“Friendly” Health Care Debate on PBS
As I blogged last fall, I had the opportunity to participate in a Fred Friendly Seminar on the future of health care reform. Hosted by NYU law professor Arthur Miller, the program featured — in addition to me — AARP CEO Bill Novelli, former U.S. Comptroller General Dave Walker, Washington Post Bureau Chief T.R. Reid, and Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, along with family doctors, business owners, hospital administrators, and health policy experts in a lively debate over how to control health care costs, expand access, and improve the quality of care. That debate will be broadcast by PBS the week of January 18. For information on when it can be seen in your area, click here.
How Should Developing Nations Regulate Health Care?
The latest issue of the journal Health Affairs publishes a letter I wrote to the editors concerning articles on health care regulation in China and India. The entire letter follows (links added):
Recent articles on China and India (Jul/Aug 08) share the assumptions that markets for medical care and health insurance require extensive government regulation and that each nation should focus on universal coverage.
I am unfamiliar with the history of regulation in those nations. But the track record of clinician and insurance regulation in the United States is not encouraging. Both have been used by incumbents to block competition, leading to higher costs and lower quality. Gerald Bloom and colleagues worry that unless India imposes clinician licensing, “the natural process of competition is expected to force each insurer to come up with its own accreditation policy and reimbursement procedures.” Does that mean that prepayment would compete openly with fee-for-service? And that physicians could not increase costs by blocking health plans from employing mid-levels when appropriate? Dear God—not that.
Ashoke Bhattacharjya and Puneet Sapra write, “It is encouraging to note that notwithstanding the myriad issues and challenges discussed above, both countries are developing a constructive working framework to balance the interests of government, providers, employers, the insurance industry, and patients, en route to the goal of universal coverage and fairness in health care financing.” That’s just the problem: a policy of universal coverage puts too much power in the hands of elites. It inevitably “balances” those interests, when patients’ interests should trump all others. Does not the fact that “these countries lack the fiscal resources required for universal coverage because of their…low average wages” suggest that many residents have more pressing needs than health insurance? For things that might just deliver greater health improvements? In a profession where universal coverage is a religion, such questions are heresy,I know.
China and India are in the process of a slow climb out of poverty. It is entirely possible that the best thing those governments could do to improve these markets and population health would be to enforce contracts, punish torts, contain contagion, and nothing else.
Michael F. Cannon
Cato Institute, Washington, D.C.
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; International Economics and Development
Cato Unbound on Controlling Terror
This month’s Cato Unbound began yesterday, with a fascinating title and topic: Keep Calm and Carry On: How to Talk about Terrorism.
The term is trite, perhaps, but terrorism is handily described as a form of psychological warfare. It’s a wonder, then, that more time and attention hasn’t been paid in official Washington to communications strategies pertaining to terrorism.
People elsewhere have been giving it focus, and the author of the lead article is Bill Burns, a research scientist at Decision Research and consultant at the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events. His piece is called “The Path Well Taken: Making the Right Decisions about Risks from Terrorism.”
You are hereby assigned it as reading, but here’s an inspiring quote from Burns’ closing paragraph:
America may yet offer the voice of calm and deliberative action to a world as shaken as we. And through these travails, we must lead by example, inspired by our constitutional freedoms and drawing from the best of our science and culture.
Watch for follow-on commentaries by Bernard Finel (January 7), John Mueller (January 9), and Camille Pecastaing (January 12).
Burns is a speaker, and this topic will be one of the subjects, at Cato’s two-day conference on counterterrorism strategy which begins on Monday next week. Read more and register here.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
No Vacancies on the Supreme Court, but a New “Tenth Justice”
The selection of Harvard Law School Dean Elana Kagan to be the next solicitor general (and the first woman nominated for a position known as the “Tenth Justice”) is not at all surprising. While President-elect Obama is under great pressure to nominate more women for cabinet and judicial positions, in Kagan and former Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan he had two highly credentialed candidates who would have been front-runners regardless of their gender. Two things we know about Kagan is that she is very smart – even before the Supreme Court clerkship and record of scholarship, she won a Sachs Scholarship, sometimes called a “Princeton Rhodes” – and has done a fabulous job as dean (including poaching star professors from law schools across the country). While the White House and Attorney General will, of course, be setting the administration’s legal policy, we can expect Kagan to defend those policy positions ferociously and expertly. Whether those efforts will coincide with a defense of the individual liberty and limited government encapsulated in the Constitution remains to be seen.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Prisoners against the Stimulus
A postcard in my mailbox this morning from Stan Hart, inmate #800054, at Iowa State Penitentiary:
“Is there a chance of stopping the great giveaway ’stimulus’ plan? Isn’t the fact that none of those ’shovel-ready’ projects are currently funded mean that they are neither necessary nor essential?”
Great point Stan. State and local investment spending is at high levels, and many governments have so much extra money that they have been wasting billions of dollars on sports stadiums and convention centers. How could it be that “the highways are crumbing” as stimulus supporters claim?
The answer is that policymakers misallocate investment. They always have, and they always will, because governments are nonmarket institutions. That’s why the hope for a more rational infrastructure policy comes from privatizing highways, airports, and other facilities.
Bernard Madoff for Social Security Commissioner
As Barack Obama prepares to take office, a few crucial administration positions remain unfilled. Herewith a modest proposal for one still open position: Bernard Madoff for Social Security Commissioner.
True, there may be a minor problem since Madoff is under indictment for running a $50 billion “Ponzi scheme” on Wall Street, but think of the qualifications. Madoff is accused of running a scheme in which he took money from people with a promise to invest it. But instead of making investments, he kept the money for himself, and simply took more money from later investors and used it to pay earlier investors. Now compare that to a Social Security system that takes money from workers but does not save or invest it. Instead the government simply uses money from younger taxpayers to pay benefits to earlier retirees, while spending any “surplus” on other things. In the end, neither Madoff’s scheme nor Social Security are sustainable.
The big difference is that Madoff will likely go to jail; the politicians in Washington will likely get reelected.
Obama Wants 600,000 More Bureaucrats
In his weekly radio address, President-Elect Obama regurgitated some typical nonsese about how everyone “across the political spectrum” agrees that the burden of government spending should increase and that this somehow will “stimulate” the economy (for an explanation of why this is nonsense, see here). Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of his radio address, though, is that he says he wants to create three million new jobs, eighty percent of them in the private sector. I’m no math genius, but 20 percent of three million works out to be 600,000 new bureaucrats to harass the American people. This is hope and change?
Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don’t act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double digit unemployment and the American Dream slipping further and further out of reach. …we can’t just fall into the old Washington habit of throwing money at the problem. We must make strategic investments that will serve as a down payment on our long-term economic future. We must demand vigorous oversight and strict accountability for achieving results. And we must restore fiscal responsibility and make the tough choices so that as the economy recovers, the deficit starts to come down. That is how we will achieve the number one goal of my plan—which is to create three million new jobs, more than eighty percent of them in the private sector.
Spendaholic Governors Want $1 Trillion from Feds to Replenish Political Liquor Cabinet
Every interest group is busy in Washington lobbying for a slice of the so-called stimulus plan being concocted by the incoming Obama Administration. The governors are especially greedy, particularly the ones that already have taxed and spent their states into deep trouble. As Reuters reports, five of them are asking for $1 trillion. They say this money would restore the economy, but everyone who has watched this video knows that is nonsense. The real purpose is to buy more votes with other people’s money:
Governors of five U.S. states urged the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country’s 50 states to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession. The governors of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin — all Democrats — said the initiative for the two-year aid package was backed by other governors and follows a meeting in December where governors called on President-elect Barack Obama to help them maintain services in the face of slumping revenues. …The governors said during a conference call with reporters that the plan had been discussed with Congressional leaders and the incoming administration, which had indicated its willingness to help. “The Obama team has been very receptive in listening to us,” said Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin. He said “quite a number” of other governors back the initiative. …The proposal comes amid expectations that the Obama administration, which takes office on January 20, will provide hundreds of billions of dollars in economic stimulus to boost the shrinking U.S. economy and halt the loss of jobs.
Helen Suzman, R.I.P.
Helen Suzman, the longtime leader of the parliamentary opposition to apartheid, has died at 91. The Times of London writes:
Helen Suzman had a special place in South African history, being generally recognised as the most effective parliamentary fighter against apartheid policies.
For 13 years - from 1961 to 1974 - she was the sole representative in Parliament of the liberal Progressive Party, forerunner of the Democratic Party.
In South Africa they knew the difference between liberals and leftists. Plenty of leftists and communists opposed the National Party and its apartheid system. But so did liberals like Suzman, people committed to human rights, freedom of thought, and a market economy. She did not forget her liberalism when apartheid finally fell and the African National Congress came to power. She continued to speak out against repressive policies and the Thabo Mbeki government’s continuing support for Robert Mugabe.
I loved reading about her quick wit in parliamentary debates. She sent the minister of law and order a postcard from the Soviet Union, saying, “You would like it here. Lots of law and order.” Once she told a government minister to go into the black townships and see their appalling conditions for himself. He would be quite safe, she said, if he went “heavily disguised as a human being.” In a famous exchange a certain minister shouted: “You put these questions just to embarrass South Africa overseas.” To which she coolly replied: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa – it is your answers.” When an Afrikaner in Parliament sneered at her Jewish roots and asked what her ancestors were doing when his were bringing the Bible to the “savages,” she snapped, ”They were writing the Bible.”
In 1989 Helen Suzman was a Distinguished Lecturer at the Cato Institute. See a picture on page 55 of this very large pdf of our 25-Year Annual Report. Her remarks were reprinted in Cato Policy Report and then in Toward Liberty, our compilation of essays from our first 25 years, and can be read here.
On the first day of the new year, the world has lost one of its great champions of freedom. May she inspire many more.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Political Philosophy
Brady Campaign Suing to Block Concealed Carry in National Parks
As I noted before, the Department of the Interior recently announced that it will allow the concealed carry of handguns in national parks and wildlife refuges. New West reports that the Brady Campaign is now suing to block implementation of the rule. (H/T to David Hardy at Of Arms & the Law.) The Brady Campaign claims that the rule will allow concealed carry on the National Mall just in time for inauguration. Not true.
The full complaint is available here (pdf), where the claim about National Mall carry is repeated. Scroll down to pages 19-20, where one of the Brady plaintiffs alleges harm from the new rule because he lives in Maryland and visits the National Mall, where he may feel threatened by the prospect of concealed weapons.
Actually, the rule only allows carry “if, and only if, the individual is authorized to carry a concealed weapon under state law in the state in which the national park or refuge is located.” D.C. officials recently ramped up requirements for a gun permit, and a gun permit does not permit concealed carry outside the home. D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier made it explicitly clear that “[w]e have no plan to expand those laws to allow people to carry handguns in public.”
The Department of the Interior’s rulemaking came in the wake of the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller, which overturned the District’s long-standing gun ban. The Heller case is detailed in Brian Doherty’s new book Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle over the Second Amendment. The Cato book forum is available in video and podcast formats here.
TARP
The Bush administration has blown through the first $350 billion of your money that Congress authorized it to spend under the Troubled Asset Relief Fund. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is now asking for the second $350 billion.
Will Congress approve the second $350 billion of TARP money? I have no special skill at political speculation, but since a reporter asked, here are five reasons I think that it won’t, thankfully.
- It is not clear that the first $350 billion of TARP money has aided the economy at all. I suspect that all the recent Treasury micromanagement through TARP has destabilized the economy and delayed the recovery, not helped it. But certainly TARP supporters cannot claim any big success
- Congress and the general public are unhappy with the lack of transparency and poor oversight of TARP spending. President-elect Obama campaigned on creating a more transparent government. TARP spending does not fit into that Obama vision.
- Democrats don’t like TARP anymore. Democrats are unhappy that TARP money has bailed out Wall Street and not Main Street, to use their nomenclature. They are resisting further bailouts of financial firms.
- Republicans don’t like TARP anymore. Republicans in Congress are unhappy that the Treasury bailed out the auto firms with TARP money after they explictly opposed an auto bailout. They don’t want to give the new Democratic administration a similar open-ended opportunity to spend.
- The U.S. economy will recover from the current recession, and the Obama administration will want to take credit for it. Renewing TARP will muddy the waters for that credit-taking. For Obama, it is politically important that he “do something” in his first few months to the economy so that when the recovery comes he can claim success. TARP is a Bush thing, Obama needs something fresh and new.
What Obama should do is a pass a large corporate tax rate cut, which would spur long-run growth. Alas, Obama appears to be an old-fashioned Keynesian, and his credit-taking vehicle is shaping up to be a gigantic “stimulus” spending plan. I think that’s crackpot, as I touched on here, and will address in future blog posts.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
The Bluegrass Porker
The following howler from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in today’s Wall Street Journal is worth calling out:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in a statement Monday supported the idea of using federal spending to boost the economy. But he warned that the price tag, which could approach $800 billion over two years, shouldn’t become an excuse for funding undeserving projects. “We should have a simple test: Will the yet-unwritten, reportedly trillion-dollar spending bill really create jobs and grow the economy — or will it simply create more government spending, more bureaucrats and deeper deficits?” Mr. McConnell said.
Didn’t the Republican Senator from Kentucky, along with his Republican congressional colleagues and Republican president, oversee the largest federal spending binge in decades?
If history is any guide, it’s a good bet that Sen. McConnell thinks “creating jobs” means funneling taxpayer pork to the state of Kentucky. Back in October, when he was struggling for reelection, the Washington Post reported that “McConnell boasts of the projects he has brought to Kentucky — a total of $500 million for the state last year, he said last week. He lists every project he has brought to every town he visits, and argues that Lunsford couldn’t do the same.”
Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to “create more government spending, more bureaucrats and deeper deficits” when Sen. McConnell and his party are running the show.
(For a list of Sen. McConnell’s recent pork grabbing, which totals $195 million, check out the Citizens Against Government Waste’s 2008 Pig Book by clicking here and selecting his name from the pull-down menu.)
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Government “Stimulation” — Shouldn’t the Economy be Booming?
Prevailing wisdom among politicians, media talking heads, and a sizable number of economists is that a downpour of government money is needed to “stimulate” the economy into recovery. (To understand why this belief is bunk, please see Dan Mitchell’s helpful video here.)
But isn’t spending tons of money exactly what government at all levels has been doing in recent years? According to U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis numbers, combined federal, state, and local expenditures in 2000 were an already unhealthy 30% of GDP. Eight years and two recessions later, government spending now sucks up 35% of the nation’s economy and is trending higher. During that time we have witnessed the first $2 trillion federal budget and the first $3 trillion dollar budget.
With all the money federal, state, and local governments have been spending shouldn’t we be experiencing a boom? It would seem to me that proponents of government spending as a cure for our economic cold have it backward.
‘First, Assume I’m Right’
In a Saturday New York Times op-ed, Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress writes: “Drive around Chicago, Detroit or most other big cities and you’ll see dilapidated schools staffed largely by rookie teachers. The districts spend, say, $10,000 a child.”
Perhaps my memory is corrupted by nostalgia, but wasn’t there an era when the Times op-ed page discouraged policy commentary based on made-up, make-believe numbers?
As Miller might have discovered if he had researched the issue, Detroit is spending roughly $13,000 per pupil this school year, while Chicago spent roughly $14,000 in 2007-08. These figures can be calculated by reviewing readily available budget documents, summing all applicable expenditures, and dividing by enrollment. In Detroit, for instance, we sum FY09 “General Fund” expenditures (funds # 11, 13, 14, 22) with those of the Bond Redemption Fund (#31), and relevant items of the Food Service Fund (#25). Total expenditures come to roughly $1.24 billion while the official enrollment estimate for the school year is 96,194. The quotient of the two is just under $13k. FY08 data for Chicago yield a figure just above $14k.
Miller goes on to assert that “If you compare most poor, urban areas to their nearby affluent suburbs, the suburbs typically spend thousands of dollars more per pupil.” Do they? Let’s go Miller one better and compare ALL poor urban districts to ALL wealthy suburban districts. The National Center for Education Statistics publishes a table with these numbers (Table 37-2, page 172) in its most recent edition of the Condition of Education. The relevant numbers are (for the 2004-05 school year, in 2006-07 dollars):
Current per pupil spending, highest poverty city districts: $9,901
Current per pupil spending, lowest poverty suburban districts: $9,455
Had Miller checked his numbers, he would have discovered his assumptions to be not only mistaken but exactly backwards, and his policy prescription thus entirely groundless.
Had the New York Times checked his numbers, or simply asked him to check them, it might have done a better job of disguising how low it has sunk in recent years. Or was it always this bad?
I’m Changing My Name to Bank Holding Company
It was a Merry Christmas for GMAC, which learned on Christmas Eve that the Federal Reserve had approved its application to become a bank holding company. That gives GMAC “access to new sources of funding, including a potential infusion of taxpayer dollars from the Treasury Department and loans from the Fed itself,” as the Washington Post explains. Of course, that’s on top of the $13 billion that General Motors itself has been granted as a short-term bailout until a bigger bailout can be arranged.
GMAC isn’t the only company that has suddenly become a “bank holding company” in order to cash in on the $700 billion financial bailout. Late one night in November, American Express was granted the same privilege. Not to mention Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, CIT…
Maybe it’s time for a new version of Tom Paxton’s classic song “I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler,” sung here by Arlo Guthrie: “When they hand a million grand out, I’ll be standing with my hand out.” Of course, there’s already been a new version, “I’m Changing My Name to Fannie Mae,” sung here by Arlo and here by Paxton. Besides the name of the company, they had to make a few other changes in the lyrics, like “When they hand a trillion grand out, I’ll be standing with my hand out.”
So take it away, Tom and Arlo: I’m Changing My Name to Bank Holding Company.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Downsizing the Federal Government
President-elect Obama has pledged to go through the federal budget “line by line” to root out waste. In this new video, Cato analysts Chris Edwards, Sallie James and Daniel Ikenson explain why the Department of Agriculture is a great place to start.
For more great videos from the Cato Institute, subscribe to our YouTube Channel.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Trade
Our New Quasi-Allies
On the way out the door, the Bush administration is extending something resembling security guarantees to Georgia and Ukraine.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ukraine’s foreign minister signed a “Charter on Strategic Partnership” on December 19. According to the State Department, it will be the basis for the pact with Georgia, which will be signed within a week.
The deal with Ukraine is non-binding, meaning that it is legally meaningless. (Presumably, the same will be true of the Georgia-U.S. pact.) But its language can be read to commit the United States to defend Ukraine:
This Charter is based on core principles and beliefs shared by both sides:
1. Support for each other’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and inviolability of borders constitutes the foundation of our bilateral relations.
True, this is no formal commitment to mutual defense, as in the NATO treaty’s Article 5. But leaders in Ukraine might believe that this obligates the United States to aid them in a fight with Russia. That is doubly true because the agreement also says that the United States will help Ukraine prepare for NATO membership. The confidence that seeming–U.S. protection provides may cause leaders in these countries to provoke Russia, possibly dragging the United States into a crisis. In Georgia’s case, this sort of moral hazard was already obvious last August.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security
Fort Dix Five Convicted
In case you missed it, five foreign-born defendants have been convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix, NJ, a site often used to train up reservists for deployment to Iraq. These guys are essentially terrorist wannabes, but they did have some weapons training and may have perpetrated an attack if left to their own devices.
While the government made the effort to try some aspiring terrorists, it has bungled the prosecution of Ali al-Marri, an exchange student and alleged sleeper agent for Al Qaeda. The government moved him to military custody at the naval brig in Charleston, SC. Then the government asked the presiding judge to dismiss the charges against al-Marri with prejudice, meaning that they cannot be re-filed if he moves back to civilian custody. That was a very peculiar thing for the government to do and may end up wasting good police and intelligence work.
The Fourth Circuit held that he can be held as an enemy combatant, but the Supreme Court granted certiorari and is slated to hear arguments in March.
For more on the future of counterterrorism policy, check out Cato’s upcoming conference. This is part of a three-year project on counterterrorism and civil liberties.
Jindal’s Rx: the Most Coordinated System of Care that No One Can Access
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) proposed Medicaid reforms are getting a lot of press. Jindal proposes to expand eligibility for Medicaid, enroll Medicaid patients in private managed-care plans, and do other things to improve the quality of care. Writing in The American Spectator, Joseph Lawler says the approach is “market-based” and “could forestall universal health care.”
A friend asked my thoughts about Jindal’s proposal. Here’s what I emailed back:
Why is it that when politicians propose giving taxpayer dollars to private companies, people think that’s “market-based”?
Jindal’s plan is not market-based reform. As a general matter, market-based charity care is just that: private charity. So the only market-based Medicaid reforms are those that remove people from the Medicaid rolls — e.g., federal block grants, eligibility restrictions, etc.
Jindal wants to expand eligibility. For a welfare program. And we call that market-based?
Jindal may be able to improve the quality of care through greater coordination. Which looks good on paper. But if the quality of care in Medicaid improves, more people will enroll. Only 2/3 of those eligible actually sign up for the program. (Many of the 1/3 who don’t enroll actually have private coverage.) So improving Medicaid benefits could cause enrollment to increase 50 percent. And that’s before Jindal expands the eligibility rules.
With all the additional cost pressure, what’s going to happen to Medicaid payments and enrollees’ access to docs? (There are reasons why Medicaid pays so little.)
Louisiana’s Medicaid program could someday achieve the most coordinated system of care that no one can access. Should we pull people out of private health plans for that?
Expanding enrollment in a government-run health plan is supposed to forestall universal coverage? Discerning consumers of market-based ideas should keep shopping.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Don’t Let the Left Nationalize Health Insurance
With left-wing Democrats controlling Congress and the White House, and many special-interest groups clamoring for reform, people are starting to talk about comprehensive health care reform as if it were a done deal.
Yet comprehensive reform could easily crater — and it should crater if it includes any of the following:
- Government-run health care for the middle class
- Mandates
- Price controls
Those reforms would effectively nationalize health insurance, regardless of whether we continue to call it “private” insurance.
Republicans, moderate Democrats, and independents should kill any reforms that include any of those three items. Here’s why, and how.
The Good News about the Bailouts
They mean more money for Washington, D.C.:
The government’s bailout of the banking and automobile industries is likely to expand the federal bureaucracy, creating jobs that could fill vacancies in office buildings, according to the report by the Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Government and Politics
Great Moments in Local Government
This story probably has a deeper meaning for those concerned about a hyper-sensitive society. It also probably raises the hackles of those trying to protect 2nd Amendment rights. But my immediate reaction was that only government could do something as stupid as arrest a 10-year old boy for having a toy cap gun:
The latest case of zero-tolerance at the public schools has a 10-year-old student sadder and wiser, and facing expulsion and long-term juvenile detention. And it has his mother worried that his punishment has already been harsher than the offense demands. “I think I shouldn’t have brought a gun to school in the first place,” said the student, Alandis Ford, sitting at home Thursday night with his mother, Tosha Ford, at his side. Alandis’ gun was a “cap gun,” a toy cowboy six-shooter that his mother bought for him. “We got it from Wal-Mart for $5.96,” Tosha Ford said, “in the toy section right next to the cowboy hats. That’s what he wanted because it was just like the ones he was studying for the Civil War” in his fifth-grade class at Fairview Elementary School. …Tosha said that Wednesday afternoon, after school, “six police officers actually rushed into the door” of their home. “He [Alandis] opened the door because they’re police. And then they just kind of pushed him out of the way, and asked him, ‘Well where’s the gun, where’s the real gun?’ And they called him a liar… they booked him, and they fingerprinted him.” …Alandis was charged with possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic acts and threats. …Sherri Viniard, the Director of Public Relations for the Newton County School System, emailed a statement to 11Alive News Thursday that reads, in part: “Student safety is our primary concern, and although this was a toy gun, it is still a very serious offense and it is a violation of school rules. We will not tolerate weapons of any kind on school property.” Alandis had his first hearing in juvenile court on Thursday. Tosha said the case worker assigned to Alandis will recommend a period of probation, rather than juvenile detention. The judge will make the final decision. Tosha said Alandis is not allowed back in school for now. She has a meeting scheduled with school administrators. She does not know if he will be expelled, and is hoping for no more than a ten-day suspension.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
‘Tis Better to Take
In a sign of how toweringly stacked government is against he who believes ’tis wrong to steal, my place of residence offers taxpayer-subsidized classes on how to maximize your taxpayer subsidy for college. That’s right: The government subsidizes classes on subsidy-grubbing.
“Strategies are revealed on how to reposition assets to minimize the amount the government determines you can afford to pay,” proudly declares the description of “Paying for College without Going Broke” in the winter 2009 adult education catalog from the Alexandria (VA) City Public Schools. Students will “find out how to use the IRS to fund college through ‘tax scholarship’. This seminar will give you the tools and knowledge to meet your goals.’”
That’s right: If your goals include maximizing the amount that other people have to pay for you or yours to go to college, Alexandria has a fantastic deal for you! And don’t worry, only saints refrain from stealing these days, and who wants to be one of them?
Obama’s Not-So-Centrist Cabinet
Journalists continue to insist that President-elect Obama has named a largely centrist Cabinet. But they’re clinging to a storyline that might have been true two weeks ago but no longer is. Obama’s national security team — Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and James L. Jones — and his economic team — Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Christina Romer, and Bill Richardson — could be regarded as centrists, or at least as centrist Democrats.
But as the Cabinet selection process went on, Obama increasingly named left-wing activists to jobs in which they could carry out his ambitious plans to “transform our economy” and be the 21st-century Franklin Roosevelt. Tom Daschle at HHS wrote a book on how we need a Federal Health Board to manage and regulate every aspect of our health care. Hilda Solis at Labor is a sponsor of the bill to eliminate secret ballots in union authorization elections and of heavy regulatory burdens on business. She opposed the Central America Free Trade Agreement and generally opposes free trade. Shaun Donovan worked on affordable housing issues in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration — just the policies that led to the mortgage crisis and then the general financial crisis. His reward for a job well done? He’s coming back as secretary of HUD.
White House science adviser John Holdren is an old-time “running-out-of-resources” Paul Ehrlich cohort who disdains economics and famously lost a bet with Julian Simon on whether the prices of natural resources would rise, reflecting growing scarcity. He and Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy; former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection chief Lisa Jackson as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Carol Browner, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, as the White House’s “energy/climate czar,” are all global-warming catastrophists who see an urgent need to impose crushing burdens on the economy in the name of influencing the climate a century from now.
The choice of Tom Vilsack to be secretary of agriculture is said by the Washington Post to be an example of Obama’s moderation and intention to balance competing interests. You see, he’s popular with “groups representing big agricultural interests, which praise him for his support of biotechnology and subsidies for corn-based ethanol.” But also with groups that want to shift Ag dollars to smaller farms. So the question to be decided is who gets the gravy, not whether the gravy will be ladled out by Washington. There doesn’t appear to be anyone in the Obama Cabinet who will speak for the taxpayers’ interest. Or who will argue that it would best for the whole country to let the market work and not have the government pick any winners or losers.
More Power to State
The New York Times reports on Hillary Clinton’s efforts to reassert the State Department’s power over US foreign policy. This is, in one sense, good news. A bloated budget and far flung combatant commanders have allowed the Pentagon to trample over Foggy Bottom in recent years. That is bad not because diplomats are inherently wiser than generals, but because the competition of relatively balanced bureaucratic powers is generally conducive to wise policy.
The trouble here is the idea, hinted at in the Times story, that increased State Department capacity will bring success in state-building missions. A peculiar hubris of Democratic foreign policy analysts is their confidence that they have discovered a science of nation-building by watching the Bush Administration screw up. They see errors on the road to chaos during the occupation of Iraq and assume causality. They read a little about counter-insurgency and the Small Wars Journal blog. Avoid the errors, apply the best practices, and you are gold, they say. So: more troops, better plans, more interagency coordination, more reconstruction, and so on — and, presto, you can “fix” failed states that you occupy, like Afghanistan, or even states you don’t occupy, like Pakistan.
As I wrote here and said last week, this would-be science provides leaders with confidence they should not have to undertake dumb wars or to establish excessive goals for se