Associated Press photojournalist Noah Berger captured this thousand-word image near the Occupy Oakland demonstrations last month.

(AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Many Cato@Liberty readers will get it immediately. They can stop reading now.

For everyone else, this image perfectly illustrates the ethos of what I call the Church of Universal Coverage.

Like everyone who supports a government guarantee of access to medical care, the genius who left this graffiti on Kaiser Permanente’s offices probably thought he was signaling how important other human beings are to him. He wants them to get health care after all. He was willing to expend resources to transmit that signal: a few dollars for a can of spray paint (assuming he didn’t steal it) plus his time. He probably even felt good about himself afterward.

Unfortunately, the money and time this genius spent vandalizing other people’s property are resources that could have gone toward, say, buying him health insurance. Or providing a flu shot to a senior citizen. This genius has also forced Kaiser Permanente to divert resources away from healing the sick. Kaiser now has to spend money on a pressure washer and whatever else one uses to remove graffiti from those surfaces (e.g., water, labor).

The broader Church of Universal Coverage spends resources campaigning for a government guarantee of access to medical care. Those resources likewise could have been used to purchase medical care for, say, the poor. The Church’s efforts impel opponents of such a guarantee to spend resources fighting it. For the most part, though, they encourage interest groups to expend resources to bend that guarantee toward their own selfish ends. The taxes required to effectuate that (warped) guarantee reduce economic productivity both among those whose taxes enable, and those who receive, the resulting government transfers.

In the end, that very government guarantee ends up leaving people with less purchasing power and undermining the market’s ability to discover cost-saving innovations that bring better health care within the reach of the needy. That’s to say nothing of the rights that the Church of Universal Coverage tramples along the way: yours, mine, Kaiser Permanente’s, the Catholic Church’s…

I see no moral distinction between the Church of Universal Coverage and this genius. Both spend time and money to undermine other people’s rights as well as their own stated goal of “health care for everybody.”

Of course, it is always possible that, as with their foot soldier in Oakland, the Church’s efforts are as much about making a statement and feeling better about themselves as anything else.

The Ethos of Universal Coverage is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over the past decade, American taxpayers have lost as much as $60 billion dollars to massive fraud and waste in the nation building campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released today by the Commission on Wartime Contracting. The independent panel confirms much of what we already know about rent-seeking in wartime; nevertheless, the panel details specific reconstruction projects and programs that display a stunning array of mismanagement:

• A modest $60 million agricultural development program in northern Afghanistan expanded to the south and east to the tune of $360 million. The cash-for-work program was intended to distribute vouchers for wheat-seed and fertilizer in drought-stricken areas. Today, the program spends $1 million a day. The panel reports, “The pressure to quickly spend the millions of dollars created an environment in which waste was rampant. Paying villagers for what they used to do voluntarily destroyed local initiatives and diverted project goods into Pakistan for resale.”
• During operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, waste and fraud averaged about “$12 million every day for the past 10 years.” [Emphasis in original];
• The Department of Defense (DoD) awarded an $82 million contract for the design and construction of an Afghan Defense University. Now, DoD officials say it will cost $40 million a year to operate—beyond the indigenous government’s ability to fund and sustain;
• The U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Government’s main distributor of development contracts, funded the Khost-Gardez road project. Originally valued at $86 million it has since mushroomed to $176 million;
• The insurgents’ second-largest funding source is the U.S. taxpayer. Money for construction and transportation projects are diverted to the insurgency so Afghan subcontractors can pay them for protection. Of course, the insurgents use this money to buy bombs, IEDs, and other explosives to kill foreign troops and civilians.

The report goes on and on with examples that should disgust U.S. taxpayers. In addition, the report was released amid news that August 2011 was the deadliest month for U.S. service members, and 2011 shaping up to be the deadliest year for Afghan civilians. Despite the spin from warhawks, people in the region know the coalition has lost. Last year, the “Godfather of the Taliban,” Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, laid out in extensive detail why America has been defeated (for skeptics of withdrawal, it’s worth reading).

The United States has largely disrupted, dismantled, and defeated al Qaeda. America should not go beyond that objective by combating a regional insurgency or drifting into an open-ended occupation. We have endured enough with tens of thousands of people killed, injured, and traumatized, and billions of dollars wasted.

Wartime Contracting Report Provides More Evidence to Exit Afghanistan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The House of Representatives is scheduled this week, as early as today, to consider an extension and “reform” of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), administered by FEMA. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the NFIP has been about $18 billion in the hole. And this is from a program that only collects around $2 billion a year in premiums, which barely covers losses and expenses in a normal year. So make no mistake, the NFIP is still on course to cost the taxpayer billions more in the future.

Even before Katrina, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the NFIP was receiving a subsidy of close to a billion dollars a year. Under CBO’s optimistic projections, the House’s reform bill would increase NFIP revenues by about $4 billion over the next ten years, making only a small dent in the program’s current deficit.

The projected cost savings could potentially be lost by the expansion of the NFIP in the House bill. Yes, you read that correctly. Despite being deep in debt, the House is proposing to expand the coverage, and hence the risk, underwritten by the NFIP. For instance, the reform bill adds coverage for living expenses and “business interruption expenses,” as well as increasing the coverage limit from $350,000 (250k for structure and 100k for contents) to about $520,000 per home.

Such a massive expansion of coverage would likely drive out the existing providers of excess flood insurance coverage. And yes, you also read that correctly: there are a handful of insurers that offer private flood insurance. There is absolutely no reason that the private market could not offer flood insurance. Yes, rates might go up for the highest risk properties, but they would likely go down for others (and clearly reduce costs to the taxpayer). And given the high administrative costs of the NFIP (about 30 percent of premiums go directly to private insurance companies to help run it), it is likely that a completely private system of flood insurance would be cheaper.

In the aftermath of the housing bubble and its extreme costs to the taxpayer, we should eliminate the vast array of subsidies for housing construction, including the NFIP. If there’s one thing we should have learned, the underpricing of risk can have disastrous results.

Put Federal Flood Insurance Out of Its Misery is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The following is cross-posted from the National Journal’s Education Experts blog. This week’s topic: Whether new ”gainful employment” regulations for higher education are too little, too much, or just right:

I agree largely with Steve Peha — our policies and mindsets have made “college” synonymous with “job training,” and that has led to huge inefficiencies. But there is an even deeper problem: government aid, both to students and schools.

The most aggressive opponents of for-profit schooling to have posted thus far appear to agree that taxpayer-funded student aid is what for-profit institutions are after. No doubt the critics are, for the most part, right. But there is another side to this equation: The aid also enables students to choose proprietary schools, choices many aid recipients likely would not have made had they been using only their own money, or money they borrowed from people who willing lent it to them. So aid helps enrich proprietary schools, but it also hugely degrades the incentives of students to economize or fully scrutinize the choices before them.

College is a two-way street, and student aid has fueled out-of-control traffic going in both directions

But it gets worse. What has been perpetually ignored by far too many people who’ve been involved in the assault of for-profit institutions is that all sectors of higher education get massive subsidies, and all are performing very poorly.

Public colleges get huge subsidies directly from state and local governments, yet still saddle students — and aid-supplying taxpayers — with big bills. And how do they perform? Only about 55 percent of students at four-year public colleges finish their degrees within six years, while only about 21 percent — one-fifth! — of community college students complete their programs within 150 percent of expected time. And yes, there is a lot that these figures do not capture, but there is no way to look at these outcomes of public schools as anything other than atrocious.

And nonprofit private institutions? They get big tax benefits by virtue of being putatively nonprofit, and often accumulate major wealth as a result. But their six-year grad rates? Only 64 percent.

Once again, the root problem is that massive government subsidies induce students to spend far more — and think about their priorities far less — than they would were they using their own dough, or money someone voluntarily gave them. Moreover, all of our higher ed subsidies enable colleges to raise prices with near impunity, and expend cash on all sorts of things that make them hugely inefficient.

In light of all this, “gainful employment” is clearly no solution to our higher ed troubles. It is, at best, an over-hyped distraction.

The Aid’s the Thing is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at the New America Foundation’s “Higher Ed Watch” blog, Stephen Burd purports to know “the truth behind Senate Republican’s boycott of the Harkin hearing.” And what is that truth? Republicans are trying to “discredit an investigation that has revealed just how much damage their efforts to deregulate the industry over the past decade have caused both students and taxpayers.”

Really?

Okay, it is possible that Republicans are trying to save themselves some sort of blame or embarrasment — I can’t read their minds — but if so they’ve done a terrible job. Every time Harkin holds one of his hearings the bulk of the media coverage treats it like it has revealed shocking abuse by the entire for-profit sector. And don’t forget the damage done by the now-discredited — at least for those wonks who have followed it – GAO “secret shopper” report that was baised against for-profits enough on its own, but Sen. Harkin abused even beyond what the GAO wrote was reasonable.  So Harkin has defintiely gotten his message across, and he certainly hasn’t hidden past Republican efforts to reduce regulatory burdens on for-profit schools.

The fact remains, however, that the whole Ivory Tower — every floor and staircase — is loaded down with luxurious but crushing waste, and the crumbling foundations are being propped up with huge amounts of taxpayer dough and student debt. Not addessing that, as the boycotting Senators have stated, is what has been blaringly wrong with Harkin’s crusade. (Not that I think either party is likely to do what needs to be done: phasing out federal student aid.)

So absolutely, let’s stop forcing taxpayers to prop up the for-profit part of the tower. But let’s also stop pretending that that part isn’t just one rotten level in a much bigger, buckling edifice.

Truth Is, All of Higher Ed Is Broken is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Florida Governor Rick Scott deserves a big round of applause for dealing a major setback to the Obama administration’s costly plan for a national system of high-speed rail. As Randal O’Toole explains, the administration needed Florida to keep the $2.4 billion it was awarded to build a high-speed Orlando-to-Tampa line in order to build “momentum” for its plan. Instead, Scott put the interests of his taxpayers first and told the administration “no thanks.”

