Get ready for Washington D.C.’s Mall to be filled with seniors in the not-too-distant future.

About 25 percent of seniors depend entirely on Social Security for their consumption. And for two-thirds of them, Social Security makes up the majority of their monthly income. With soaring fuel and food prices, they are beginning to complain about being unable to make ends meet — as in, having to cut down on leisure and travel activities.

The rise in gas, food, and commodity prices is unlikely to be a bubble and won’t ”burst” anytime soon. Furthermore, the Fed’s recent interest rate–cutting binge has promoted a weaker dollar and risks higher future inflation and inflation expectations. That means our itinerant seniors will soon demand a larger inflation adjustment on their monthly checks than allowed by Social Security’s post-retirement benefit formula.

No prizes for guessing whether Congress will capitulate!

An Arizona appellate court struck down two school voucher programs yesterday, finding that they violate a state constitutional prohibition against using public money to aid private or religious schools. The programs, serving disabled children and those in foster care, were unanimously ruled unconstitutional by a three-judge panel of Arizona’s Division Two Court of Appeals.

The ruling and the motivations behind the suit have been attacked by school choice groups, with the Alliance for School Choice calling it “shameful.” Praising the court’s decision, but doing little to allay concerns about the quality of public school instruction, John Wright, president of the Arizona Education Association, tautologically declared that “Arizonans understand that public schools are our pathway to great public schools.…”

What are the legal merits of this decision, and what does it mean for the affected kids and the school choice movement as a whole?

The ruling hinged on whether the vouchers in question can be considered aid to private and religious schools, because Article IX, paragraph 10 of the Arizona Constitution forbids the use of public money for that purpose. Choice advocates argued that the aid is being given to families and that the schools only benefit indirectly. The court found that while families are indeed aided, so too are the schools. However much I want all children to have access to a choice of independent schools competing to serve them, I find it hard to disagree with the court’s conclusion.

That doesn’t mean that the appellate court’s word is final. Choice advocates will no doubt appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court, which could agree with the narrower interpretation of the aid’s beneficiaries.

Even if it does not, yesterday’s ruling leaves open two paths for recreating the stricken programs in constitutionally acceptable fashion. The justices pointed explicitly to one obvious, if difficult, approach: seek an amendment to the state’s constitution that would strike or revise the “Aid Clause” ( Article IX, paragraph 10).

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Wired’s Threat Level blog has a great post about Arlen Specter’s effort to get to the bottom of a recent spying scandal. Not, mind you, the Bush administration’s various warantless wiretapping programs, but rather spying among football coaches in the NFL:

Apparently real-world warrantless spying isn’t as egregious as snooping on opposing NFL coaches.

Specter and other lawmakers initially talked tough when The New York Times disclosed Bush’s spying program in 2005. “There is no doubt that this is inappropriate,” Specter said at the time.

But Congress, including Specter, eventually passed the Protect America Act, which allowed government officials to eavesdrop in the United States on telephone conversations and e-mails without warrants, if the target of the surveillance is “reasonably believed” to be overseas.

And now, with the warrantless wiretapping issue still simmering, Specter believes that the most pressing spying issue in the country involves coaches taping each others’ hand signals.

Over at Ars Technica, I’ve got an in-depth discussion of In Re Bilski, an important case that was argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last week. The Federal Circuit has jurisdiction over most patent appeals and, until recently, their decisions were rarely reviewed by the Supreme Court, making them effectively the final authority on patent issues. And unfortunately, they’ve made quite a mess of things, departing dramatically from Supreme Court patents and allowing patents on broad, abstract concepts (including software, which I wrote about last year). The result has been an explosion of low-quality patents and frivolous litigation:

Amazon’s much-derided one-click patent was approved the year after the decision. Patent litigation in the software industry has exploded with firms facing lawsuits over patents covering extremely broad software concepts such as wireless e-mail, web embedding, and converting IP addresses to phone numbers. Technically, these patents cover general purpose computers executing the algorithms described in the patent rather than the algorithms themselves. But because no one executes such algorithms with pen and paper, the net result has been to give the patent holders effective monopolies on the algorithms themselves.

The Federal Circuit has been catching a lot of flack for its patent jurisprudence in recent years, and they’ve showed an increased interest in revisiting past precedents. As I discussed in a Cato podcast last week, In Re Bilski concerns a patent that was rejected by the USPTO for being too abstract. In its call for amicus briefs in the case, the Federal Circuit explicitly asked for opinions on whether it should revisit its key rulings on abstract patents from the 1990s.

Unfortunately, the oral arguments suggest that the Federal Circuit is unlikely to abandon its dubious experiment with allowing patents on software and other abstract concepts. At best, I think we can expect the court to tinker at the edges, restricting the most egregiously abstract patents.

I’m more optimistic about the Supreme Court, which has shown a renewed interest in patent law in recent years and has shown no compunctions about overturning the Federal Circuit’s patent decisions. At least three Supreme Court justices (Scalia, Breyer, and Stevens) have raised questions about the patentability of software, suggesting that there may be some skepticism from the Supremes on this issue. If the case gets appealed to the Supreme Court, it will be another opportunity to correct a Federal Circuit that has not done a good job of respecting Supreme Court patent precedents.

As many expected, the California Supreme Court has overturned that state’s ban on gay marriage. So many expected it, in fact, that opponents have already submitted more than a million signatures through California’s initiative process to put an anti-gay-marriage amendment on the ballot this fall.

I wonder if opponents of gay marriage in California will rely on the same arguments as did the Washington Supreme Court? 

Having so recently blogged about the expansion of Florida’s k-12 scholarship tax credit program, I’m delighted to be able to add that Georgia governor Sonny Perdue yesterday signed a similar program into law in his own state. Meanwhile, in Louisiana, a modest New Orleans voucher program was passed out of the House yesterday by a nearly 3 to 2 majority (a corresponding bill has already passed out of Senate committee and awaits a floor vote).

While none of these programs is yet big enough to create significant market forces, the growth of the Florida program and the bi-partisan support that it and the New Orleans program are enjoying are promising signs.

Matt Bai has a writeup in this Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine of McCain’s vision on foreign policy. Buckle up:

McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain’s view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet….

[…]

[A]s we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values. Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election? How about sending soldiers into Myanmar, formerly Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest by a military junta?

“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

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If you’re like most Cato@Liberty readers, you often ask yourself, “Self, what kind of artwork does Michael Cannon have on the walls of his office?” Thanks to the folks at bloggingheads.tv, not only can you find the answer, but you can learn an awful lot about medicine, health insurance, and health care reform. 

This week, BloggingHeads hosted a discussion between New America Foundation senior fellow Shannon Brownlee and me.  Brownlee is the author of the quite excellent book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.  (Disclaimer: I disagree with many of the conclusions in Overtreated, else we wouldn’t have much to debate.)  Brownlee was kind enough to plug my book, too.

Should we force our way into Burma to aid cyclone victims? Since the May 3 storm, Burma’s military regime has barred most outsiders from delivering supplies and medical relief. The regime is accepting aid shipments, it appears, but lacks the capacity and maybe the will to efficiently deliver them. With people still dying — estimates so far range roughly from 40,000 to 130,000 — and another storm possibly on the way, several Western nations may push the UN Security Council to evoke the “responsibility to protect,” and authorize the use of military force to deliver the aid. National positions are still solidifying, but it appears that France, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, maybe Canada, and even Pakistan endorse this tact. EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana, for one, is willing to do “whatever is necessary to help the people who are suffering” in Burma.

Less importantly, Robert Kaplan takes up the call in today’s New York Times, pointing out that US Naval forces now exercising off Thailand could escort in an invasion force. Kaplan doesn’t quite come out and call for the use of force but seems to be leaning that way, as is his wont.

Kaplan does concede that things could get messy. Even if the war were quick, the government could fall, and then the invaders might wind up trying to reorganize the country, which is fraught by ethnic tensions. Kaplan is cautiously optimistic about this endeavor — he thinks the fact that Burma has suffered insurgencies for 60 years is conducive to their settlement rather than indicative of their tenacity. Personally, I think the last thing the United States needs is another occupation to manage. We should wish the Europeans luck if they’re game, but we shouldn’t encourage them.

You could argue that the best way to get the junta to open Burma’s doors is to get legal authority to knock them down. But bluffing may be a bad tactic here. The Burmese military is reputed to be paranoid about invasion. According to the Times, “One of the generals’ most enduring fears is a seaborne invasion by Western powers it refers to as ‘foreign saboteurs.’” Along with the truth of the adage, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” this fear indicates that threatening to break in may only cause the Burmese to double their locks. Painful as it is, diplomacy is a better route.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger just released his revised budget proposal. To close the $17.2 billion gap between the spending desired and the revenue growth projected, the governor is recommending securitizing future lottery revenue or increasing the sales tax. As soon as November, pending legislative approval, voters could have the chance to vote for even more state debt. Rejecting the proposed ballot measure would trigger a sales tax increase of 1 cent for up to three years. Schwarzenegger’s budget does keep some of the two percent across-the-board spending cuts the administration called for in January and renews his call for a spending limit and rainy day fund.

Interestingly, in his comments, the finance office director notes that the underlying problem in the state is the tendency to spend one-time revenues on spending increases that continue indefinitely. Unfortunately for Californians, their proposed solution is not to reduce the size of the state government, but to call for a rainy day fund to smooth fluctuations in revenue growth, which will be funded by more debt.

Hopefully, as legislators consider the spending plan for 2008-09, they will take a closer look at reducing spending and enacting a spending limit to address the underlying problem of unsustainable spending growth.

Former Georgia congressman Bob Barr announced this week that he wants to be the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee in 2008. Party members have only another week to kick the tires of this former Republican before they decide at their May 22 convention whether he should be their standard bearer in the fall.

I’ll leave it to others to dissect his overall record, but on international trade Barr is no libertarian.

During his eight years in the House, from 1995 to 2003, Barr voted on 24 major bills and amendments affecting the freedom of Americans to trade and invest in the global economy. He voted in favor of lower trade barriers only four times, voting in favor of higher trade barriers 20 times.

You can check out his trade voting record (or that of any other member of Congress) by using the “Trade Vote Records” search tool on the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies web site.

On the pro-trade side, Barr did vote twice to approve presidential trade promotion authority, to expand visas for foreign-born doctors, and to relax computer export controls. But he also voted: (more…)

Bad news: the House has just passed the farm bill by a veto-busting margin of 318 to 106. Roll call here. The measure will likely become law unless the improbable happens and scores of Republicans back up the president’s veto when it comes.

Yesterday, an announcement from the Commonwealth Fund landed in my inbox. The subject line read:

How to Achieve Universal Coverage While Lowering Health Spending

A colleague received the same release, and forwarded it along with this note:

Coming next, anti-gravity and perpetual motion machines.

To which I replied:

…eternal youth, gold from base metals, a lasting peace in the Middle East…

To which he replied:

The dead shall rise, the lame shall walk, the blind shall see.

I’m tempted to throw in something about the Cubs winning the World Series. But even that wouldn’t convey the level of impossibility we’re talking about here. You see, there’s an outside chance that the Cubs actually could take the Series.

I’d say we’re as likely to see the dead, the lame, and the blind win the World Series as we are to achieve universal coverage while lowering health spending.

Or does even that overstate the odds?

After noting that “some of my best friends work for think tanks,” The Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle contends that these organizations cannot be trusted because the purported ideological homogeneity of their employees renders them intellectually blindered, lazy, and compromised. Since Cato was apparently the first think tank Ms. McArdle thought of in the context of school choice (and I’m not even one of her best friends!), I couldn’t resist the temptation to respond.

All human institutions are flawed (I used to work for one of the most successful corporations in the world, and it was no exception), but I haven’t noticed the crippling “groupthink” that McArdle warns of in my time at Cato. I have had stimulating debates with colleagues on a host of issues, including education policy. As it happens, I’m not alone. Cato made waves in the blogosphere not so long ago due to a very public disagreement among its staff over domestic surveillance law and policy. One of the bloggers who noted this lack of ideological groupthink at Cato was… Megan McArdle. Cato scholars have at times publicly disagreed on high profile foreign policy questions as well.

Getting to the heart of her argument, though, I’m puzzled as to why someone conversant with public choice theory would imagine that think tanks are categorically different from other sources of scholarship when it comes to ideological bias. McArdle contends that donors would balk if think tanks produced publications at odds with the donors’ preferences. Some do. Cato has in fact lost donors on a number of occasions for this reason. But this incentive system is not fundamentally different from what obtains in the academic world. In academia, career advancement is tied to journal publication, but journal editors and peer reviewers have their own biases (as do academic authors themselves), and these are felt in their decisions of what to publish. Hence, there is pressure on academics to conduct studies they expect to be more rather than less publishable.

The most notable difference between academic and think tank papers is that naive some readers grant academic papers an unwarranted presumption of impartiality. The same applies to government publications. For think tanks, the absence of that presumption means that our work is more stringently checked by the media when the ideological flavor of the medium is different from the presumed slant of the think tank. Since there are few libertarian media outlets, Cato output is subjected to more extensive fact checking by the media than is the typical academic paper, government pronouncement, or the media’s own reporting. For example, I recently wrote an op-ed noting that the press grossly understates per pupil spending in DC public schools. In making my case, I observed that local media had claimed “$8,322 is spent for each student” and then I showed that when the district’s total budget is divided by its enrollment the real figure is over $24,000 per pupil. The editor of the paper publishing my piece asked for my source for the inaccurate media figure, claiming that his own paper knew better. I pointed him to an article in his own paper that used it (among others).

This is not unusual. It is far more common that we at Cato point out inaccuracies in the mainstream media and in government claims and reports than the other way around. 

In a world in which everyone who collects and analyzes data invariably is subject to complex economic pressures, there is only one reliable path to the truth: read their publications critically and assess them for yourself, on their intrinsic merits. In cases where you lack the expertise to critically evaluate a study yourself, the next best thing is probably to seek out a proxy reviewer – an expert in the field whose conclusions you have reason to trust. But simply dismissing an entire category of scholarly institutions due to a misplaced faith in the impartiality of the other categories is an epistemological error.

In an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal the political liberal Thomas Frank paints a Depression-era picture of American workers and households.

“Real hourly wages for most workers … have risen only 1% since 1979,” he writes. Median “non-elderly” household income is down since 2000. Americans work more hours per year than their counterparts in other industrialized countries. The phrase “modern American slave labor” even finds its way into his column. All this reminds Frank of “those what-if stories in which Hitler wins World War II. Could this really have happened to my country?”

What is to blame for this “disaster”? According to Frank, “tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest of us behind.”

Facts on the ground show a far different America. In a study from last October, titled “Trading Up,” I found that expanding trade and trade agreements have actually lifted the living standards of most Americans. Consider a few facts that directly contradict Frank’s doom-saying:

• In the past decade, the average hourly real compensation—wages and benefits adjusted for inflation—earned by American workers is up 22 percent.

• Median household income for all Americans (what, don’t the elderly count, too?) is up 6 percent in the past decade.

• The share of American households earning LESS than $35,000 a year continues to fall.

• The median net worth of American families, adjusted for inflation, is up by more than one-third since the mid-1990s.

• Total employment is up by 16.5 million and the unemployment rate is down. (And since when did liberals find it objectionable that Americans seem to have plenty of work to do?)

Critics of free markets and free trade may find it politically expedient to paint a grim picture of economic “stagnation,” but in the real world Americans continue to progress.

The commentariat (including Cato folks and friends) have spent the past couple of weeks sounding off on John McCain and Hillary Clinton’s proposals to suspend the federal motor fuels tax this summer. The commentary has been almost uniformly critical of the idea, and some of the harshest critics have been economists.

Unfortunately, a lot of this commentary seems to be value judgments disguised as economics. Also, much of the economic analysis makes assumptions about the market that may not be correct or that may be offset by other market conditions — but the commentators do not mention (and may even forget) those problems. Put simply, though the idea of a gas tax holiday may be flawed, many of the opinion and analysis pieces on the McCain and Clinton proposals appear to be flawed as well.

Peter Van Doren and I have put together this short paper on the microeconomics of the gas tax. Don’t let the figures and the talk of “elasticities” throw you — the ideas are easy to understand.

The upshot is this: Contrary to many economists’ claims, it’s quite possible that a tax holiday could give consumers some price relief on motor fuels. (This is an economic insight.) However, it’s an open question whether that savings is worth its cost. (Answering that question requires a value judgment.)

One of the hottest trends in health policy — wait, where are you going? — is for insurers to pay doctors and hospitals based on the value of their services. I know: how novel. But as it happens, in the United States we generally pay providers based on volume, rather than value. The new trend of value-based purchasing goes by the name “pay-for-performance” or P4P.

P4P can be tricky, since patients vary in terms of their preferences and how they respond to even high-quality care. So if you’re going to have insurers define and reward value, it makes sense to let patients choose their health plan. That way, patients can avoid a P4P system that might (ironically) leave them with lower-quality care.

Unfortunately, the government doesn’t see it that way. The federal Medicare program — which covers 45 million seniors and disabled Americans, making it the nation’s largest purchaser of medical services — is developing a P4P scheme that enrollees will find unavoidable, for two reasons. First, many Medicare enrollees do not have the option of switching insurers. Second, even if they do have that option, private insurers will simply follow the P4P scheme developed by Medicare. Why spend your own money doing something when a big government bureaucracy will do it for you?

The reactions to a study in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association illustrates another concern with government-administered P4P. According to that study:

Safety-net hospitals tended to have smaller gains in quality performance measures over 3 years and were less likely to be high-performing over time than non–safety-net hospitals. An incentive system based on these measures has the potential to increase disparities among hospitals.

This is not necessarily a problem: a P4P scheme should penalize low-quality care and spur those hospitals to improve quality.

The problem is that when government administers the P4P scheme, the low-quality providers and their advocates will lobby their elected officials for more money in advance of improving quality. In some cases, such as safety-net hospitals, providers may indeed require more resources to improve the quality care. But because the P4P scheme is politically controlled, even providers who don’t will demand more resources — and get them. Moreover, what will those providers say if the “pre-improvement” subsidies fail to deliver any improvement? I’m willing to bet may hat that they’ll ask for even more subsidies.

As I argue here, better that we just let patients choose their health plan, and leave the P4P-ing to the private sector, where the low-quality providers won’t be able to lobby their way out of making some badly needed behavioral changes.

For a look through the keyhole into the bizarre world of the Rumsfeld-era DOD establishment, take a look at these documents describing the DOD military analysts/”force multipliers” program. Or better yet, listen in to some of Rumsfeld’s Roundtables, with audio available here and here. Over the slurpings and mastications of people like Jed Babbin, now editor of Human Events who was then thought to be a reliable pitcher of “softballs” designed to defend the DOD line of the day, you can hear what your half-a-trillion per year pays for. (Sounds like expensive china their forks and knives are clinking against, at least.)

The topics of conversation range from Rumsfeld likening himself to Churchill, Rumsfeld grousing about obstruction to his ideas on the Hill, Rumsfeld grousing about Moqtada al-Sadr (”he’s not a real cleric!”), and various people (including Babbin) fawning over Rumsfeld. The discussion is peppered with Pentagon-speak, good-old-boys-club outbursts of laughter, and Rumsfeldian aphorisms (”you don’t want to eat your seed corn…”) It’s a little nauseating and a little enlightening. Bill Lumbergh meets Robert McNamara.

Yesterday I blogged about a Washington Post column by Shankar Vedantam that began: “About 35 million Americans regularly go hungry each year, according to federal statistics.” I looked up the federal data, and the real number appears to be about 9 million.

I queried the Post about the discrepancy, and Shankar kindly pointed me to this study produced by academic health scholars and the Sodexho Foundation. (I appreciate the prompt replies by both Shankar and the Post’s ombudsman).

The Sodexho study is a classic example of program advocates apparently inflating the size of a problem in order to prompt “Congress to expand existing programs,” as it proposes. I am not a health specialist, but it seems to me that Sodexho using 35 million for the number of Americans going hungry is a huge exaggeration. 

On page 10 and 11 of the Sodexho study, the authors admit that they are including both those people who occasionally go hungry and those who are “food insecure,” which is a far larger group. As I noted yesterday, the USDA puts the narrower group (those sometimes going hungry) at only about 9 million people.

While the Sodexho authors admit that they are using the broader group, they do not tell readers how vastly narrower the actual hunger group is. (The table on page 11 only shows the broader measure).

Also, the authors use “hunger” in the title, and they frequently claim that they are measuring the “economic cost of hunger.” On page 13 and 21, they say that 35 million people do not “get enough to eat.” But again, not getting enough to eat best describes 9 million people, not 35 million.

The Sodexho study takes the 35 million and calculates a cost of hunger in the United States of $90 billion. Obviously, the cost would be much less if the narrower and more accurate definition of hunger were used. 

To top it off, the authors of the study (page 21) have the chutzpah to claim that they are being “conservative” in their approach.

As I should have mentioned in my previous post, the House and Senate are likely to vote on the Farm Bill conference report tomorrow.

The bill, an abysmal one that carries a price tag of roughly $300 billion, will likely pass easily in the Senate, where an earlier version of the bill sailed through the chamber last year in a 79-14 vote.

So the questions over the possibility of an override center mainly on the House, which will likely see a closer vote, but not by much.

If House Republicans are unable to secure enough votes to sustain a veto, it would signify a remarkable failure of their leadership, especially of House Minority Leader John Boehner. Boehner has publically opposed the bill, but - along with House Minority Whip Roy Blunt - has refused to actively push his Republican colleagues to do the same.

An article in today’s The Hill notes:

[L]obbyists said members were being told to “vote their districts,” meaning they could support the measure without fearing any consequence from leadership.

What’s worse is that the bill probably could have been improved upon, much earlier in the process. The Republican leadership has full discretion over committee assignments. Instead of seating on the Agriculture Committee a balanced array of viewpoints, the House GOP leadership has chosen a collection of members that hail almost universally from farm-heavy districts and are greatly predisposed to support an increase in agricultural spending.

In fact, an informal vote count compiled by the office of Rep. Jeff Flake suggests that every single Republican member of the House Agriculture Committee is likely to support the Farm Bill tomorrow.

What would the bill look like if Rep. Flake or another critic of current farm policies was a member of the committee? Sure, one member can have only so much impact on a committee of 46. But at least that would give taxpayers a voice at the table.

Further to my quasi-post on the farm bill Friday, I may have been premature in my enthusiasm. According to an article [$] today in Congress Daily, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee Charles Grassley (R, IA) is confident that Congress will be able to override the President’s threatened veto:

Grassley expects the White House will not push Republicans to sustain the expected veto. If Bush does push support for the veto, cautioned Grassley, he should expect “very weak loyalty in the Congress from his own party.” Bush has said that some Republicans in safe seats who represent districts without agriculture might not worry about offending anti-hunger advocates by turning down the bill’s $10 billion increase in nutrition programs. Grassley said today that such a scenario is the only way he could envision the White House getting enough House support to sustain a veto.

The full conference report, in all its glory, available here for the strong-of-stomach.

Also alarming: the conference report apparently includes language that would nullify a federal appeals court decision under the Freedom of Information Act that has done so much (via the great Ken Cook at the Environmental Working Group) to shed light on these egregious subsidies. See here.

WisPolitics.com reports that Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle (D) plans to take more than $20 million out of the state’s REAL ID account and transfer it into the state’s general fund.

Wisconsin Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R) objects:

When I shepherded the REAL ID bill through Congress 3 years ago, it was in response to one of the key recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, that ‘fraud in identification documents is no longer just a problem of theft.’ As we saw in 2001, in the hands of a terrorist, a valid ID accepted for travel in the US can be just as dangerous as a missile or bomb.

Congressman Sensenbrenner is correct to claim responsibility for REAL ID, but less accurate in other parts of his statement. The 9/11 Commission’s ‘key’ recommendation wasn’t key. (Indeed, Congress’ effort to follow the Commission’s recommendation was repealed by REAL ID.)

Nobody - not the 9/11 Commission, not Congressman Sensenbrenner, not Stewart Baker, nor anyone else - can explain the proximity between false ID and terrorist attacks, or how REAL ID cost-effectively secures the country against any threat.

Wisconsin’s governor has issued a mighty well-placed snub to the creator of the “Sensenbrenner tax.”

Steve Clemons posts a heartening little video of Bush père’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft responding to Steve’s question “What do you think about Cuba?” It’s a rare occasion for foreign policy folks to take heart and ponder whether the forces of reality may not be making progress on some issues, at least:

More common sense on Cuba here.

A recent story in the Arizona Republic describes the rising practice of using “registered agents” to take care of the paperwork associated with the E-Verify system, which is mandatory for employers in Arizona. Registered agents know how to navigate this system, which requires employers to submit information about their new hires to the federal government for an immigration-status background check. Registered agents are there to step in and reap the rewards when employers throw up their hands.

The story reports that registered agents charge from $7.50 to $10.00 per new hire. There are about 50,000,000 new hires per year in the country (according to Labor Department statistics), and let’s assume that average employer is a little more efficient than those who use a registered agent - so make it $5.00 per new hire. That’s $250,000,000 per year, just on basic administration of the E-Verify system.

There are plenty of other costs to electronic employment elgibility verification, which I wrote about in my recent paper, “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

At a recent hearing, Representative Ken Calvert (R-CA) reportedly said, “There are certain interests that simply do not want employment verification.” He was referring to an internecine fight with a human resources group. But I found in my paper that “successful internal enforcement of federal immigration law requires an overweening, unworkable, and unacceptable identity system.”

Freedom-loving Americans do not want employment verification. They think it’s doubly or triply foolish to spend taxpayer dollars and burn employers’ time on policies that reduce our economic growth.

Last year, the federal Medicare program announced that — after 40 years of financially rewarding providers who harm patients – it would no longer pay the added costs of treating patients who fell victim to a list of medical errors known as “never events.”  In other words, the providers — doctors, hospitals — will have to eat the costs of their own mistakes. 

As they often do, private health insurance companies are following Medicare’s lead.  WellPoint, Cigna, and other fee-for-service plans have announced that they too will stop paying the added costs that come from “never events.”

In the race to improve health care quality, is government beating the market?  Hardly.

As noted health economist Alain Enthoven and I explain in a recent oped, the market long ago developed payment mechanisms that punish medical errors:

If anything, government prevents markets from improving patient safety. A raft of government interventions favor fee-for-service medicine and inhibit competition by plans with greater incentives to reduce errors. Medicare, the nation’s largest purchaser of medical services, is almost entirely fee-for-service. Federal and state tax laws give larger tax breaks to people or groups that choose more costly care, and favor employer-based coverage, which usually denies workers the ability to choose their health plan.

Government regulation of health insurance and medical professionals further inhibit competition by such plans.

If you want to know why medicine isn’t better, cheaper, and safer, look no further than your own government.

When it comes to international academic assessments, especially in math and science, a few Asian countries regularly kick world posterior. Many observers chalk this up to these countries having national curricula, but this seems a specious conclusion given that most of the countries that do worse than Asian nations—and sometimes even worse than the U.S.—have national curricula, too.

A couple of additional—and quite likely more accurate—potential secrets of Asian success are touched on in a Saturday Washington Post article about South Korea:

South Koreans are working up a lather over working too much.

They put in far more time on the job than citizens of any other free-market democracy. Compared to Americans, they average 560 more hours at work a year — the equivalent of 70 more eight-hour days. And that is down significantly from the go-go 1990s.

In the OECD, they rank second to last in leisure spending, first in suicide and last in bearing children.

Despite the dearth of children, South Korea leads the OECD in per capita spending on private education, which often includes home tutors, after-school cram sessions and intensive English-language courses.

South Koreans, it seems, rely not primarily on government schooling as we do, but abundant private options, including tutoring companies that appear to be almost ubiquitous in many Asian nations. Indeed, in 2002 Education Week reported that in Japan “more than 50,000 private cram schools are taking in some $12 billion a year by some estimates.”

The massive consumption of private education is not the only likely explanation for outstanding Asian academic performance. So too is the culture that drives that consumption: As the Post highlights, Koreans put more emphasis on work than the citizens of any other industrialized nation. Of course, that appears to be a double-edged sword, probably yielding great testing outcomes but, as the suicide and income data in the article hint, not necessarily outsized success in life—or happiness. And while national academic standards and tests don’t likely create academic success, they could very well exacerbate the ugly side of Korean culture, taking an already work-obsessed mindset and forcing it on those students and families who might find happiness—and long-term success—in other ways.