While campaigning for former Hawaii governor Linda Lingle, who is now running for U.S. Senate, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), the only Native American in Congress, said that opposition to the Akaka Bill is “arrogant” meddling in local affairs.  (The Akaka Bill, which I’ve covered extensively, would create a race-based governing entity that would negotiate with the federal and state governments over all sorts of issues—effectively carving out an unconstitutional system of racial spoils.)

As quoted in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser ($):

“Hawaii has told us again and again, on a bipartisan basis, this is what we want to do,” Cole said. “I’d have to tell you, I think it’s incredibly arrogant, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat that opposes tribal sovereignty — in this case sovereignty for Native Hawaiians—when the people of Hawaii have told us we’d like it. Who are we to impose our opinions?”

Cole’s attack is not only a calumny on those who oppose the Akaka Bill in good faith—including all but six of his House Republicans who voted against it in 2010 after years of deliberation, public vetting, and a 2006 Department of Justice conclusion that the bill was unwise as a policy matter and presented serious constitutional difficulties—but itself displays a dangerous misunderstanding of the issues involved.

It’s easy to think of the Akaka Bill as being “merely” another request for self-governance by native peoples as was extended to Aleuts upon Alaskan statehood, but that’s simply not what’s going on in Hawaii.  Hawaiians, “Native” and otherwise, have a different history and political sociology from the tribes that are accommodated in our (dubious and counterproductive) Indian law, which itself is a unique compromise with pre-constitutional reality.  Congress can’t simply define Hawaiians as an “Indian tribe” because that term has a fixed meaning, limited to preexisting North American tribes that were “dependent nations” at the time of the Founding.  Such tribes, to benefit from the protections of Indian law, must have an independent existence and “community” apart from the rest of American society, and their separate government structure must have a continuous history for at least the past century.  By these standards, Hawaiians don’t qualify.

Moreover, it’s false to say that Hawaiians support the Akaka Bill or ethnic/racial preferences more broadly.  There has never been a public referendum—Akaka Bill supporters resist such a move—but a November 2009 Zogby poll revealed that 51% of Hawaiians oppose the bill, 60% opposed if you remove the undecideds.  In addition, 76% would oppose tax increases to pay for the Akaka nation-tribe (which would be inevitable), only 7% favor separate laws and regulations for a new native government, and only 28% say the bill is fair with respect to racial discrimination.  Perhaps most importantly, 58% would want a chance to vote before the Akaka Bill could become law, with only 28% saying that would be unnecessary.

Finally, and quite apart from the policy and political considerations, the Akaka Bill has serious constitutional defects. As mentioned above, the Constitution’s anamolous Indian law exception was created by the document itself and Congress still retains a great amount of oversight.  Once the Constitution was ratified, no government organized under it could create another government that can exempt itself from the Bill of Rights.  Even setting these structural issues aside, the Akaka Bill is facially disallowed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ explicit proscription against any state action that treats people differently based on their race or ethnicity. The Supreme Court has found Native Hawaiians to be an ethnic group, so Congress cannot pass a law giving them rights denied other Americans.

I respect Rep. Cole’s right to hold a different view of the Akaka Bill’s merits than mine, in which case he could have said something like, “Some folks have principled objections to this.  I think they’re wrong.  I think they misread the Constitution and don’t appreciate Hawaii’s unique history.  We need to show them why they should come over to our side, and Linda Lingle can help me do that.”  Instead, he accuses us critics of arrogance, ignorance, and willfully thwarting Hawaiians’ dreams of self-determination.

With all due respect, Rep. Cole (and Gov. Lingle to the extent she associates herself with his remarks), if you want to pass the Akaka Bill, you need to do a better job of answering some very valid concerns rather than engaging in base demagoguery.  And these concerns aren’t limited to parochial issues relevant only to Hawaiians.  So long as Hawaii remains part of the United States, all Americans have a stake in the future of the state and how it treats its citizens.

h/t Steven Duffield

With All Due Respect, Rep. Cole, My Arguments Against Race-Based Government Are Quite Principled is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

At MasterResource, a free-market energy blog, Alex Epstein posts a glowing tribute to the 1996 Cato book Oil, Gas, and Government by Robert L. Bradley, Jr. (who happens to be a co-blogger at MasterResource). Oil, Gas, and Government is surely the longest book Cato ever published, and nobody knows better than I do—well, Rob Bradley does—how much work went into researching, writing, editing, and publishing it.

In these days of blogs and tweets, we’re used to consuming information in very small bites. But one of the fundamental roles of think tanks is to produce long-form research, not just talking points and congressional briefings. And Oil, Gas, and Government is very long form—1,997 pages in two volumes. (We told him nobody wanted to read a 2,000-page book, so he stopped at 1997.) It’s a tremendous and comprehensive achievement, as Epstein explains:

While recently researching energy history for a writing project, I was reminded of how valuable—and underrated—Robert Bradley’s Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience is. While there are countless books covering the history of energy from one angle or another, very few, in my experience, can be counted on for precision and accuracy.

The majority of books I read that reference early petroleum history, for example, tell a radically oversimplified narrative of petroleum replacing whale oil. However, if one reads Harold Williamson and Arnold Daum’s definitive two-volume The American Petroleum Industry, one learns about a far more intricate and interesting progress, including the one-time dominance of camphene, a turnpentine-based illuminant that preceded petroleum–or the story of “coal oil,” which was once believed to be the illuminant of the future. (I discuss this history in my essay Energy at the Speed of Thought: The Original Alternative Energy Market.)

What distinguishes Williamson and Daum—and Oil, Gas, and Government—is the systematic use of primary sources. For a researcher, this certainly makes life more difficult as it is far easier to use popular accounts as a jumping off points.

But the researchers who undergo this difficult task give the rest of us an enduring resource. Williamson and Daum present the essential technological and economic history of the industry through the 1950s, with exact quantitative data and contemporaneous images throughout. Bradley’s book gives us the essential political and political-economic history of the oil and gas industry through the 1980s, with painstaking attention to detail.

Bradley’s introduction, incidentally, gives a valuable overview of the merits and shortcomings of various popular histories. Not surprisingly, Williamson and Daum receive high praise and are referenced throughout Oil, Gas & Government.

Bradley’s 2,000-page opus may be daunting for some, but if you ever need historical context on today’s developments, from offshore drilling to natural gas policy, this is the resource to consult.

Earlier this year, for example, I was wondering about the history of eminent domain in the oil industry, and Oil, Gas, and Government covered it comprehensively-–including this memorable passage about how Standard Oil created pipelines without using eminent domain:

Right-of-way was obtained by dollars, not legal force. Pipe was laid deep for permanence, and only the best equipment was used to minimize leakage. Storage records reflected “accuracy and integrity.” Innovative tank design reduced leakage and evaporation to benefit all parties. Fire-preventions reflected “systematic administration.” The pricing strategy was to prevent entry by keeping rates low. While these business successes may not have benefited certain competitors, they benefited customers and consumers of the final products.

The book does not need to be read cover-to-cover, though I have found it immensely rewarding to do so. Any chapter stands on its own, almost as an encyclopedia entry, though one will find references to intriguing concepts or history discussed elsewhere in the book.

Oil, Gas, and Government has an additional benefit: Bradley’s theoretical examination of certain important issues in petroleum policy. Most notable is his discussion of a “homestead” theory of property rights in oil. Under this theory, the individual who creates value by discovering a reservoir is the primary rights-holder, so long as he has made proper arrangements for any given surface access point.

Under traditional theory, every person whose land happens to be above a given reservoir, whether they do anything or not, is a rights-holder with a right to “capture” as much oil as they can once someone else has discovered it. When I first read Bradley’s account many years ago my reaction was “Of course—this is the only way to do it.”

I write all of this because I think the energy community would be served by possessing more copies of this book—along with Williamson and Daum—and, owing to its length and its age (nearly 20 years old) it does not get the attention it deserves. In our age of quick communication, where even medium-sized books seem on the wane, the old-styled treatise has a storied place in our understanding of history to better inform the present and imagine the future.

Copies still available!

The Value of Books is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It seems I was put on the planet to educate people about the negative economic impact of excessive government. I must be doing a bad job, because the burden of the public sector keeps rising.