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the administration is going to dole the money back out to 22 passenger-rail projects in other states. Florida taxpayers were spared their state’s share of maintaining the line, but they’re still going to be forced to help foot the bill for passenger-rail projects in other states.

Here’s Randal’s summary:

Instead, the Department of Transportation gave nearly $1 billion of the $2.4 billion to Amtrak and states in the Northeast Corridor to replace worn out infrastructure and slightly speed up trains in that corridor, as well as connecting routes such as New Haven to Hartford and New York to Albany. Most of the rest of the money went to Midwestern states—Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, and Missouri—to buy new trains, improve stations, and do engineering studies of a few corridors such as the vital Minneapolis-to-Duluth corridor. Trains going an average of 57 mph instead of 52 mph are not going to inspire the public to spend $53 billion more on high-speed rail.

The administration did give California $300 million for its high-speed rail program. But, with that grant, the state still has only about 10 percent of the $65 billion estimated cost of a San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line, and there is no more money in the till. If the $300 million is ever spent, it will be for a 220-mph train to nowhere in California’s Central Valley.

Why should Floridians be taxed by the federal government to pay for passenger-rail in the northeast? If the states in the Northeast Corridor want to pick up the subsidy tab from the federal government, go for it. (I argue in a Cato essay on Amtrak that if the Northeast Corridor possesses the population density to support passenger-rail then it should just be privatized.)

I don’t know if taxpayers in Northeast Corridor would want to pick up the federal government’s share of the subsidies, but I’m pretty sure California taxpayers wouldn’t be interested in footing the entire $65 billion for their state’s high-speed boondoggle-in-the-works. As I’ve discussed before, the agitators for a national system of high-speed rail know this:

If California’s beleaguered taxpayers were asked to bear the full cost of financing HSR in their state, they would likely reject it. High-speed rail proponents know this, which is why they agitate to foist a big chunk of the burden onto federal taxpayers. The proponents pretend that HSR rail is in “the national interest,” but as a Cato essay on high-speed rail explains, “high-speed rail would not likely capture more than about 1 percent of the nation’s market for passenger travel.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, congressional Republicans aren’t happy that the administration is taking Florida’s money and spreading it around the country:

Monday’s announcement drew criticism from House Republican leaders, who questioned both the decision to divide the money into nearly two-dozen grants around the country—instead of concentrating it into fewer major projects—and the fact that many of the projects will benefit Amtrak, the federally subsidized passenger-rail operator.

I heartily agree with the Amtrak complaint, but I’m not sure why as a federal taxpayer I should feel better about instead “concentrating [the money] into fewer major projects.” Subsidizing passenger-rail is no more a proper role of the federal government than education or housing. Unfortunately, for all the criticisms of the Obama administrations and the constant talk about spending cuts, Republicans don’t appear to possess much more desire to limit the scope of the federal government’s activities than the Democrats.

See this Cato essay for more on fiscal federalism.

High-Speed Rail and Federalism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

My friend Gawain Kripke at Oxfam posted a very good blog entry yesterday on the proposed cuts to agriculture subsidies. In it, Gawain elaborates on a point that I made briefly in a previous post about Rep. Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget plan: that cutting so-called direct payments—those that flow to farmers regardless of how much or even whether they produce—is only part of the picture.

Here’s Gawain’s main point:

Most farm subsidies are price-dependent, meaning they are bigger if prices are low and smaller if prices are high. Prices are hitting historic highs for many commodities, which means the bulk of these subsidies are not paying out very much money. Over time, the price-dependent subsidies have been the bulk of farm subsidies. They also distort agriculture markets by encouraging farmers to depend on payments from the government rather managing their business and hedging risks.

So—these days there’s only about $5b in farm payments being made, and these payments are not considered as damaging in international trade terms because they are not based on prices…

Still, Congress will probably make some cuts. But these cuts won’t really be reform and won’t produce much long-term savings unless they tackle the price-dependent subsidies. Taking a whack at those subsidies could save taxpayers money later and make sure our farm programs don’t hurt poor farmers in developing countries. (emphasis added)

I will be delighted if direct payments are abolished, thereby saving American taxpayers about $5 billion a year. But we should not be content with that, nor should we fool ourselves that we have tackled the main distortions in agricultural markets. If the price- and production-linked programs are not abolished, too, then taxpayers and international markets will pay the price if/when commodity prices fall.

Distortions versus Outlays is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

To sell his high-speed rail program, President Obama desperately needed a success story—a high-speed train operating during his administration that would awe the public and lead to a national demand for more such lines. That success story was going to be Florida’s Orlando-to-Tampa line, the only true high-speed route (as opposed to speeding up existing trains by 3 to 5 mph) that could have been completed during Obama’s term in office (assuming he is re-elected).

Anticipating that success, the administration drafted a proposal to use federal gasoline taxes and a “new energy tax” to fund $53 billion for more high-speed rail lines over the next six years. (The proposal also included $250 billion for highways, $120 billion for urban transit, $27 billion for “livability,” and $25 billion for an infrastructure bank.)

The chances of that happening died when Florida Governor Rick Scott decided to turn back the $2.4 billion in federal dollars dedicated to the Orlando-Tampa line. To maintain momentum behind high-speed rail, the administration could have given all of that money to California, the only other state proposing to build true high-speed rail.

Instead, the Department of Transportation gave nearly $1 billion of the $2.4 billion to Amtrak and states in the Northeast Corridor to replace worn out infrastructure and slightly speed up trains in that corridor, as well as connecting routes such as New Haven to Hartford and New York to Albany. Most of the rest of the money went to Midwestern states—Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, and Missouri—to buy new trains, improve stations, and do engineering studies of a few corridors such as the vital Minneapolis-to-Duluth corridor. Trains going an average of 57 mph instead of 52 mph are not going to inspire the public to spend $53 billion more on high-speed rail.

The administration did give California $300 million for its high-speed rail program. But, with that grant, the state still has only about 10 percent of the $65 billion estimated cost of a San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line, and there is no more money in the till. If the $300 million is ever spent, it will be for a 220-mph train to nowhere in California’s Central Valley.

In essence, the administration has given up on high-speed rail. New York Times editorial writers haven’t figured that out yet, opining that Florida Governor Scott made a dreadful mistake when he rejected the rail money. In fact, as tax activist Doug Guetzloe told a Tampa newspaper, “Federally funded rail is like being given a brand new Maserati and then you have to pick up the gas and the insurance — forever. The car looks great, but the costs will kill you.”

The Times suggested that Florida taxpayers will resent Scott’s decision whenever they are stuck in traffic. But no one seriously believes that intercity rail will ever relieve traffic congestion, most of which is in cities, not between them. In its original application for high-speed rail funds, Florida’s DOT admitted that Orlando-to-Tampa traffic grows more every five years than all the cars the trains were expected to take off the road, so at best high-speed rail was a very expensive and temporary solution to congestion.

Outside of the Times editorial offices, most transportation experts agree that the President’s high-speed rail program is over and his draft transportation bill is dead on arrival. Taxpayers throughout the country should thank Scott (as well as Ohio Governor John Kasich and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker) for saving them the hundreds of billions of dollars that Obama’s program would have eventually cost.

The Administration Concedes Defeat is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“National Public Radio (NPR) is paying the lobbying firm Bracy, Tucker, Brown & Valanzano to defend its taxpayer funding stream in Congress, according to lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Secretary of the Senate,” reports Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller. Once again, a government-funded entity is using its taxpayer funds to lobby to get more money from the taxpayers.

When the bailouts and takeovers started in 2008-9, I noted that there was lots of outrage in the blogosphere over revelations that some of the biggest recipients of the federal government’s $700 billion TARP bailout had been spending money on lobbyists. And I wrote:

It’s bad enough to have our tax money taken and given to banks whose mistakes should have caused them to fail. It’s adding insult to injury when they use our money — or some “other” money; money is fungible — to lobby our representatives in Congress, perhaps for even more money.

Get taxpayers’ money, hire lobbyists, get more taxpayers’ money. Nice work if you can get it.

At the same time, Dan Mitchell wrote that companies that received government money and then lobbied for more “deserve a reserved seat in a very hot place.” Taxpayer-funded lobbying is a scandal, but it’s a scandal that has been going on for decades:

As far back as 1985, Cato published a book, Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics, that exposed how billions of taxpayers’ dollars were used to subsidize organizations with a political agenda, mostly groups that lobbied and organized for bigger government and more spending. The book led off with this quotation from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”

The book noted that the National Council of Senior Citizens had received more than $150 million in taxpayers’ money in four years. A more recent report estimated that AARP had received over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding. Both groups, of course, lobby incessantly for more spending on Social Security and Medicare. The Heritage Foundation reported in 1995, “Each year, the American taxpayers provide more than $39 billion in grants to organizations which may use the money to advance their political agendas.”

In 1999 Peter Samuel and Randal O’Toole found that EPA was a major funder of groups lobbying for “smart growth.” So these groups were pushing a policy agenda on the federal government, but the government itself was paying the groups to lobby it.

Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for the very lobbying that seeks to suck more dollars out of the taxpayers. But then, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize banks, car companies, senior citizen groups, environmentalist lobbies, labor unions, or other private organizations in the first place.

When the Government Lobbies Itself is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last night’s vote by the Wisconsin-based portion of the Wisconsin Senate has received enormous attention. The scope of collective bargaining by school district and other government employees has been narrowed, and the state will no longer automatically garnish workers’ wages to pay union dues.

This was the right thing to do. But how much of a difference will these changes actually make to the state’s bottom line? As I’ve noted, the presence or absence of collective bargaining is not strongly correlated with school district spending. Instead, unions have won their massively (42%) above- market compensation through well-funded political action; which brings us to the question of automatic paycheck deduction of union dues.

Without automatic dues withdrawals, will public school unions still be able to afford their fantastically successful political activities? There’s no reason to doubt it. Given the huge compensation premium public school employees enjoy over their private sector counterparts, they have a powerful incentive to voluntarily keep funding the political action that helped win it.

Indeed, we can see this already in right-to-work states like South Carolina. Public school employees there have no collective bargaining rights and there is no automatic union dues withdrawal, but the Palmetto State nevertheless has a teachers’ union and an administrators’ association that have spent large sums of money on political action. It’s worked. Despite not being the wealthiest of states, South Carolina still spends roughly $12,000  per pupil on its public schools, and its public school teachers earn more than the state’s median household income. The teacher and administrator groups have also successfully defeated every legislative effort thus far to open up the state’s education system to private sector competition and parental choice.

The only way to rein-in out-of-control public school spending is thus to give both families and taxpayers an alternative to the government monopoly status quo. Cut taxes on folks who pay for their own children’s education, or who donate to non-profit scholarship organizations that subsidize private school tuition for the poor. Many states are doing this already on a small scale. By so doing so on a larger scale, families will have much greater choices and taxpayers will reap enormous savings.

Wisconsin: Post-Mortem & Predictions is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It is unclear whether New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) will make it to the Senate floor this year or if there are 67 votes for it if it does. According to the White House and arms control boosters, that uncertainty endangers us all by leaving Russia’s nuclear arsenal unmonitored and undermining our non-proliferation agenda. According to pundits, New START’s failure to pass in the lame-duck would be a grievous political wound for Obama adminstration, which is struggling to buy enough Republican votes for ratification.

In an op-ed out today on the National Interest‘s website, Owen Cote and I say this talk is mostly hot air. New START just isn’t that big a deal. We write:

[New START] would provide minor increases in intelligence and Russian goodwill. But passing it means handing taxpayers a substantial new tab on top of what we already pay for our bloated nuclear weapons complex. And rather than reducing the arsenal’s size and cost, the treaty props it up…. The real impact of New START is distraction. By faking a drawdown, the treaty keeps Americans from noticing that deterring our enemies requires nothing like the force structure we plan to retain.

Overwrought On START is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, President Obama hosted the White House Summit on Community Colleges, and in-your-face love was in the air. President Obama and Second Lady Jill Biden, a community college professor, couldn’t keep their hands off their signficant other, lavishing all sorts of praise on their favorite little schools.

Swooned Dr. Biden about the dreamy things community colleges do for their students:

They are students like the mother who shared her experience with us on the White House website of working towards a degree while raising three children and straddling financial challenges.  Now employed and the holder of a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree, she wrote, “Community colleges didn’t just change my life, they gave me my life.”

Community colleges do that every day. 

Ick!

The President, too, couldn’t hide his affection:

So I think it’s clear why I asked Jill to travel the country visiting community colleges -– because, as she knows personally, these colleges are the unsung heroes of America’s education system.  They may not get the credit they deserve.  They may not get the same resources as other schools.  But they provide a gateway to millions of Americans to good jobs and a better life.

Like the guy with the locker next to Mr. and Mrs. Lovebird, all I can say is “oh, come on!”

Community colleges might be a good option for some people, but they are hardly paragons of educational success. Quite the opposite: According to the U.S. Department of Education, they have the worst graduation rates of any two-year sector of higher education. Only around 22 percent of public, two-year college students graduate within three years, versus roughly 49 percent of private, not-for-profit attendees and about 59 percent of private, for-profit students.

Wait! What’s that? Private, for-profit institutions outperform super-cute community colleges…by a lot? But they’re the ugliest, meanest, least popular kids in school!  Nobody likes them!

Oh, I know what’s going on here! For-profit schools cost a lot more than community colleges, right? That’s why they’re so disliked.

That’s true if you look at tuition prices. But community colleges get big subsidies from government, especially state and local taxpayers. So they might actually cost a lot, it’s just that they sneak the money out of your back pocket and then congratulate themselves for charging students so little.  

When you look at government expenditures per-pupil, including aid to schools and students, it becomes clear that community colleges are, in fact, just as mean and greedy as for-profits. Indeed, former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro has calculated that they are actually more costly to taxpayers than for-profit schools (see table 24). According to his calculations, two-year public schools cost taxpayers $6,919 per student, while private, for-profits cost just $3,628. 

No wonder the summit turned my stomach! At the same time the administration and its allies in Congress are bashing for-profit schools, the President has a love fest with community colleges that are generally much worse. Unfortunately, it leaves you concluding that for-profits could walk on water and it wouldn’t matter: As long as they’re honest about trying to make a buck, they’ll be beaten up in the parking lot and never invited to any of the cool summits.

Enough Community College PDA is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Congress uses price controls to pay Medicare-participating providers.  Those providers invariably complain that Congress sets prices too low, but many are no doubt too high.

Congress chose to pay for ObamaCare‘s new entitlement spending in part by ratcheting down many of those prices.  That suggests supporters either believe that Medicare’s controlled prices generally exceed the marginal value of the relevant services, or that those prices will begin to exceed marginal value as providers become more productive (i.e., as they learn to provide those services at a lower cost).

Neither assumption is necessarily wrong.  Producers operating under price controls nevertheless have an incentive to improve productivity.  When costs fall relative to prices, producers get to keep the difference.  Ambulatory surgical centers saw a windfall because Medicare took two decades to update those price controls for productivity gains.

Medicare’s chief actuary and many others doubt that providers will realize the productivity gains assumed by Congress.  If the assumed productivity gains do not occur, those price reductions would reduce Medicare enrollees’ access to care.  Medicare providers and enrollees would likely persuade Congress to block the price reductions.  Medicare spending and the federal debt would rise.

Yet even if those productivity gains do occur, ObamaCare’s price reductions would still reduce access compared to a world without them, therefore enrollees and providers may still persuade Congress to eliminate them.  Regardless of what happens with productivity, as Tom Daschle notes, the patient-provider pincer movement usually carries the day.

This is an inherent defect of Medicare not found in markets.  Competitive markets automatically translate productivity gains into lower prices for consumers.  Medicare protects providers at the expense of enrollees and taxpayers.

(Cross-posted at National Journal‘s Health Care Expert Blog.)

Did ObamaCare Get Medicare’s Price Controls Right? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times reports that congressional investigators have found mounting evidence that “American taxpayers have inadvertently created a network of warlords across Afghanistan who are making millions of dollars escorting NATO convoys and operating outside the control of either the Afghan government or the American and NATO militaries.”

The Financial Times broke this story back in March. But their most startling discovery was that after nearly a decade at war in Afghanistan, Washington still has no clue as to who its true enemies (and allies) are.

Many Americans would be surprised to learn that some prominent Afghan officials are in fact saboteurs of America’s presumptuous and dangerously quixotic nation-building endeavor, instituting policies that feed the insurgency’s momentum in order to get more economic assistance from the coalition. America’s Ambassador to Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, said as much last November. Eikenberry warned (of course, to no avail), that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, “continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden. . .He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further.” [Emphasis added]

Karzai knows very well that once the conflict ends, his open aid spigot will dry up. Indeed, Karzai has become notorious for replacing and undercutting people in his government who become too well-liked and “clean,” fearing these officials will become more popular than himself. Such double-gaming leads us to Karzai’s younger half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai.

He consolidates his power base by acting as the powerful chairman of Kandahar’s provincial council, as well as relying on a mafia-like network of militias, many of whom demand bribes from security companies that benefit from U.S. contracts. The rise of these militia fiefdoms have profited handsomely with foreign taxpayer dollars. “You have about 30 oligarchs who have built little empires with ISAF money,” Carl Forsberg, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of War, told the Financial Times. “We are ultimately creating a shadow government.”

Lamenting America’s strategic paradox, Congressman John F. Tierney (D-MA), chair of the U.S. House National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee said recently: “In this case, the U.S. appears to be inadvertently fueling the very warlordism and corruption that we are pressing President Karzai to curtail.”

U.S. officials say perceptions that power in Kandahar is concentrated in the hands of the Karzai family’s ethnic Pashtun Popalzai tribe fuel support for the insurgency. According to a Pentagon assessment released April 28, Afghan public perceptions of Karzai’s anti-corruption efforts are “decidedly negative” and extend to international forces and the international community. U.S. defense officials also find that the “exploitative behavior” of some Afghan officials contributes to the insurgency’s success.

For far too long, U.S. officials and analysts have concentrated their focus on Pakistan. As regional expert Steve Coll notes, “If you think about it, the United States is essentially waging a proxy war against its own ally. The Taliban are a proxy of the government of Pakistan. We are an ally of the government of Pakistan. We are fighting the Taliban.”

But government officials in Kabul also fit into this equation; unfortunately, this is a government that Washington still endeavors to support.

Our Enemies or Our Allies? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at National Journal‘s National Security Experts blog, this week’s question revolves around the health of the U.S. economy, and its relationship to U.S. power. 

The editors ask: 

How serious a threat is the mounting debt to the nation’s standing as the world’s only superpower? Can the U.S. continue to spend more than all other countries combined on its military forces given burdensome debt levels? In what other ways does the mounting debt undermine the country’s strategic position? [...]

My response:

Our long-term fiscal imbalance, which increasingly amounts to a massive intergenerational wealth transfer, is clearly a sign of our decline. But it is a decline that has been a long time coming. (I first wrote about the insolvency of the Social Security system as a college sophomore, 23 years ago.) As such, it is tempting for people to assume that we’ll figure our way out of this mess before a complete collapse. Let’s call them, at the risk of a double negative, the declinist naysayers. And, even if they are willing to admit to the problem in the abstract, the naysayers can point to the more serious, and urgent, imbalances between pensioners and those who pay the pensions in Europe or Japan and say “At least we aren’t them.”

That is a pretty shoddy argument, but it seems to be ruling the day. We can talk about the obvious unsustainability of using taxes on current workers to pay benefits for retirees until we’re blue in the face. And my second grader can do the math on a system that was designed when workers outnumbered beneficiaries by 16.5 to 1, and in which, by 2030, that ratio will fall to 2 to 1. It simply doesn’t add up. (For more on this, much more, see my colleague Jagadeesh Gokhale’s latest.)

But this isn’t a math problem; this is a political problem. The incentive to kick the can down the road is overwhelming. The pain in attempting to deal with the problem in the here and now is, well, painful. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that members of Congress / Parliament / Bundestag / Diet, etc, have become very good at avoiding the issue altogether. And many of those who have chosen to tackle it are “spending more time with their families.”

What does all this mean for the United States’s standing as the world superpower? Less than you might think. Our difficulties in two medium-sized countries in SW/Central Asia have done more to puncture the illusion of American power than our political inability to deal with domestic problems. Our fiscal insolvency might convince other countries to play a larger role, if they genuinely feared for their safety. But other countries, especially our allies, are cutting military spending, while Uncle Sam continues to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders. In other words, our ability to maintain our global superpower status isn’t driven by our economic problems. But it is strategically stupid.

It is here that I take issue with Ron Marks’s contention that we spend less today than during the Cold War. While technically accurate, measuring military spending as a share of GDP is utterly misleading (as I’ve argued elsewhere.) If the point is to argue that we could spend more, I agree. But the measure doesn’t address whether we should do so.

We should think of military spending not as a share of the American economy, but rather relative to the threats we face. In real terms (constant current dollars), we spend today more than when we were facing down a nuclear-armed adversary with a massive army stationed in Eastern Europe and a navy that plied the seven seas from Cam Ranh Bay to Cuba. We spend more than during the height of the Vietnam or Korean Wars. Today, terrorist leaders are hunkered down in safe houses somewhere in, well, somewhere. In other words, what we spend is utterly disconnected from the threats we face, a point that is easily obscured when one focuses on military spending as a share of total output.

We spend so much today not because we are facing down one very scary adversary, but because we are facing down dozens or hundreds of small adversaries that should be confronted by others. After the Cold War ended, our strategy expanded to justify a massive military. Since 9/11, it has expanded further. Our fiscal crisis alone won’t force a reevaluation of our grand strategy. It will take sound strategic judgement, and a bit of political courage, to turn things around.

In the cover letter to his just-released National Security Strategy, President Obama acknowledged that it doesn’t make sense for any one country to attempt to police the entire planet, irrespective of the costs. Unfortunately, the document fails to outline a mechanism for transferring some of the burdens of global governance to others who benefit from a peaceful and prosperous world order. We should assume, therefore, that the U.S. military will continue to be the go-to force for cleaning up all manner of problems, and that the U.S. taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.

Fiscal Imbalance and Global Power is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

What is it with modern American liberals and taxes? Apparently they don’t just see taxes as a necessary evil, they actually like ‘em; they think, as Gail Collins puts it in the New York Times, that in a better world “little kids would dream of growing up to be really big taxpayers.” But you really see liberals’ taxophilia coming out when you read the reviews of the new movie Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe. If liberals don’t love taxes, they sure do hate tax protesters.

Carlo Rotella, director of American Studies at Boston College, writes in the Boston Globe that this Robin Hood is “A big angry baby [who] fights back against taxes” and that the movie is “hamstrung by a shrill political agenda — endless fake-populist harping on the evils of taxation.” You wonder what Professor Rotella teaches his students about America, a country whose fundamental ideology has been described as “antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism.”

At the Village Voice, Karina Longworth dismisses the movie as “a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement” in which “Instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about ‘liberty’ and the rights of the individual as he wanders a countryside populated chiefly by Englishpersons bled dry by government greed.” Gotta love those scare quotes around “liberty.” Uptown at the New York Times, A. O. Scott is sadly disappointed that “this Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles. Don’t tread on him!” The movie, she laments, is “one big medieval tea party.”

Moving on down the East Coast establishment, again with the Tea Party hatin’ in Michael O’Sullivan’s Washington Post review:

Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” is less about a band of merry men than a whole country of really angry ones. At times, it feels like a political attack ad paid for by the tea party movement, circa 1199. Set in an England that has been bankrupted by years of war in the Middle East — in this case, the Crusades — it’s the story of a people who are being taxed to death by a corrupt government, under an upstart ruler who’s running the country into the ground.

Man, these liberals really don’t like Tea Parties, complaints about lost liberty, and Hollywood movies that don’t toe the ideological line. As Cathy Young notes at Reason:

Whatever one may think of Scott’s newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speak of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the “libertarian rebel” played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the “rob from the rich, give to the poor” cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution….The Sheriff of Nottingham is Robin’s chief opponent; at the time, it was the sheriffs’ role as tax collectors in particular that made them objects of loathing by peasants and commoners. [In other books and movies] Robin Hood is also frequently shown helping men who face barbaric punishments for hunting in the royal forests, a pursuit permitted to nobles and strictly forbidden to the lower classes in medieval England; in other words, he is opposing privilege bestowed by political power, not earned wealth.

The reviewers are indeed tapping into a real theme of this Robin Hood, which is a prequel to the usual Robin Hood story; it imagines Robin’s life before he went into the forest. Marian tells the sheriff, ”You have stripped our wealth to pay for foreign adventures.” (A version of the script can be found on Google Books and at Amazon, where Marian is called Marion.)  Robin tells the king the people want a charter to guarantee that every man be “safe from eviction without cause or prison without charge” and free “to work, eat, and live merry as he may on the sweat of his own brow.” The evil King John’s man Godfrey promises to “have merchants and landowners fill your coffers or their coffins….Loyalty means paying your share in the defense of the realm.” And Robin Hood tells the king, in the spirit of Braveheart‘s William Wallace, “What we ask for is liberty, by law.”

Dangerous sentiments indeed. You can see what horrifies the liberal reviewers. If this sort of talk catches on, we might become a country based on antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism and governed by a Constitution.

Robin Hood and the Tea Party Haters is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Great stuff on Forbes.com today by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity’s Daniel Bennett. Bennett examines the income-based student-loan repayment provisions attached to the health-care reconciliation law, and itemizes how much of their monthly repayment bill borrowers in most federal loan programs will be able to skip out on, leaving taxpayers holding the bag.

Check out Bennett’s entire, handy chart in the article to see the savings for numerous levels of debt and income, and I’ll just highlight the savings for borrowers with $25,000 in debt – slightly more than the average for those graduates who have any debt.

Basically, any single person at that debt level making below a little more than $60,000 a year would see savings under IBR. A federal loan of $25,000, with a 6.8 percent interest rate, would normally carry a monthly repayment of $383. But a person earning $60,000 a year would only pay $365 under IBR, a $19 monthly savings. And, of course, the IBR savings to the borrower — and loss to the taxpayer — gets bigger as income goes down.

Oh, and that’s really only half the story: While anyone with a federal loan (excluding PLUS loans) is now eligible for IBR, if you go into saintly non-profit work — including assuming the incredible hardships of working for the government — your remaining loan balance will be forgiven after only ten years of on-time payments, versus twenty for any devil who dares produce things for which people voluntarily pay!

Income-based Taxpayer Ripoff is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Recently, the Federal Reserve has significantly altered the procedures and goals that it had followed for decades. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has introduced a bill calling for an audit of the Fed.

Remarkably, there is significant opposition to such oversight, and the political prospects for undertaking such an audit are relatively bleak. In a new paper, Cato scholar Arnold Kling examines the processes and outcomes on which an audit should focus, and looks at opposition to the audit:

We should document why the Fed took each step, what the expected results were, and whether those results were achieved. …The profit or loss of the Fed’s investments would provide a very helpful indicator of whether the Fed’s actions served the economy as a whole or merely transferred wealth from ordinary taxpayers to bank shareholders.

Read the whole thing.

The Case for Auditing the Fed is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Concern about the pay, benefits, and performance of government employees seems to be growing. Chris Edwards’s articles on how government pay is outpacing private-sector pay have generated media attention, cartoons, and angry rebuttals from the head of the federal Office of Personnel Management. Steven Greenhut has a new book, Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation, and is writing lots of newspaper articles on the high costs of government unions, also the topic of a recent Cato Policy Analysis. New Jersey unions are not finding much sympathy as they try to hold on to their raises, benefits, pensions, and work rules in the face of Gov. Chris Christie’s attempt to cut the budget. Liberal journalist Mickey Kaus is running for the U.S. Senate, trying to warn California’s voters and the Democratic Party about the excessive power and destructive influence of public employee unions.

And now Saturday Night Live. The zeitgeist-riding comedy show had a truly harsh sketch this weekend about the “Public Employee of the Year Awards.” It touched every element of popular resentment toward government workers: “people with government jobs are just like workers everywhere – except for the lifetime job security, guaranteed annual raises, early retirement on generous pensions, and full medical coverage with no deductibles, office visit fees, or copayments” — “retirement on full disability” by an obviously young and healthy worker — “Surliest and Least Cooperative State Employee” — “3200 hours [a year] on the job, all of it overtime” — New York school janitors living in Florida — employees with two current jobs and full disability — an entire workday at the DMV without serving a single customer — no-work contracts –  surprisingly early closings — and “he’s on break.”

Time for unions to start worrying?

Furor over Government Employees is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

…Sparta, New Jersey that is. Like their fellow citizens in 54 percent of school districts across the state, the people of Sparta rejected their local district’s proposed budget yesterday. That’s the highest rate of school budget rejections since 1976, according to the New Jersey Star Ledger. Why? Taxpayers are tired of the relentlessly increasing per-pupil cost of public schooling at a time when their own household budgets are under pressure. It helped that popular new governor Chris Christie recommended that voters reject their districts’ budgets unless the teachers unions agreed to a one year salary freeze. [HT: Instapundit]

If this keeps up, voters might just decide to dump the government monopoly approach to schooling in favor of an education system that offers families far more choices while dramatically reducing costs.

This Is Sparta! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog