile paid 25 percent. Average rates continued to rise within the top quintile, with the top 1 percent facing an average rate of close to 30 percent.
Simplicity, Please
Today, L. Gordon Crovitz penned “Complexity Is Bad for Your Health” in the Wall Street Journal. It is a most edifying article about the difficulties facing the Supreme Court as it tries to figure out what the concoction termed “ObamaCare” is all about. Justices — from Breyer to Scalia — have made it clear that the only thing that is “clear” is that Congress and the White House paid a visit to Rube Goldberg before they passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Law in 2010.
Most of what passes for “getting something done” in Washington, D.C. usually amounts to making things so complex that no one — not even the authors — can grasp the nettle. But, that’s the objective of complexity — to conceal the truth, to deceive.
A Primer on ‘Judicial Activism’
In his recent preemptive attack on the Supreme Court, President Obama invoked what he took to be the conservative critique of “judicial activism”:
I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this [the Court’s possibly overturning the Affordable Care Act] is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step.
Those were the least problematic of the president’s Rose Garden remarks, because they rang true in large part. Over the years, many conservatives have indeed criticized the courts—and the Supreme Court in particular—along just those lines. But it’s also true that the debate has changed over that period. To shed some light on such changes, and how the president got it wrong, ultimately, it’s worth a brief look at the underlying issues. (See here for a more thorough discussion.)
How Naysayers See the World Trade Organization
Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach is no fan of the World Trade Organization. But her mischaracerizations of how that body operates require correcting. Wallach published this piece on April 9 on the Huffington Post blog under the title, “WTO Orders U.S. to Dump Landmark Obama Youth Anti-Smoking Law.” Here are some excerpts followed by commentary.
Behind closed doors in Geneva, a World Trade Organization (WTO) tribunal issued a final ruling ordering the U.S. to dump a landmark 2009 youth anti-smoking law.
However, this is what the last paragraph of the WTO Appellate Body report actually says:
The Appellate Body [the highest "court" in the WTO] recommends that the DSB [WTO Dispute Settlement Body] request the United States to bring its measure, found in this Report, and in the Panel Report [the Panel is the equivalent of a lower court] as modified by this Report, to be inconsistent with the TBT Agreement [Technical Barriers to Trade], into conformity with its obligations under that Agreement. (My emphasis.)
The decision – just like U.S. court decisions are made – was made behind closed doors in the sense that the judges probably evaluated the merits of the claims against the texts of the agreements in the comfort of their own offices with their doors closed. The Appellate Body report, though, which includes the rationale for each decision in the report, is available right here, to the public. Likewise, the original Panel report is available here, as is plenty of other relevant information.
Contrary to the characterization that Wallach and other anti-globalistas have been trying to paint for years, the WTO is not some faceless bureaucracy issuing edicts that run roughshod over national sovereignty and local laws. The WTO has no special power to compel any member state to do anything. Contrary to Wallach’s claim that a WTO “Tribunal” (sounds like a military junta, no?) “ordered” the United States to “dump” a “landmark” anti-smoking law, the WTO Appellate Body merely requested (see above) that the United States bring a specific clause of the law into conformity with U.S. treaty obligations. WTO Panels and the AB only recommend or request.
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