But hope springs eternal. To help make the case, I’ve cited research from international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Central Bank. Since most of those organizations lean to the left, these results should be particularly persuasive.

I’ve also cited the work of academic scholars from all over the world, including the United States, Australia, and Sweden. The evidence is very persuasive that big government is associated with weaker economic performance.

Now we have some new research from the United Kingdom. The Centre for Policy Studies has released a new study, authored by Ryan Bourne and Thomas Oechsle, examining the relationship between economic growth and the size of the public sector.

The chart above compares growth rates for nations with big governments and small governments over the past two decades. The difference is significant, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The most important findings of the report are the estimates showing how more spending and more taxes are associated with weaker performance.

Here are some key passages from the study.

Using tax to GDP and spending to GDP ratios as a proxy for size of government, regression analysis can be used to estimate the effect of government size on GDP growth in a set of countries defined as advanced by the IMF between 1965 and 2010. …As supply-side economists would expect, the coefficients on the tax revenue to GDP and government spending to GDP ratios are negative and statistically significant. This suggests that, ceteris paribus, a larger tax burden results in a slower annual growth of real GDP per capita. Though it is unlikely that this effect would be linear (we might expect the effect to be larger for countries with huge tax burdens), the regressions suggest that an increase in the tax revenue to GDP ratio by 10 percentage points will, if the other variables do not change, lead to a decrease in the rate of economic growth per capita by 1.2 percentage points. The result is very similar for government outlays to GDP, where an increase by 10 percentage points is associated with a fall in the economic growth rate of 1.1 percentage points. This is in line with other findings in the academic literature. …The two small government economies with the lowest marginal tax rates, Singapore and Hong Kong, were also those which experienced the fastest average real GDP growth.

The folks at CPS also put together a short video to describe the results. It’s very well done, though I’m not a big fan of the argument near then end that faster growth is a good thing because it generates more tax revenue to finance more government. Since I’m a big proponent of the Laffer Curve, I don’t disagree with the premise, but I would argue that additional revenues should be used to finance lower tax rates.

Since I’m nit-picking, I’ll also say that the study should have emphasized that government spending is bad for growth because it inevitably and necessarily leads to the inefficient allocation of resources, and that would be true even if revenues magically floated down from heaven and there was no need for punitive tax rates.

This is my message in this video on the Rahn Curve.

When the issue is government, size matters, and bigger is not better.

New Study from UK Think Tank Shows How Big Government Undermines Prosperity is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Obama campaign is trying to hang so-called “vulture” capitalism around Mitt Romney’s neck, but as two excellent opinion pieces explain, it’s the administration’s crony capitalism that’s the really disturbing story.

The first piece, written by the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel, explains the difference:

Like Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama has presided over bankruptcies, layoffs, lost pensions, run-ups in debt. Yet unlike Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama’s C-suite required billions in taxpayer dollars and subsidies, as well as mandates, regulations, union payoffs and moral hazard.

Strassel singles out the Solyndra debacle and the administration’s bailout of the unions General Motors. She notes that the alternative to profit-driven free enterprise, which the president is critical of, “is an Obama capitalism that is driven by political favoritism, government subsidies, mandates, and billions in taxpayer underwriting.”

In the second piece, Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen says that “if Romney’s record in private equity is fair game, then so is Obama’s record in public equity—and that record is not pretty.” Thiessen lists numerous examples of companies that the administration gambled on with taxpayer money and lost. But what’s really disturbing is the administration’s cronyism:

Amazingly, Obama has declared that all the projects received funding “based solely on their merits.” But as Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer reported in his book, “Throw Them All Out,” fully 71 percent of the Obama Energy Department’s grants and loans went to “individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.” Collectively, these Obama cronies raised $457,834 for his campaign, and they were in turn approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.35 billion. Obama said this week it’s not the president’s job “to make a lot of money for investors.” Well, he sure seems to have made a lot of (taxpayer) money for investors in his political machine.

Lest any readers think that I’m shilling for Mitt Romney, I have provided comments to journalists that were critical of Romney’s Bain Capital for seeking government subsidies (for an example, see here). And if Romney has a specific plan to eliminate the Department of Energy’s subsidy programs, I’m not aware of it. That points to a more fundamental problem: so long as the federal government can stick its nose into the marketplace, cronyism is inevitable. Indeed, cronyism has been a persistent problem under both Democratic and Republican presidencies. For example, a Cato essay on scandals at the Department of Housing & Urban Development details the rampant cronyism at HUD during the Reagan administration:

Using congressional testimony, HUD documents, and interviews, the New York Times compiled a lengthy list of those benefiting from their political connections to HUD in the 1980s. Some earned substantial consulting fees for persuading [HUD Secretary Samuel] Pierce and his top aides to approve federal subsidies, while others used their connections to secure HUD subsidies for their own projects…

In 1990, a report adopted unanimously by the House Government Operations Committee concluded, “At best, Secretary Pierce was less than honest and misled the subcommittee about his involvement in abuses and favoritism in HUD funding decisions. At worst, Secretary Pierce knowingly lied and committed perjury during his testimony.” An independent counsel investigation into HUD activities under Pierce’s watch was instituted in 1990 and wrapped up in 1996. Pierce himself was not indicted based on his agreement to admit that “he created an atmosphere at HUD that allowed influence-peddling to go on.” In all, the independent counsel investigation into HUD corruption on Pierce’s watch yielded 17 convictions, including convictions of three former HUD assistant secretaries.

White House Cronyism Is Disturbing, But Not New is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is the latest person to mock Mitt Romney’s declaration that the Russian Federation “is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” It was a pretty silly statement, particularly given the fact that Russia is a demographic basket case and a very humble economic power. But there’s all sorts of weirdness going on in Romney’s assertions and those of his critics.

Take, for example, Wolf Blitzer’s follow up to the Romney assertion:

BLITZER:  But you think Russia is a bigger foe right now than, let’s say, Iran or China or North Korea? Is that—is that what you’re suggesting, Governor?

ROMNEY:  Well, I’m saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, the nation that lines up with the world’s worst actors.  Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran.  A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.

But when these—these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when—when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go—we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world’s worst actors?

It is always Russia, typically with China alongside.

And—and so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, that has the heft of the Security Council and is, of course, a—a massive nuclear power, Russia is the—the geopolitical foe and—and the—and they’re—the idea that our president is—is planning on doing something with them that he’s not willing to tell the American people before the election is something I find very, very alarming.

In fairness to Governor Romney, it does seem like he realizes he’s made a gaffe here, so he tries to back up and take another run at it. But in doing so, he just makes it worse. Taking a mulligan, he tries to pivot from the Russia allegation by folding in Iran (“the greatest threat the world faces”) and North Korea, and gesturing at Syria.

It’s the same thing Kerry does in his condescending lecture to Romney:

We have much bigger problems on this planet in the Middle East, with the evolution of Egypt, with the challenge of Syria, terrorism, al-Qaeda in Yemen, and so forth.

Both of these guys should be ashamed of themselves. And they ought to be light-headed from the amount of threat inflation they’re doing. We spend too much time debating the relative size of our enemies and too little debating their absolute size. Every country at all times has a #1, #2, and #3 “geopolitical foe.” But the threat environments posed by those foes vary radically.

In a better world, American political elites would discuss the absolute level of threat they face rather than just bickering over our enemies’ batting order. As Ben Friedman and I recently wrote in Orbis:

The dirty little secret of U.S. defense politics is that the United States is safe—probably the most secure great power in modern history. Weak neighbors, vast ocean barriers, nuclear weapons and the wealth to build up forces make almost nonexistent the threats that militaries traditionally existed to thwart. Americans cannot seriously fear territorial conquest, civil war, annexation of peripheral territories, or blockade. What passes for enemies here are small potatoes compared with what worried most states at most times. Most U.S. military interventions affect U.S. security at best marginally. We have hopes and sometimes interests in the places where we send troops, but no matter how much we repeat it to honor the troops, it is untrue that they are fighting to protect our freedom.

Part of the reason our national security politics are pathological is that we focus disproportionately on debating which enemy is the biggest without stopping to ask how big the enemies are.

If your three biggest problems are being infected with Black Death, having a bull rhino charging at you, and being knee-deep in quicksand, you can wonder—for a few seconds, at least—which is your #1 problem. Similarly, if your three biggest problems are that you got into an argument with your spouse about who left a dish in the sink, your shoelaces are untied, and you can’t log in to Facebook, you can puzzle over which of those is bigger. But only a fool would miss the distinctions between the two scenarios.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

Romney, Kerry Miss the Point on Threats: Size Matters is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yet again, U.S.-Pakistan relations have hit a new low. Days after a deal to reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan fell through, and two back-to-back U.S. drone strikes rocked northwest Pakistan in a 24-hour period, tensions flared again after a tribal court sentenced Dr. Shakil Afridi—a Pakistani citizen who helped the United States track-down Osama bin Laden with a fake vaccination program—to 33 years in prison.

Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill were appalled, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the move “unjust and unwarranted.” Apparently, U.S. officials and lawmakers are surprised that the chasm separating Washington and Islamabad is growing wider after years of papering over their differences.

Yesterday, in response to Dr. Afridi’s 33-year sentence under the Frontier Crimes Regulation, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to cut aid to Pakistan by a symbolic $33 million. That’s not enough—it represents just 58% of the amount the president requested for Pakistan. Washington should go further and phase out assistance entirely.

Today in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, my coauthor Aimen Khan and I argue that ending aid to Pakistan is the right course for both countries:

The U.S. must carefully calibrate a policy with Pakistan that continues diplomatic relations absent large sums of aid. While cutting aid to Pakistan might be temporarily destabilizing, Pakistan’s support for militant Islamists is arguably more harmful to regional stability. Moreover, while emergency-type humanitarian aid can be beneficial to the Pakistani people, economic development aid intended to promote growth has been detrimental, allowing Islamabad to avoid confronting its rampant corruption and budgetary problems with the necessary urgency.

The Pakistani government and people stand united in their belief that Pakistan does not need the U.S. Phasing out U.S. aid to Pakistan benefits both parties and better reflects strategic realities.

As is common with U.S. military and foreign aid to unstable governments, it typically serves to entrench the prerogatives of military and civilian elites. Quite perversely, in return for the tens of billions of dollars that American taxpayers forked over to Islamabad, many in Pakistan have come to blame Washington for their deteriorating situation. Even well-intentioned assistance under the much-lauded Kerry-Lugar aid package was viewed within Pakistan as an infringement on sovereignty, mainly because it came with intrusive strings attached. Furthermore, U.S. aid and arm-twisting have failed to pressure or persuade Pakistan to go after militants we deem to be a threat to our interests, including the Afghan/Quetta Shura/Karachi Taliban, Hekmatyar, and the Haqqanis.

From the 30,000-foot view, from Islamabad to New Delhi, it appears that Washington is slowly making a long-term pivot in South Asia. But as this author argued years ago, reconciling this pivot in the context of Afghanistan has been nothing short of a failure. The United States and Pakistan do not trust one another, NATO slouches toward an exit, and Pakistan has become more radicalized, destabilized, and encircled by India and militants.

But I digress. Please click here to read the full op-ed. Enjoy!

U.S.-Pakistan Relations: The Afridi Affair and Its Aftermath is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There are few people with whom I am so much in agreement on the goals of education policy as John Kirtley. To the extent that we differ, it’s chiefly about the best ways of achieving those shared goals. With that in mind, here are my thoughts on his recent post on Education RedefinEd.

Regulation of Private Schools under Education Tax Credit Programs

I’ve no reason to think that the customary financial reporting requirements imposed on scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) are problematic, but the same cannot be said about regulations imposed on the private schools themselves. In response to an earlier post by Adam Schaeffer, John writes that “Adam is absolutely correct that you can only drive so much excellence through top-down accountability.” But Adam actually goes further, arguing that there is no evidence you can drive any excellence through “top-down accountability” (read: “government regulations”) on private schools. The purpose of noting the corruption in state schools (e.g., in Florida and Atlanta) is to show that even the vast array of government regulations imposed on public schools fails to curtail such defects. And, as I found in reviewing the worldwide literature comparing different types of government, pseudo-market, and market education systems, it is the least regulated, most market-like systems that consistently do the best job of serving families across all measured outcomes.

If there were compelling evidence that government regulations on schools could reduce corruption or boost academic achievement, there might be a case for such regulations being added to tax credit programs. But no such evidence exists to the best of my knowledge. In addition to failing to achieve its intended goals, regulation inhibits the educational freedom and diversity that are responsible for the market’s efficiency and responsiveness to families—undermining the whole purpose of a choice program.

The one and only empirically defensible argument in favor of regulations of schools under tax credit programs is political: in some states, it may not be possible to enact tax credit programs without such regulations. In that case, a judgment call has to be made on whether the regulations are so bad as to compromise the program and make it unworthy of passage, because it would fail to produce positive results and give the movement a black eye that would mistakenly be carried over to better, freer programs.

But that argument does not apply to states that have already enacted relatively free school choice programs, by definition: the bills have already passed, so the regs weren’t politically necessary.

Multi-SGO vs. Single SGO Tax Credit Program

 John also argues that a proliferation of SGOs increases the risk of a financial or other SGO scandal in any given year. It’s a plausible argument. If the probability of a scandal breaking out at any one SGO is fixed, and that probability is equal to x, then the probability of a scandal breaking out at any one of a group of SGOs would be = 1 – (1 – x)^N, where N is the number of SGOs. As N goes up, so does the likelihood of at least one scandal occurring.

On the other hand, it seems likely that the probability of a scandal breaking out at an SGO is not fixed, but rather is proportional to the number of people the SGO employs. Hiring more people raises the chance that you eventually hire someone crooked. Tempting as it is to develop a full-blown mathematical model for scandal risk based on the number and size of the SGOs, it seems sufficient to say that the two factors probably cancel each other out to a considerable extent. In other words, it is not obvious that scandal risk would be appreciably different in single SGO vs. multi-SGO environments.

But the absolutely crucial factor that the above discussion omits is that the impact of a scandal also varies with respect to the number of SGOs. If you have 200 SGOs, each of limited size, and one of them has a scandal, it’s no big deal. Donors will just stop giving to that SGO and it will go out of business unless it manages the Herculean task of convincing the public it has mended its ways. Parents that had gotten scholarships from it will then seek scholarships from one of the SGOs that is now receiving the donations that the corrupt one used to get. In fact, this is just what would have happened in the case of the errant donation that John mentions, whether or not any new regulations were imposed.

Indeed, we see this with charities in general. Charitable giving is hugely popular in the United States, but every year some charities are found to be fraudulent or mismanaged. This has had little or no effect on the popularity of charitable giving over time. The system has proven extremely resilient as former donors to the fallen charities have simply shifted their giving to better-run institutions. There has been no move to winnow down America’s charitable landscape either overtly or indirectly (such as by drastically limiting the share of donations that can be used for operational overhead, and thereby driving most institutions out of business).

John likens the probability of a scandal at an SGO in a multi-SGO tax credit program to “giving the enemy a hand grenade.” Extending that simile, the single SGO model is like giving opponents a nuclear time bomb. What happens if there is only one SGO that accepts all the donations in a state and it succumbs to a scandal? Donors have nowhere else to turn. Many will likely stop donating and poor families who were depending on those scholarships will suffer. That, in turn, will not sit well with legislators or the public, who would likely act to re-open the flow of funds to those families.

But how would they go about trying to do that on short notice? One way would be for the state to take over the corrupt SGO and promise to set it aright. As we’ve seen, state control of education does not prevent scandals, so that won’t work—but it would destroy the independence of the program. Another alternative would be for the state to create its own SGO alongside the corrupt one, with much the same effect. Yet another option would be for the state to impose a passel of new regulations on the corrupt SGO, promising that these would solve the problem—which, as we’ve seen, they’d be highly unlikely to do. And finally, the state could simply shut the program down entirely, forcing all those families back into the state school monopoly, which they had deliberately chosen to flee. Every one of those outcomes is far worse than the outcome in a state with many SGOs. Indeed, even without a scandal, a single-SGO system represents a vastly easier and more tempting target for a state takeover than a distributed, multi-SGO system.

I am both very happy and very relieved to grant that John’s organization, Step Up for Students, is impeccably run and is not likely to suffer a scandal in the foreseeable future. But, as Adam asks, what happens if/when John and the organization’s current top executives are gone? And similarly, what happens in states that don’t have a John Kirtley to create and brilliantly staff and oversee their one and only SGO? I’ve been around long enough to know that John Kirtleys do not grow on trees. The school choice movement is astonishingly lucky to have him as one of its leading lights. And because of the rarity of his invaluable qualities, it is unwise to design a policy that relies on similarly exceptional individuals to lead every SGO in every state in perpetuity.

Some SGOs will inevitably be overseen by less experienced, capable and honorable people (just as some public school districts are today) and so our education policies must systematically minimize the damage that mismanagement and corruption can do. Giving donors real choice among a panoply of different SGOs is the only mechanism yet suggested to accomplish this task, and one that has proven its value for generations in the broader charitable sector.

Preserving Parental Choice

There is another important reason to prefer the multi-SGO model, a goal that John and I deeply share: preserving real parental choice. A central conclusion of my journey through education history from classical Greece to modern America, England, Canada and Japan was that parents generally make better choices for their own children than even “expert” third parties make on their behalf. That is true whether the third parties are government bureaucracies or private institutions. And in my reading of that history I failed to find a single education system in which third parties who were paying for children’s education indefinitely restrained themselves from shaping what or how those children were taught. Ultimately, the money came with strings attached. (The G.I. Bill, sometimes presented as a counterfactual to this observation, is actually not relevant, since the pattern I’m describing is for elementary and secondary education. It is when children are young and their minds most malleable that the temptation is greatest to shape them in whatever image the third party wishes.)

We’d be wise to expect that pattern to continue. But if all third party payment ultimately comes with strings, how do you preserve the maximum level of parental choice? You prevent any single individual or organization from gaining a monopoly in third party education subsidies. By ensuring that a multiplicity of funding sources exists, you make it possible for parents to seek assistance from whichever organization most closely comports with their needs and preferences.

The freedom of donors to give to different SGOs that match their different educational ideals thus offers unique protection to families against being forced to accept strings they object to.

The alternative John suggests, legislatively forbidding SGOs from attaching any conditions to their scholarships, is unlikely to achieve its intended aim in the long run. Certainly there is no precedent for it, and it is easy to think of cases that would undermine it. What happens when schools begin to open that refuse to serve gay students? Or that exclusively serve them? What about Wiccan schools? What about “Marx’s Manifesto Middle School”? What about “Hayek High”? For each one of these schools, there is a distinct and sizable constituency that would deeply object to funding it. So what happens if all SGOs have to fund all of them? Do angry, coerced donor/taxpayers roll over and go gently into that good night of compulsion? No. They demand that their representatives impose restrictions on the eligibility criteria for private schools. But since we live in a pluralistic society, that ultimately will result in a gradual accretion of homogenizing restrictions on the kinds of education schools can offer, winnowing down the range of choices available to families—precisely the opposite of the intended goal.

Nor is this merely a hypothetical. I suspected this phenomenon would exist based on my research for Market Education: The Unknown History, but recently tested it statistically by comparing the level of regulation imposed on private schools under voucher versus education tax credit programs. Under vouchers, every taxpayer is compelled to pay for every government-approved private school. Under tax credit programs (with the partial exception of Florida’s) donors have very broad latitude in choosing the kind of SGO they will support, and SGOs have similar latitude. So, based on my theory, we would expect vouchers programs to result in more heavily regulated private schools than tax credit programs because of the compulsion that vouchers perpetuate but tax credits avoid. After crunching the numbers using two different statistical methods and allowing for thousands of different randomized ways of measuring regulatory burden, I found that vouchers do impose a large and statistically significant extra burden of regulation on private schools that tax credits do not. This evidence is not dispositive, but it is consistent with the analysis outlined above, and it’s the only evidence we have. I suggest that we ignore it not so much at our own peril as at the peril of the children we seek to serve.

One Model to Rule Them All?

In any discussion of the “best” policy, I think it’s wise to consider the possibility that any one of us (or even all of us) could be wrong. Education policy is hard. We can of course do our best to collect the widest possible body of relevant evidence, and to test our recommendations empirically whenever possible. We can and should have more discussions like this one, which are hugely valuable. But after all that, we could still be missing something.

Given that reality, there is one other step we can consider to maximize our chances of getting education policy right: we can let different models coexist side by side for a few decades and watch how well they perform, rather than trying to homogenize them up front. If one program doesn’t work quite as well as another, we will see that and be able to learn from it. But if we insist on conformity in the short term, we may never learn those important lessons. And if we settle on a fundamentally flawed model, the results could fall very far short of our hopes and expectations.

Of course, in any state that is just adopting a school choice program for the first time, there has to be a decision as to which program is best. But in states where programs have already been implemented, it seems far wiser to allow them to mature independently rather than to try to “fix” them or even supplant them with new and different programs simply because we believe that they may suffer shortcomings in the future.

Almost anything is better than the status quo monopoly, and yet we’ve had this awful monopoly for a century and a half. It’s hard to correct mistakes once a policy monoculture has established itself and crowded out the alternatives.

Tax Credit Policy Design for School Choice: A Response to John Kirtley is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A financial columnist named Rex Nutting recently triggered a firestorm of controversy by claiming that Barack Obama is not a big spender.

Here’s the chart he prepared, which certainly seems to indicate that Obama is a fiscal conservative. Not only that, it shows that Republicans generally are the big spenders, while Democrats are frugal with other people’s money.

In some ways, these numbers don’t surprise me. I’ve explained before that Bush bears a lot of blame for the big expansion in the burden of government this century, and I’ve specifically pointed out that he deserves the blame for most of the higher spending from the 2009 fiscal year (which began October 1, 2008).

That being said, Nutting’s numbers seemed a bit nutty. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Nutting’s numbers actually seem accurate, including the fact that he decided that Obama should be responsible for $140 billion of the spending in Bush’s last fiscal year (a number he may have taken from one of my posts).

But sometimes accurate can be misleading, so I decided to dig into the data.

I went to the Historical Tables of the Budget from the Office of Management and Budget, and I calculated all the numbers for every President since LBJ (with the exception of Gerald Ford, whose 2-year reign didn’t seem worth including).

But I corrected a big mistake in Nutting’s analysis. I adjusted the numbers for inflation, using OMB’s GDP deflator.

As you can see, this changes the results. My chart isn’t as pretty, but based on the inflation-adjusted average annual growth of outlays, it shows that Clinton was the most frugal president, followed by the first President Bush and Obama.

With his guns-n-butter Keynesianism, it’s no big surprise that LBJ ranks last. And “W” also gets a very low grade.

But then I figured we should take interest payments out of the budget and focus on inflation-adjusted “primary spending.” After all, Presidents shouldn’t be held responsible for the national debt that existed before they took office.

Looking at these numbers, it turns out that Obama does win the prize for being the most fiscally conservative president in recent memory. Reagan jumps to second place. Clinton is in third place, which won’t surprise people who watched this video, while W and LBJ again are in last place.

But I don’t want my Republican friends to get too angry with me, so let’s expand our analysis. Just as we don’t want to blame Presidents for net interest payments on debt that was accrued before their tenure, perhaps we should make sure they don’t get credit or blame for defense outlays that often are dictated by external events.

There’s obviously room for disagreement, but most people will agree that the Cold War and 9/11 meant higher defense spending, regardless of which party controlled the White House. Similarly, the collapse of the Soviet Empire inevitably meant lower military expenditures, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were in charge.

So let’s now look at primary spending after subtracting defense outlays (still adjusting for inflation, of course). All of a sudden, Reagan jumps to the top of the list by a comfortable margin. LBJ and W continue to score poorly, but Nixon takes over last place.

But it’s also worth noting that Obama still scores relatively well, beating Clinton for second place. Inflation-adjusted domestic spending (which is mostly what we’re measuring) has grown by 2.0 percent annually during his three years in office.

So does that mean Obama deserves re-election? Well, before you answer, I want to make one final calculation. Just as there are good reasons to exclude interest payments because they’re not something a president can control, we also should take a look at what spending would be if we don’t count the cost of bailouts.

To be sure, these types of expenditures can be controlled, but if we go with the assumption that the federal government was going to re-capitalize the banking system (whether using the good FDIC-resolution approach or the corrupt TARP approach), then it seems that Presidents shouldn’t get arbitrary blame or credit simply because some financial institutions failed during their tenure.

So let’s take the preceding set of numbers and subtract out the long-run numbers for deposit insurance, as well as the TARP outlays since 2009. And keep in mind that repayments of TARP monies (as well as deposit insurance premiums) show up in the budget as “negative spending.”

As you can see, this produces a remarkable result. All of a sudden, Obama drops from second to second-to-last.

This is because there was a lot of TARP spending in Bush’s last fiscal year (FY2009), which created an artificially high benchmark. And then repayments by banks during Obama’s fiscal years counted as negative spending.

When you subtract out the big TARP spending surge, as well as the repayments, then Bush 43 doesn’t look quite as bad (though still worse than Carter and Clinton), while Obama takes a big fall.

In other words, Obama’s track record does show that he favors an expanding social welfare state. Outlays on those programs have jumped by 7.0 percent annually. And that’s after adjusting for inflation! Not as bad as Nixon, but that’s not saying much since he was one of America’s most statist presidents.

Allow me to conclude with some caveats. None of the tables perfectly captures what any president’s fiscal record. Even my first table may be wrong if you want to blame or credit presidents for the inflation that occurs on their watch. And there certainly are strong arguments that bailout spending and defense spending are affected by presidential policies rather than external events.

And keep in mind that presidents don’t have full power over fiscal policy. The folks on Capitol Hill are the ones who actually enact the bills and appropriate the money.

Moreover, the federal government is akin to a big rusty cargo ship that is traveling in a certain direction, and presidents are like tugboats trying to nudge the boat one way or the other.

But enough equivocating. The four different tables at least show more clearly which presidents presided over faster-growing government or slower-growing government. More importantly, the various tables provide a good idea of where most of the new spending was taking place.

We can presumably say Reagan and Clinton were comparatively frugal, and we can also say that Nixon, LBJ, and Bush 43 were relatively profligate. As for Obama, I think his tugboat is pushing in the wrong direction, but it’s only apparent when you strip out the distorting budgetary impact of TARP.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Which President Is the Biggest Spender of All? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It’s been almost four years since the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 put President Bush’s warrantless wiretap program on legal footing by authorizing broad, programmatic surveillance of Americans’ international communications. The only thing the public really knows about it so far is that it was almost immediately misused, resulting in “significant and systemic” overcollection of Americans’ purely domestic communications. Subsequent reporting revealed that the improperly “overcollected” communications could number in the millions, and included former president Clinton’s private e-mails. So naturally, the Senate is charging ahead toward the renewal of these sweeping powers without hearings or debate.

It’s not just the public that’s in the dark about the use of the FAA mind you. Sen. Ron Wyden has been clamoring for more information—and, to the extent possible, public deliberation—for months now. Yet the Director of National Intelligence has told Wyden that “it is not possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority of the FAA,” though he did refer to classified reports indicating the “number of collection targets that were later determined to be located in the United States.” Meanwhile, work continues on a multibillion dollar NSA decryption and data storage facility capable of storing all that information indefinitely. The only real check on this is activity is congressional oversight, which as intelligence scholar Amy Zegart demonstrates in her important recent book Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community, is largely chimerical.

Meanwhile, there are serious questions about whether the FAA is even constitutional. But the government doesn’t want any court to even consider those questions: It has petitioned the Supreme Court to shoot down a challenge to the law before it even begins, in a case to be heard in the coming term.

This is a truly incredible state of affairs. We have a vast apparatus for intercepting—and retaining indefinitely—American communications on a mass scale. We are being asked to take it as an article of faith that this is absolutely necessary to the security of the United States, even though similar claims about the original warrantless wiretap program could not be substantiated by later internal audits. The government doesn’t want to have to even defend the constitutionality of this program in front of a judge. And Congress doesn’t seem interested in so much as discussing the question, or making the public privy to so much as the raw numbers involved, before giving the NSA four more years of carte blanche. But hey, look over there, someone tangentially related to a presidential campaign said something dumb on cable television! Clearly there’s no time to discuss trivia like this “vast government database of intercepted communications.”

Mass Surveillance: No Need for Debate? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In an op-ed posted yesterday on Forbes, I praised a decision by the World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body for recognizing the true nature of federal regulations that define what kind of tuna can be called dolphin-safe.  In one part of the ocean where the Mexican fishing fleet operates the rules are very strict, but everywhere else, including the parts of the ocean where the U.S. fishing fleet operates, tuna can be called dolphin safe without regard to whether dolphins were actually killed in the fishing process.

Rather than providing consumers with accurate information, as the government and other advocates contend, the consequence of the dolphin-safe labeling requirement is to provide discriminatory protection for the U.S. tuna industry by misleading those consumers.

The case highlights the reality that government is not a reliable guardian of consumer welfare, and that you invariably get more (or in this case less) than you bargained for when you put your faith in government mandated standards.  As I wrote in the op-ed:

Without this law, consumers would be free to demand tuna caught without setting on dolphins, or they might prefer to buy only tuna whose capture was certified as dolphin safe by an independent observer.  Under the current regime, tuna producers are completely prohibited from providing that information on product labels.  A policy designed to protect dolphins by harnessing the power of consumers depends on having informed consumers with access to all relevant information.  Consumers who want to protect dolphins from tuna fishers are not served by a law that actually protects U.S. tuna fishers from Mexican competition.

Abiding by international rules that promote free trade across borders is easily accomplished by adhering to the principles of free enterprise here at home.

Protectionism in a Can of Tuna is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Remote Area Medical‘s Stan Brock, who spoke at the Cato Institute’s 2012 State Health Policy Summit, explains:

The culprit is state medical licensing laws. For more, read Cato adjunct scholar Shirley Svorny.

CNN Video: How Government Blocks Health Care Access for the Poor is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Florida cops have made a practice of ticketing drivers who warn others about speed traps by flashing their lights, despite uncertainty as to whether state law actually does prohibit such flashing. Now a judge in Sanford, Fla. has ruled that Ryan Kintner of Lake Mary not only was within his rights under state law when he flashed his headlights, but was engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. [Orlando Sentinel; cross-posted from Overlawyered]

Judge: Flashing Headlights To Warn of Speed Trap Is Protected Speech is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The lead article in the new Cato Policy Report is entitled “We Can Cut Government: Canada Did.” The article reviews Canada’s economic reforms since the 1980s, which have included free trade, privatization, spending cuts, sound money, large corporate tax cuts, personal tax reforms, balanced federal budgets, block grants, and decentralizing power by cutting the central government.

Those all sound like things we ought to pursue in America. The political systems of the two countries are different, but Canada’s pro-market reform lessons are universally applicable.

Canada’s reforms, for example, refute the Keynesian notion that cutting government spending harms economic growth. Canadian federal spending was cut from 23.3 percent of GDP in 1993 to 16.5 percent by 2000. Keynesians and their macro models would predict a crushing economic blow from such a spending reduction. They would argue that the “austerity” would slash “aggregate demand” and “take money out of the economy.”

Yet Canada’s spending cuts of the 1990s were coincident with the beginning of a 15-year economic boom that only ended when the United States dragged its neighbor into recession in 2009. As the government shrank in size during the 1990s, the Canadian unemployment rate plunged from more than 11 percent to less than 7 percent.

Canada still has a large welfare state, and its provincial governments are prone to overspending. However, its experience shows that even a modest dose of public sector austerity combined with pro-market reforms can lead to substantial gains in private-sector prosperity. American and European leaders still under the Keynesian spell should take note.

For more, see here and here.

Canada’s Economic Reforms is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Stephanie Saul’s anecdote-driven smear piece in yesterday’s NYT has perhaps had one positive effect; a serious discussion of good education tax credit bill design.

John Kirtley, chairman of the only active scholarship organization in Florida and father of the state’s credit program, used the NYT piece as a jumping-off point for legislative guidelines. Kirtley has done tremendous things in Florida for low income children and educational choice, but several of his policy recommendations (shared by others) are either unsupported or contradicted by the evidence.

I’ll use Saul’s brief description of the positive aspects of Florida’s credit program (which Kirtley praises) and his own guidelines as a structure for discussion. (See here for legislative guidelines and model legislation.)

Academic and Fiscal “Accountability”

This is the area in which the guidelines proposed by Kirtley and organizations such as the American Federation for Children are most at odds with research on education markets and government regulation. For decades, policymakers have desperately tried to improve education through accountability to the government. Their efforts have clearly failed. And it would be disastrous to involve the government, which has failed so dismally for so long, more directly in the private education sector and the private decisions of families and taxpayers. As Neal McCluskey showed for Florida specifically, fraud, waste and abuse in the public education system is much more widespread and pervasive than in private school choice programs.

Below are the reasons it is unnecessary and harmful to increase government regulation on education decisions made by families and taxpayers.

Education tax credits automatically impose three layers of accountability; 1) The parents who choose the school, 2) the scholarship organization that provides funds to parents, and 3) the taxpayer who donates or directly spends their own money on education. Additional government regulations are therefore unnecessary and interfere with the choices of those directly affected by the program.

Andrew Coulson’s international literature review of the school choice/education market research shows that the least regulated education markets had the greatest margin of superiority over state school systems.

The use of vouchers, as government funds, can only be held accountable to the taxpayers whose money is used through the government, which disburses those funds. By contrast, credit funds are private funds, disbursed to students or scholarship organizations directly by the taxpayers who earned them. There is already direct accountability to the taxpayers who fund the credit program.

In short, no new requirements for or regulations on private schools or home schooling should be imposed. If accreditation is not required for existing private educational options, then none should be imposed on private choices backed by private credit funds.

Scholarships are strictly controlled to make sure they go to poor families.

All other donation credit programs besides Georgia are means-tested.

However, there are serious problems with hard income cut-offs for any program meant to help those who need help. What about the family that has a child with special needs, perhaps not rising to the level of an IEP, but requires more resources than a typical child? Or the family that loses one income earner, but can’t qualify because of their most recent tax return?

In a decentralized credit scholarship system, such flexibility can be built into means-testing regulation. In New Hampshire, scholarship organizations are allowed to use up to 20 percent of their funds for families who fall outside the strict income cutoff.

Strict, hard income cutoffs may be easy for governments and large organizations to process, but they come at a serious cost in flexibility and responsiveness to the diverse needs of individual children and families.

Only corporations are eligible for the tax credits.

Individual-level tax credits are relatively difficult in Florida because there is no individual income tax. However, sales tax credits can be allowed for individuals at the point of sale.

From a larger perspective, however, this is an unfortunate flaw, not a feature, and including individual taxpayers is a huge positive for any program.

Corporate tax liabilities are subject to very large fluctuations year-to-year, there are far fewer corporate than individual taxpayers, and decisions must be made within an often-complex and time-consuming process.

All of this means that corporate-only credit programs are more volatile, uncertain, and costly.

Donations from individual taxpayers broaden and stabilize the revenue stream for credits, invest real human beings in supporting education with their personal funds, and thereby create greater accountability to a more diverse and attentive donors base.

Eliminating the chance of parents donating for their own benefit.

The problem of parents donating for the benefit of their own child is an issue created by poor policy design in the first instance.

What sense does it make to force parents with a tax liability, who also need assistance for their child, to 1) donate to a scholarship fund and then 2) apply to that non-profit for a scholarship funded with the money that they earned and donated in the first place?

This absurd circular-donation system can be easily fixed by allowing parents to claim a credit for their own child’s education—as is already done in Illinois and Iowa. It can be made even better by allowing grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends, and neighbors to claim a credit for money they spend on a specific child they know and want to help. Allowing those with a direct personal interest in the success of a child to help support their education creates yet more accountability and more direct involvement in education from extended families and communities.

All scholarships are handled by one nonprofit organization, and its fees are limited to 3 percent of donations.

Florida’s education tax credit program is run entirely by a single non-profit organization largely due to the fact that scholarship organizations are not able to use any credits funds for the significant overhead involved in running such an organization for the first three years, and then only 3 percent thereafter, which is inadequate for meeting reasonable costs.

This hyper-centralization is the single most concerning flaw in Florida’s education tax credit program.

Taxpayers have no choice among scholarship organizations, and therefore their only choice if they are unhappy with the current SO is to not donate money to support needy children at all.

By all accounts, the single SO in Florida is a model non-profit. However, what happens should the current leadership move on or pass away? The character and performance of large organizations does not continue in perpetuity, and the evidence on the performance of monopolies long-term is grim indeed.

In the case of malfeasance or even an innocent but serious mistake at this single scholarship organization, the results could be devastating. Without other SOs to turn to, allowing donors to immediately de-fund the underperforming SO in favor of better ones, there will be intense political pressure to shut down or take over the system. Indeed, even absent a scandal, the centralization of all scholarships in one SGO makes it a tempting and easy target for state takeover.

Furthermore, is it wise or right in a larger sense for a single, private non-profit to control and administer hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially more than $1 billion within seven years, on behalf of tens of thousands of children and all the taxpayer who want to help them?

A diverse array of scholarship organizations ensures beneficial competition among non-profits, provides choices to families and taxpayers, and allows the development of organizations more intimately connected with and integrated into local communities and more flexible and responsive to the needs of individual families and children.

Parents – not individual schools or scholarship organizations – should own the decision of where their children attend school. In Florida, the scholarship can be used at any one of the 1,350 private schools whose participation has been approved by the state.

The centralized bureaucracy of Florida’s education tax credit program means that taxpayers have no choices in directing their money where they think it will do the most good, and families have no choices of scholarships organizations to which they apply.

In this situation, there is little choice but to standardize the process and ensure equal access with no regard to the quality of the school or need of the child beyond the statutory minimum. Indeed, should the sole scholarship organization decide to make distinctions – even reasonable, well-intentioned distinctions – among schools or applicants, they would be vulnerable to charges of unfair treatment because there is literally no alternative in the state.

The diversity of scholarship organizations in other states means that taxpayers and families can choose to work with organizations and schools they think perform well and comport with their values. Taxpayers and families in Florida are not afforded those options, and taxpayers are forced to fund all schools chosen by families, from good to bad and from fundamentalist Christian to Catholic to secular liberal if they wish to participate in the program at all.

Parents and taxpayers should have a diverse array of choices, and a large and diverse collection of scholarship organizations is essential for achieving that.

Diversity & Choice or Regulation & Monopoly? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at the Washington Post‘s PostPartisan blog, Jonathan Bernstein discusses the rising influence of the “Ron Paul crowd” on Republican state party platforms. Bernstein cites a derisive piece from Ed Kilgore on a draft platform being considered by the Iowa Republican Party:

Now, a new group — the Ron Paul crowd — is taking over some formal GOP structures, including in Iowa. Ed Kilgore has a great post detailing some of the wackier things they’ve put in the official Iowa Republican Party platform — for example, eliminating the Agriculture Department. In Iowa. Oh, there’s plenty more, including phasing out Social Security and Medicare; overall, it has called for a federal government half the size of what Paul Ryan has advocated.

I don’t take issue with Bernstein’s contention that a platform like the one being proposed by the Iowa GOP would be a problem for most Republican politicians because the overall program “is just spectacularly unpopular with the general public.” I quickly scrolled through the hundreds of proposed “planks” in the platform and, as a libertarian, often found myself shaking my head and rolling my eyes. So it struck me as odd that of all the ideas in the platform that one could deem to be “wacky,” Bernstein chose to focus solely on planks that would cut – admittedly, dramatically – federal spending.

Bernstein continues:

Many libertarians have fooled themselves into believing that the American people are with them on their basic program, but if that were the case, Ron Paul would have been a viable presidential candidate, not someone who finds it hard to break 15 percent in primaries. Nor would the polling on government spending be mixed, with majorities for cutting spending overall (good for libertarians!) and for increasing spending on most programs (disaster for libertarians!).

I could be wrong, but I think most libertarians are aware that the average American favors spending cuts in general but is often less enthusiastic when the cuts are specified. And while Paul isn’t going to be the next president of the United States, his campaign has been successful in getting a lot more Americans to understand that the federal government needs to be downsized. Younger people in particular have been drawn to Paul’s limited government message. Paul was never going to win over the older folks who at the end of the day are primarily concerned with making sure that their Social Security and Medicare benefits aren’t touched. But the younger crowd is becoming increasingly aware that they’re eventually going to take it on the chin in order to maintain the federal government’s intergenerational redistribution schemes. Perhaps that’s what concerns people like Bernstein.

Circling back, proposing to eliminate the U.S. Department of Agriculture could be called a lot of things: provocative, controversial, dramatic, etc. But dismissing it as “wacky” is lazy. If Bernstein thinks that it’s a bad idea, then he should just say so (of course, my colleagues and I would argue otherwise).

For more “wacky” ideas, check out Downsizing the Federal Government.

What’s ‘Wacky’ About Wanting to Eliminate the USDA? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I sometimes wonder whether journalists have the slightest idea of how capitalism works.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen breathless reporting on the $2 billion loss at JP Morgan Chase, and now there’s a big kerfuffle about the falling value of Facebook stock.

In response to these supposed scandals, there are all sorts of articles being written (see here, here, here, and here, for just a few examples) about the need for more regulation to protect the economy.

Underlying these stories seems to be a Lake Wobegon view of financial markets. But instead of Garrison Keillor’s imaginary town where “all children are above average,” we have a fantasy economy where “all investments make money.”

I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble or shatter any childhood illusions, but losses are an inherent part of the free market movement. As the saying goes, “capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell.”

Moreover, losses (just like gains) play an important role in that they signal to investors and entrepreneurs that resources should be reallocated in ways that are more productive for the economy.

Legend tells us that King Canute commanded the tides not to advance and learned there are limits to the power of a king when his orders had no effect.

Sadly, modern journalists, regulators, and politicians lack the same wisdom and think that government somehow can prevent losses.

But perhaps that’s unfair. They probably understand that losses sometimes happen, but they want to provide bailouts so that nobody ever learns a lesson about what happens when you touch a hot stove.

Government-subsidized risk, though, is just as foolish as government-subsidized success.

In the Lake Wobegon Fantasy World, All Investments Make Money is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a speech today, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will lay out the foundations of his education platform. Based on an outline of his proposals released by Education Week this morning, Gov. Romney seems just a little less disinterested in the Constitution — and the 40-plus years of proven federal education failure – than the man he seeks to replace. And no, calling what you want federal “incentives” neither absolves them of being unacceptable federal intrusions, nor makes them any less coercive.

The heart of what Mr. Romney wants in elementary and secondary education is federal enticements to get states to implement everything from “open-enrollment” policies for schools, to individual school “report cards,” to encouraging “talented individuals to become teachers.”

As I wrote last week, while “incentive” sounds kinda harmless, an incentive program is really all that No Child Left Behind is. No state has to do anything in NCLB. It only has to follow the law if it wants the federal money attached to it. The funding is only an incentive, but it is so big an incentive it is irresistible, even with the law being a huge millstone around the neck of American education. And, of course, taxpayers had no choice about furnishing the ducats to begin with. (Well, I suppose they were incentivized by a trip to prison…)

Where Romney’s K-12 offering is most enticing is his proposal that federal money be attached to low-income and special-needs children and made portable even to private schools. (Portable, that is, “in accordance with state guidelines,” a proviso the outline doesn’t flesh out.) But the very real threat, as with all federal funding , is federal control. What Washington funds it will regulate — though usually for political show, not efficiency or effectiveness — and that is something we should strenuously avoid for  private schools when states can implement more varied — and less regulation prone — choice mechanisms such as education tax credits. And, of course, the Constitution gives the federal government no more authority to deliver school choice than to dictate curricula. That is, except in Washington itself, and to his credit Mr. Romney is proposing to save the D.C. voucher program that Mr. Obama, for whatever shoddy reason, seems determined to suffocate.

The good news about Gov. Romney’s outline is that it directly addresses the primary problem in higher education, and one of its primary causes: insane tuition inflation fueled by massive federal student aid. Indeed, though he will no doubt get flayed for it by the higher ed establishment, who will publically deny it like so many naked emperors, Mr. Romney’s outline is refreshingly straightforward in identifying the root problem:

Governor Romney realizes that more spending will not solve the problem of tuition increases – to the contrary, it has helped fuel the problem. When Washington puts more money into student aid programs to help families and individuals pay for higher education, colleges and universities raise tuition rates.

So what grade does Mr. Romney get on education, at least from this initial outline? About a 30 percent for K-12, and a 90 percent for higher ed. That works out to 60 percent — a woeful D-minus – but that’s probably a tad bit better than most presidents would have gotten since the 1960s.

Gov. Romney, Federal ‘Incentives’ Mean Federal Power is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

America’s growing school choice movement is a bridge to educational freedom—an escape from our failing state school monopolies. And with all the tenacity (and veracity) of Monty Python’s Black Knight, the New York Times stands athwart that bridge, declaring: “None shall pass.”

The Times’ latest attempt to parry the thrust for educational freedom is this story attacking education tax credit school choice programs: “Public Money Finds Back Door to Private Schools.” No doubt this story has legs…but not for long.

Let’s begin with the title, which claims that private donations to private scholarship organizations are “public money” because they qualify for a tax credit. It’s a simple claim that is simply not true. As has been recently reported:

the genius of [tax credit programs] was that the money would never go into public accounts, making it less susceptible to court challenges…. As predicted, tax credits have thus far withstood legal challenges, most recently when the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s program last year.

Perhaps the editors of the NYT were simply unaware of the report above—and unaware of the Supreme Court decision it cites (ACSTO v. Winn) explicitly stating that tax credited donations are not public money. But here’s the thing, the quote above is actually from the same story on which the Times slapped the “Public Money…” headline. So either the NYT’s editors don’t read their own stories, or they’re knowingly presenting a false statement to their readers in big, bold type. I can understand someone not wanting to read the NYT every day, but surely they’ve managed to find editors willing to do so?

Next, let’s talk about the story’s lede….

This is where a paper puts the bit that they expect to rouse the most reader interest or indignation. What we have is an anecdote about a single Georgia scholarship granting organization (SGO) that just might be allocating donations in a way that donors would not approve of. But here’s the thing: there are a lot of different SGOs. If you decide that you don’t like the way one SGO is using your donations… you can stop donating to it. You can then look at other SGOs to find one you think is well run. You can even stop donating to SGOs entirely if you don’t find a single one that meets your standards. The system is quite responsive to the donor/taxpayer’s concerns.

Now let’s compare that to the status quo in America, under which every taxpayer must pay for the state school monopoly in their area regardless of its performance, efficiency, or institutional ethics. How’s that workin’ out? Since we’re talking about Georgia, surely it’s relevant to bring up the epic cheating scandal that exploded in the Atlanta Public School District less than a year ago. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation found that 178 teachers and administrators had systematically defrauded children of an education by falsifying the students’ state test sheets to make it look as though they were really learning. Can taxpayers cut off their funding to the district? No. Can they expect swift and complete justice? Nope. Even though 82 of the perps had already confessed last July, only one had been fired as of 8 weeks ago.

So which system is better equipped to deal with inevitable human frailties; the one that lets donors pull funding as soon as they have the first hint of concern, or the one that they have to keep funding no matter how suffused with corruption it becomes? Hmm?

Next, the Times demonstrates remarkable cruelty to animals by trotting out the rhetorical jade that we live in a “time of deep cutbacks in public schools.” Perhaps they felt safe making this claim knowing that the federal government’s education statistics are usually 3 or more years out of date, and hence don’t cover the most recent years of our economic downturn. If so, they must have thought no one would give credence to the up-to-date numbers published by a well-known private organization: nominal public school spending increased every single year between 2001-02 and 2011-12—both in the aggregate and per-pupil. Even after the Great Recession, even after adjusting for inflation, we’re still spending 10.6% more per pupil than we were when we had just crested the tech boom back in 2001-02. What right-wing group came up with these astonishing numbers? Was it the left’s current bête-noire, ALEC? Actually, it was the N. E. A.

Finally, some paragraphs into the piece, the Times comes up with a concern that almost has merit: some private schools that serve scholarship-receiving students have a pedagogical emphasis that some taxpayers might disagree with. The examples offered are sports and religion, but many others could no doubt be suggested. And a strong case could be made that taxpayers in a free society should not be compelled to pay for the teaching of ideas they find objectionable. In fact, such a case was already made over two hundred years ago by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves… is sinful and tyrannical.” That quote comes from the Virginia Act Establishing Religious Freedom, enacted in 1786 and subsequently used as the model for state constitutional clauses all over the country banning such “compelled support.”

So why do I say that the Times’ concern “almost” has merit? Because it doesn’t apply to education tax credits. No one is compelled to support any SGO, and those who do choose to make a donation get to select the SGO that receives their money. What the Times seems not to have realized is that this concern actually does apply to… the public school system it is trying so ineptly to defend. Taxpayers’ options under state schooling are to keep funding the system or go to jail, but it is not hard to imagine that some taxpayers may disbelieve the ideas taught by public schooling. Consider the story from just a few days ago about the public school teacher who taught her students that they could be arrested for speaking ill of the President. Or consider the Times’ evident disdain for private schools that focus on sports to the perceived detriment of academics. No one has to fund such schools under an education tax credit system, but we all have to fund them under the government monopoly status quo. Is this news (that didn’t fit) to the New York Times?

Next, the Times laments that SGOs cost money to operate. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars… in some cases”! Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you are a fiscal hawk just like the New York Times, and that you’re desperately concerned about the efficiency with which your education dollars are spent. Which system should you prefer, tax credits or the public school monopoly? As it happens, Florida’s k-12 scholarship tax credit is raising academic achievement at less than half the per pupil cost of the traditional state-run schools.

According to a statistical study commissioned by the Florida legislature and authored by David Figlio, students accepting scholarships to attend private schools under the state’s tax credit program enjoy improved academic achievement. According to a second study co-authored by Figlio and Cassandra Hart, the program also improves achievement of students who remain in public schools [see previous link].

Of course the Times story mentions that Figlio has studied Florida’s tax credit program… but it doesn’t report what he found. Apparently, a significant positive academic impact is not relevant to a NYT education story if it comes from a program outside the control of the state monopoly school system. Print readers are left entirely in the dark about these facts. The online NYT version of the article links to a .pdf file of one of the studies without comment, but even the subset of Web readers who take the time to click through and read it will only get half the story. Those who read the Times’ story on other on-line sites that lack links won’t get even that.

But what of the charge that “some of the programs have become enmeshed in politics.” Even coming from the NYT this line of argument is difficult to believe. Has it not occurred to them that state schooling has been soaking in politics since its inception? Are they unaware that the public school employee unions—whose funding comes entirely from compulsory taxation—spend more on federal politics than Chevron, Exxon Mobil, the NRA, and Lockheed Martin combined? Or that between 93 and 99 percent of those political contributions have gone to Democrats? Surely they must be aware of news coverage like this:

 If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members.

But then again, maybe they haven’t read it. After all, it ran in the New York Times Magazine.

Against public schooling’s multi-generation legacy of arch political partisanship, the Times complains that businesses might endear themselves to politicians by… helping poor kids get a good education. They present no evidence of an illegal quid pro quo—just the haunting specter that someone in political office might be gratified if a business helps kids learn. They have it precisely backwards. The real problem is that there are so many in political office who would not be gratified by such an act, because their own political lives depend on teachers’ union donations coercively squeezed out of taxpayers thanks to the government-protected monopoly on k-12 schooling.

Years ago, we were told that the legacy media were distinguished by their “multiple layers of fact checking”. This NYT article, like most NYT articles on education, is certainly comprised of multiple layers of something… but it doesn’t smell like fact checking.

NYT Channels Monty Python’s Black Knight is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The collusion between big business and big government that fleeces the rest of us has struck again — Tim Carney, iMessage your office – this time in the sports world. 

Minnesota governor Mark Dayton recently signed the midnight deal that state lawmakers struck with the owners of the state’s football team, the Minnesota Vikings, to build the team a new stadium.  This caused plenty of celebration in Minneapolis and elsewhere across the Gopher State.  Alas, the hangover is about to come for taxpayers regardless of their gridiron allegiance or level of fandom.

As former Cato legal associate (and Minnesotan) Nick Mosvick and I write in the Huffington Post, these stadium deals hurt most fans:

That’s because they lead to increased taxes and higher prices, squeezing the average fan for the benefit of owners and sponsors.  And that’s not even counting the overwhelming majority of taxpayers, regardless of fandom, who never set foot in these gladiatorial arenas.

Let’s look at this particular deal.  The stadium costs $975 million on paper, with over half coming from public funds, $348 million from the state and $150 million from Minneapolis—not through parking taxes or other stadium-related user fees, but with a new city sales tax.  In return, the public gets an annual $13 million fee and the right to rent out the stadium on non-game-days.

Vikings ownership, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and local politicians make a typical pitch for the deal: the stadium will attract investment to the area; local establishments will see a rise in game-day sales of $145 million; jobs will be created, including 1,600 in construction worth $300 million ($187,500 per job?!); tax revenues will increase $26 million; property values will rise; and, of course, the perennially underachieving team’s fortunes will improve.

Such arguments are always trotted out for these sweetheart deals, but the evidence regarding the economic effects of publicly financed stadiums consistently tells a different story.  For example, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys performed an exhaustive study of sports franchises in 37 cities between 1969 and 1996 and found no measurable impact on per-capita income.  The only statistically significant effects were negative ones because revenue gains were overshadowed by opportunity costs that politicians inevitably ignore.

An older study looked at 12 stadium areas between 1958 and 1987 and found that professional sports don’t drive economic growth.  A shorter-term study looked at job growth in 46 cities from 1990 to 1994 and found that cities with major league teams grew more slowly.  Even worse, taxpayers still service debt on now-demolished stadiums, including the $110 million that New Jersey still owes on the old Meadowlands and the $80 million that Seattle’s King County owes on the Kingdome.  And we shouldn’t forget that local governments often employ property-rights-trampling eminent domain to facilitate these money-squandering projects.

Read the whole thing.  It’s not a matter of ideology; we even quote Keith Olbermann approvingly!

The point is that these deals benefit team owners and the politicians who get to wrap themselves in team colors to the exclusion of taxpayers or fans (who are priced out of the games their increased taxes support).  If luxury stadiums were hugely profitable, why would the savvy businessmen who own the teams let the politicians in on the windfall?

Public Financing of Vikings Stadium a Bad Deal for Fans, Taxpayers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

After the Republicans took back control of the House following the November 2010 elections, the GOP leadership went with Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers—a.k.a. “The Prince of Pork”—to chair the powerful House Appropriations Committee. I wrote at the time that “The support for Rogers from House Republican leaders is a slap in the face of voters who demanded change in Washington.”

I haven’t changed my mind.

A recent article in the New York Times offers up another reminder that the 30-year House veteran’s priority is to funnel taxpayer money back to his district—not downsize the federal government:

In the 1980s, the military had its infamous $800 toilet seat. Today, it has a $17,000 drip pan. Thanks to a powerful Kentucky congressman who has steered tens of millions of federal dollars to his district, the Army has bought about $6.5 million worth of the “leakproof” drip pans in the last three years to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters. And it might want more from the Kentucky company that makes the pans, even though a similar pan from another company costs a small fraction of the price: about $2,500…The Kentucky company, Phoenix Products, got the job to produce the pans after Representative Harold Rogers, a Republican who is now the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added an earmark to a 2009 spending bill. While the earmark came before restrictions were placed on such provisions for for-profit companies, its outlays have continued for the last three years.

According to the Times, Phoenix Products’ president and his wife have been “frequent contributors” to Rogers’s political committee and the company has spent at least $600k on a DC lobbying firm since 2005. Those efforts apparently haven’t gone unrewarded as Rogers “has directed more than $17 million in work orders for Phoenix Products since 2000.”

Readers should keep this story in mind the next time a Republican member of Congress calls for a Balanced Budget Amendment, complains about the growth in government under Obama, and then argues against “dangerous defense cuts.” The bedtime story that Americans often hear is that the federal government must spend gobs of money on defense in order to “keep us safe from our enemies.” I once believed that story—and then I spent some time in the U.S. Senate watching policymakers treat military spending like any other pot of taxpayer money.

[See here for more on downsizing the Department of Defense.]

House Appropriations Chairman Behind Military Pork is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog