This morning the Obama Administration officially released its proposal for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka, No Child Left Behind). The proposal is a mixed bag, and still one with a gaping hole in the bottom.

Among some generally positive things, the proposal would eliminate NCLB’s ridiculous annual-yearly-progress and “proficiency” requirements, which have driven states to constantly change standards and tests to avoid having to help students achieve real proficiency.  It would also end many of the myriad, wasteful categorical programs that infest the ESEA, though it’s a pipedream to think members of Congress will actually give up all of their pet, vote-buying programs.

On the negative side of the register, the proposed reauthorization would force all states to either sign onto national mathematics and language-arts standards, or get a state college to certify their standards as “college and career ready.”  It would also set a goal of all students being college and career ready by 2020. But setting a single, national standard makes no logical sense because all kids have different needs and abilities; no one curriculum will ever optimally serve but a tiny minority of students.

Also, on the (VERY) negative side of the register, Obama’s budget proposal would increase ESEA spending by $3 billion from last year — for a total of $28.1 billion — to pay for all of the ESEA reauthorization’s promises of incentives and rewards. That’s $3 billion more that the utterly irresponsible spenders in Washington simply do not have, and that would do nothing to improve outcomes.

Even if this proposal were loaded with nothing but smart, tough ideas, it would ultimately fail for the same reason that top-down control of government schools has failed for decades. Teachers, administrators, and education bureaucrats make their livelihoods from public schooling, and hence spend more time and money on education lobbying and politicking than anyone else. That makes them by far the most powerful forces in public schooling, and what they want for themselves is what we’d all want in their place if we could get it: lots of money and no accountability to anyone.

As long as such asymmetrical power distribution is the case — and it’s inherent to “democratic” control of education — no proposal, no matter how initially tough, is likely to make any long-term improvements. As the matrix below lays out, no matter what combination of standards and accountability you have, politics will eventually lead to poor outcomes. It’s a major reason that the history of government schooling is strewn with “get-tough” laws that ultimately spend lots of money but produce no meaningful improvements, and it’s a powerful argument for the feds complying with the Constitution and getting out of education.

When all is said and done, you can throw all the great things you want into the federal education bag, but as long as politicians are making the decisions you’ll always come up empty.

The apparent drug gang killings of U.S. consular employees this weekend in Juarez, Mexico are a bloody reminder that President Obama is getting the United States involved in yet another war it cannot win. Drug gang killings also occurred in Acapulco, with a total of 50 such fatalities nationwide over the weekend.

Unfortunately, Obama has responded to the latest incident by following the same failed strategy as his predecessors when confronted with drug war losses: a stronger fight against drugs.

Though the deaths are the first in which Mexican drug cartels appear to have so brazenly targeted and killed individuals linked to the U.S. government, illicit drug trade violence has killed some 18,000 people in Mexico since President Calderon came to power in December 2006—more than three times the number of American military personnel deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.

The carnage only shot up after Calderon declared an all-out war on drug trafficking upon taking office. After more than three years, the policy has failed to reduce drug trafficking or production, but it is weakening the institutions of Mexican democracy and civil society through corruption and bloodshed, which are the predictable products of prohibition.

The 29 people killed in drug-related violence this weekend in a 24 hour period in the state of Guerrero sets a dubious record for a Mexican state. And an increasing number of Mexicans, including former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, are calling for a thorough rethinking of anti-drug policy in Mexico and the United States that includes legalization. Legalization would significantly reduce drug cartel revenue and put an end to an enormous black market and the social pathologies that it creates.

The head of the federal Office of Personnel Management, John Berry, has become unhinged by a few recent critiques of federal worker pay. Berry is an Obama appointee who apparently views his role as being a one-sided lobbyist for worker interests, rather than a public servant balancing the interests of taxpayers and federal agencies.

Here is an 11-minute audio interview with Berry on Federal News Radio on Friday, where he lashes out at USA Today, Washington Times, and the Cato Institute. Berry is defensive, emotional, and unwilling to accept that new data might indicate a possible problem with the underpaid federal worker thesis that is constantly pushed by the unions.

What do I mean when I say he is unhinged? An investigation by the USA Today found that in 83 percent of 216 occupations examined, federal workers earned more than comparable private-sector workers. Here is Berry’s response when asked whether he thinks the USA Today analysis is a good one: “It is absolutely not! It comes straight out of the Cato Institute!” But, believe it or not, the nation’s largest newspaper is not part of some libertarian plot.

The most troubling aspect of Berry’s performance is his deliberate effort to wrap himself in the flag and deny that anyone should even ask questions about federal workers during a time of national security concerns. It is strange that an Obama administration official would so vigorously use the Bush administration tactic of “waving the bloody shirt.”

Here are excerpts from the interview starting at 1:48 minutes and then 5:54 minutes (my transcription):

Interviewer: “There was a line in this [Washington Times] editorial, one of the first lines, it was the first line of the second paragraph, and that is: ‘Consider how much money a bureaucrat can make for successfully sitting at his desk for a year.’

Berry: …You know, this is the kind of, it’s just a denigration of public service and, and it is, there should be no place for it in our country… And to be denigrated and say that they’re bureaucrats sitting at a desk pushing paper there should be no place in American society for such hyperbole.

Interviewer: I wonder if this is something that comes because of the economy. Where is this upswell of anger coming from?

Berry: …And that’s why I just get steamed when I read something like this because it denigrates that incredible motivation, and like I said to denigrate those who even put their lives on the line day in and day out so that the rest of us and our children can be safe, there should be no place for it. And I think my hope is that a lot of people, not just me, will rise up and respond to this with the anger and the facts that it deserves. Because as long as people can get away with denigrating that level of service, then we are putting at risk the future of our country.”

Have you got Berry’s message? We simply cannot allow people to use their free speech rights to question the operations of government because that will undermine national security. So people need to “rise up” and get “angry,” grab their pitchforks, and head to the homes of anyone who dares question high government worker pay because it puts “at risk the future of our country.”

Good grief!

More from me on federal worker pay here.

(Thanks to Solomon Stein and Justin Logan)

In a highly symbolic gesture, the Federal Communications Commission published the executive summary of its “National Broadband Plan” in one of the most opaque formats going: It’s a PDF scan of a printed document.

This means you can’t cut and paste the bullet point that says:

“Increase civic engagement by making government more open and transparent, creating a robust public media ecosystem and modernizing the democratic process.”

Can an agency that publishes documents in inaccessible formats be relied on to deliver transparency? Did you know that this is Sunshine Week?! Let’s segue from symbolism to substance . . . 

That bullet and the many that accompany it explode the FCC’s proper authority and propose an industrial policy fit for . . . well, the industrial age—not that industrial policies were any good then.

The executive summary is 56 bullets broken into four sections, and six “goals” carefully crafted to avoid measurement with nebulous concepts like “affordable.” (We all want it, but affordability is subjective. Nothing is universally “affordable” while it bears a price tag.)

The one goal that is measurable is telling in its own way:

“Goal No. 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.”

(Why should it take broadband to monitor your energy consumption? Does the FCC plan to send out scanned PDFs of photos of your electric meter?)

Whether we should have a network-managed energy system or not, note how the Federal Communications Commission’s “broadband” plan would make it a player in the energy business. It would also be a player in health care. And education. And “economic opportunity.”

As to the latter, maybe the FCC has a leg to stand on. Expanding the current “universal service” tax-and-subsidy scheme would provide economic opportunity of a sort to the better lobbied firms in the telecommunications industry.

As I wrote before, in an even more summary way, “The Federal Communications Commission should be shuttered.” That’s still the gist of what I have to say about the “National Broadband Plan.”

Related to my post below on whether last-second shots with time expiring, while good for basketball, might be bad for governance, Steven Horwitz offers a compelling hypothetical in academic governance at Coordination Problem:

…Nonetheless, the leadership insists this curriculum change is crucially important to the future of the institution and if only the Faculty Senate would pass it and put it in place, the faculty and students would then realize just how good it is.  In fact, the faculty leadership, working with the clear approval of the president and VPAA, are now scouring Roberts Rules of Order to find a series of sure-to-be controversial parliamentary maneuvers to get the Faculty Senate to approve the new curriculum without it ever going to the full faculty, and possibly without the Faculty Senate ever actually taking a clean vote on it.  The president, meanwhile, is going around to students and alumni telling them how important this new curriculum is and, in the process, criticizing the faculty opponents by charging they have self-interested reasons for defending the status quo, even as the new curriculum proposal contains the aforementioned special deals for some of the faculty supporters.

The faculty as a whole and the student body continue to oppose the new curriculum by a consistent majority.

Having considered this hypothetical scenario, here are my questions for you my friends:

Would you consider this a legitimate way to pass a new curriculum?  If the faculty leadership in conjunction with the administration were to ram this through by questionable parliamentary procedure and over the objections of a clear majority, do you think this new curriculum would have any legitimacy? …

• Alan Reynolds: The truth about health insurance premiums and profits.

• An overview of the many hurdles the health care bill still faces in the House.

• Study: Public schools dishonest about the true cost of education. This video explains it all in less than three minutes.

• Will conservatives ultimately oppose the war in Afghanistan? Join us for a lively discussion this Thursday at Cato featuring Joe Scarborough, Grover Norquist, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) and more. Registration free. Will be broadcast online live Thursday at the link.

• Podcast: “Documenting Human Rights Abuses in Venezuela” featuring Ian Vásquez. (Don’t tell Sean Penn.)

The Pentagon has informed Congress about another of its procurement projects that is plagued by cost overruns. In other news, the sun will rise and set today, and the pope is Catholic.

Pentagon officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that costs for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter have jumped more than 50 percent since the program began in 2001. Testifying before the committee, the Government Accountability Office noted that it has reviewed the JSF effort five times and the findings haven’t been positive:

We have consistently reported on the elevated risk of poor program outcomes from the substantial overlap of development, test, and production activities and our concerns about the Government investing in large numbers of production aircraft before variant designs are proven and performance verified in testing.

In our March 2009 report, we again noted development cost increases, additional delays in manufacturing and testing schedules, and the government’s increased financial risk from plans to increase procurement in advance of testing.

The GAO reports that just since 2007 the “total estimated acquisition costs have increased $46 billion and development extended 2 ½ years.” Incredibly, the GAO says that the Pentagon still “does not have a full, comprehensive cost estimate for completing the program.”

In private industry, it would be hard to imagine that a company and its contractors would put in such a poor performance, at least as a matter of routine, which it is with weapons procurement.

Bungled weapons procurement is not just the Pentagon’s fault. Congress is often at fault as well, as a Cato essay on cost overruns points out:

Still, Congress, not the Pentagon, deserves the main blame for cost overruns since it holds the purse strings. Rather than looking out for taxpayer interests, most members of Congress fight attempts to reduce defense spending in their districts, including spending on weapons that the Pentagon doesn’t even want.

Defense contractors exploit this parochial self-interest of legislators, and they skillfully spread out research and production work across many states and districts to maximize congressional support. The $70 billion F/A-22 fighter program provides an example. The Washington Post noted in 2005 that the F/A-22 “is an economic engine, with 1,000 suppliers — and many jobs — in 42 states guaranteeing solid support in Congress.” In 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates wanted to cancel further orders of the aircraft, but hundreds of lawmakers and state governors lobbied President Obama to keep the production lines going to preserve the 95,000 related jobs.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Comcast-NBC Universal merger, here’s a reason to: A good fight has broken out!

It starts with Mark Cooper, Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America, who testified against the merger to the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet on behalf of CFA, Free Press, and Consumers Union.

The merger has so many anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and anti-social effects that it cannot be fixed,” says Cooper.

Cato Adjunct Scholar Richard Epstein lays into Cooper’s testimony with aplomb: ”Dr. Cooper has achieved a rare feat. The evidence that he presents against this proposed merger suffices to explain emphatically why it ought to be approved.”

And in a second commentary, Epstein ladles out another helping of humble pie to Cooper, concluding:

The cumbersome Soviet-style review process that Mr. Cooper advocates does no good for the consumers who he purports to represent. It only shows how far out of touch he is with the basics of antitrust theory as they relate to the particulars of the telecommunication market.

Maybe Cooper will have a rejoinder. But until then, I’ll just note that the best fights are the ones that your guy wins.

Last week, I posted a series of questions that I hoped would get supporters of ObamaCare thinking.

I received a brief response from the Center for American Progress’ Matt Yglesias on Twitter.  The Guardian’s Sahil Kapur provided a thorough response, and even posed a question in return.

I appreciate Kapur’s effort, and plan to respond.  But before I do, I wonder if he (or any other thoughtful ObamaCare supporter) would answer just a few additional questions:

• What does it say that Democrats are having this much trouble getting their health care legislation through Congress even after hiding 60 percent of its cost?
• What does it say that Virginia’s legislature, including its Democratically controlled Senate, has approved legislation blocking the Obama plan’s centerpiece?  Or that 31 other states are considering legislation or amending their constitutions to do the same?
• What does it say that veteran and centrist health economist Alain Enthoven writes, “The American people are being deceived...the bills in Congress…do little or nothing to curb [health care] expenditures. When the American people come to understand that ‘reform’ was not followed by improvement, they are likely to be disappointed.”
• What does it say that some Democratic pollsters are in open revolt against ObamaCare?
• What do you make of Yuval Levin’s observation that, in order to enact ObamaCare, Democrats must “amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it“?
• What does it mean if Democrats decide that ObamaCare will die if it faces a simple, up-or-down, majority vote in the House?

The House leadership plans to hold a vote, more or less, on the Senate health care bill this week.  President Obama says he wants to “ge[t] rid of many of the provisions that had no place in health care reform — provisions that were more about winning individual votes…than improving health care.”  White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says Democrats will “take the pot-sweetening out of the process.”  Yet Democrats have decided to retain the Senate bill’s $300 million subsidy for the state of Louisiana, commonly known as the “Louisiana Purchase,” and other state-specific bribes pot-sweeteners.

On ABC News’s This Week yesterday, Obama advisor David Axelrod argued that the “Louisiana Purchase” is not targeted solely at Louisiana:

The president does believe that state-only carve-outs should not be in the bill. There are things in the bill that apply to groupings of states…for example…what has been portrayed as a provision relating to Louisiana says that if a state, if every county in a state is declared a disaster area, they get some extra Medicaid funds. Well, that would apply to any state…

Sure, in theory.  But as ABC News reported in November, the bill speaks of “certain states recovering from a major disaster” and “spends two pages describing what could be written with a single world: Louisiana.”

Axelrod would have us believe that after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wrote the best darned bill he could, he slapped his head and said, “Omigosh! The way I worded this one subsidy provision, it would only apply to Louisiana — the home state of a senator whose vote I need! Gee whiz, what are the odds??”  Using Axelrod’s rationale, if Reid had included a $10 billion pension for “all African-American former presidents,” that would not be an Obama-only pot-sweetener because it would apply to any African-American former president.

As I wrote in this post, Senators McCain and Lieberman proposed a broad piece of anti-terrorism legislation. The Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 would use military detention to incapacitate suspected domestic terrorists, including American citizens. This is a sea change in counterterrorism policy and a break from American principles that mandate a day in court.

This bill is a bad idea for several reasons. First, for the points that I made in my previous post, the civilian criminal justice system successfully incapacitates domestic terrorists. Our laws are built to do that — it’s the international nature of al Qaeda and the necessity of military force in the expeditionary conflicts we are fighting that make things different. Second, I doubt that this policy will be seen as a bonanza for domestic counterterrorism, and the agencies responsible tasked with using military detention won’t actually have much use for it. Third, and most importantly, detaining American citizens minus a suspension of habeas is unconstitutional and will be held so in court.

The policy prescribed under this bill is to direct anyone apprehended and suspected of terrorism into military custody for their initial interrogation. The bill bars them from being read Miranda rights, directs a high-value detainee interrogation group to determine whether or not they fit the bill as an unprivileged enemy belligerent (Military Commissions Act 2009 language for unlawful enemy combatant), and further directs authorities to submit this information to Congress. Anyone designated as an enemy belligerent can be detained until the cessation of hostilities, which amounts to whenever Congress says that the war on terrorism is over.

The kicker is that aliens detained domestically under this system must be tried by a military commission. Citizens cannot be tried by military commissions, and the jurisdictional language in the Military Commissions Act (MCA) reflects this. Basically, the government would collect a bunch of intelligence that is inadmissible in federal courts and then hold American citizens indefinitely. Also, detaining large numbers of Muslim aliens (who may have strong ties to local Muslim communities) and prosecuting them in military commissions threatens to radicalize citizens who are Muslims. The perceived double standard — commissions for Muslims in America, civilian trials for everyone else — is counterproductive when it comes to defeating terrorist recruiting.

I say that this won’t be a bonanza for the intelligence community because I see this scenario playing out in three ways:

First, it might work as seamlessly as the bill’s sponsors describe. This could be true if we already have a lot of evidence, the suspect is arrested, temporarily transferred for a short session of non-admissible interrogation, and then kicked back to the civilian criminal justice system (true with citizens, not with aliens). There’s an argument that traditional police interrogations could get the same (or more) information that the military can, because military interrogators do not have the bargaining tools such as snitching on co-conspirators for reduced sentences, plea bargains and the like. I won’t belabor that, since it’s not the point of this post.

Second, there’s the possibility that the military and the intelligence community won’t want to get involved in a lot of these cases, essentially nullification of what Congress would dictate with this bill. The FBI would monitor the communications of someone like JihadJane, have mountains of evidence against her, and have a case that supports the arrest of her co-conspirators overseas. In this case military detention is unwarranted, so the military investigator shows up, decides that the law enforcement agents have the situation in hand, and high-fives them on the way out the door. The bulk of terrorism suspects don’t have a wealth of information about other plots, so mandating military detention is tying the Executive’s hands by making counterterrorism agents jump through additional bureaucratic hoops when they take people into custody. I thought this was something that conservatives oppose.

Mandating military custody gets hairier in real emergencies. Imagine a parallel to the 1993 WTC bombing where the FBI knows that a cell is assembling a bomb but doesn’t sweep up the suspects before the bomb is operational and in a truck bound for its intended target. Agents lose track of the suspects, but quickly locate one of them and take him into custody. The new law would mandate that they first get the guy into military custody before asking him where the bomb is going. Besides creating an incentive to put military investigators (CID, NCIS, or OSI) on every Joint Terrorism Task Force in America (possible Posse Comitatus and 10 U.S.C. 375 issues with this and the rest of the bill), this doesn’t even guarantee that a military investigator is with the agents who capture the suspect that we need information from right now. Under the current “soft-on-terrorism law enforcement approach” the law enforcement agents can question the suspect directly and be assured that the exigency of the situation makes his statements admissible in court via Quarles, where the Court created a “public safety” exception for the post-arrest, pre-Miranda questioning of a rapist who had hidden his gun in a supermarket. A bomb heading toward the federal building or a shopping mall is a bigger threat than a revolver mixed in with the fresh fruit, and courts get this. If the course of action dictated to the people on the ground fails the “ticking bomb” scenario, it ought to be opposed by all armchair counterterrorism experts who take their cues from 24.

The third possibility is a worst-case scenario. Suppose we have an American citizen who gets taken into military custody, gives up a lot of information, but then won’t repeat it when he is kicked back to the civilian law enforcement system. Some will make the case that this is justification for an honest-to-goodness preventive detention system to keep such a person in custody.

This raises the question of constitutionality with regard to holding American citizens as domestic enemy combatants. More to the point, it resurrects the case of Yaser Hamdi with a differently-situated plaintiff. Hamdi was a dual US-Saudi citizen who was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. He was brought to the US and kept in a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina. The Supreme Court heard his case and the plurality held that he could be detained as an enemy combatant, but that some form of administrative hearing was required to balance his liberty interest versus the government’s national security concerns.

Justices Scalia and Stevens dissented and got this case right (agreeing with Cato’s brief). American citizens cannot be held without trial short of suspending habeas corpus, and Congress has not supplied language to comply with the Non-Detention Act when it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force after 9/11.

After all, President Bush’s military order of November 13, 2001 directs the Secretary of Defense to detain and try enemy aliens by military commission. The Military Commissions Acts of 2006 and 2009 have not deviated from this language.

The court challenge that results is a return to the Executive playing “chicken” with the courts, and the Executive continuously losing.

Courts will distinguish domestic terrorism suspects from those who participated in hostilities on the battlefield. This was the reasoning behind Jose Padilla’s loss in the 4th Circuit. He had been on the battlefield and escaped, parallel to Yaser Hamdi and the Nazi saboteurs of the Quirin case. This distinguished him from Lambdin Milligan, the post-Civil War domestic terrorist who was ordered out of a military commission and back into the civilian courts.

Even those who disagree with Scalia and Stevens can count votes on the Court. The narrow circumstances in Hamdi are not present here, and the battlefield/civil society distinction has the potential to sway all but two or three of the justices. Kennedy indicated displeasure with the jurisdictional shell game the Bush administration played with Jose Padilla, along with Roberts and Stevens. Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer voted to hear his case even after he had been transferred from enemy combatant status to federal court.

The bottom line is that this bill mandates treating all terrorist attacks as acts of war and not criminal violations, when some are clearly both. It isn’t bad policy because there is no justification for military force — there is — it’s bad policy because it prohibits a pragmatic legal response to terrorism. If the law enforcement paradigm gets results for the threat, use it. The same goes for the military paradigm. But let’s not pick one over the other for the sake of domestic politics.

On Sunday the University of Kentucky Wildcats saved their SEC tournament championship on a second-chance shot with 0.1 seconds left on the clock.

That’s a great way to win a basketball game, but not a good way for Congress to impose 2000 pages of federal rules on one-seventh of the American economy.

White House senior advisor David Axelrod continued the administration’s campaign against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on ABC’s This Week:

But thinking about Teddy Roosevelt, I wonder what he would think about a bill that essentially allows for a corporate takeover of our elections, or a court decision. And that’s what we’re dealing with here. Under the ruling of the Supreme Court, any lobbyist could go into any legislator and say, if you don’t vote our way on this bill, we’re going to run a million-dollar campaign against you in your district. And that is a threat to our democracy.

He was of course echoing and defending President Obama’s declaration in the State of the Union address:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people.

Axelrod and Obama are horrified at the idea of corporate contributions to elections. Who can imagine the impact? It’s too horrifying to contemplate.

Except — it turns out that Axelrod and Obama don’t have to imagine a political system wracked by corporate contributions. They’re already intimately familiar with such an undemocratic system. Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman points out:

But consider a state where corporations are already allowed to spend as much as they want on elections: Illinois.

That is, Obama and Axelrod spent their entire political careers in a state where corporations can make direct political contributions. Chapman isn’t impressed with the corporations’ impact:

Here, companies have established beyond doubt that this prerogative, when combined with $2.25, will get them a ride on the bus.

Illinois is something short of a corporate paradise. It ranks 30th among the states in its friendliness toward business. The Tax Foundation, which did the survey, complains of excessive sales, property and unemployment insurance taxes.

Illinois is one of a minority of states requiring employers to pay more than the federal minimum wage. It is notorious for heavy workers’ compensation costs. It puts no limits on the punitive damages a company can be assessed.

All this evidence should dispel the fear that future congressional debates will pit the senator from Exxon Mobil against her distinguished colleague from Bank of America. It turns out that where corporate expenditures are allowed, corporations a) don’t do much or b) don’t get much for what they do.

Whether or not that’s true, someone should ask Obama and Axelrod whether they accepted corporate contributions in Illinois, whether they fought to end that system, and whether they think democracy still exists in Illinois. But as far as I can tell, no one has, including ABC, NBC, and CNN, all of whom interviewed Axelrod this morning.

When Dorothy and her friends finally reach Oz, they present themselves to the almighty Wizard, only to eventually discover that he is just an illusion maintained by a charlatan hiding behind a curtain. This seems eerily akin to to the state of Keynesian economics. It does not matter that Keynesianism isn’t working for Obama. It does not matter that it didn’t work for Bush, or for Japan in the 1990s, or for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s. In the ultimate triumph of theory over reality, the Keynesians say all that matters is the macroeconomic model behind the curtain showing that more government spending leads to more jobs and growth. Consider the recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which claimed that Obama’s stimulus created at least one million jobs. As Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation noted:

CBO’s calculations are not based on actually observing the economy’s recent performance. Rather, they used an economic model that was programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs — thus guaranteeing their result. …The problem here is obvious. Once CBO decided to assume that every dollar of government spending increased GDP…, its conclusion that the stimulus saved jobs was pre-ordained.

But surely this can’t be true, you may be thinking. Our public servants in Washington would not make important policy decisions based on a model that automatically produces a certain result, would they? Peter Suderman of Reason pulls aside the curtain:

[T]hose reports rely on assumption-packed models that effectively predetermine their outcomes; what they say, in essence, is that the stimulus worked because we assume it did. …That’s especially true when estimating government spending’s productive effects, which is accomplished by plugging numbers into a formula that assumes that government spending produces a multiplier—an increased return for every government dollar spent. In other words, it extrapolates from how much money is put in rather than from what has actually come out. And it does so using a formula that dictates that if money is put in, even more money will come out. According to the CBO’s estimates, depending on how the money is spent, one dollar of government spending can produce total economic activity of up to $2.50. What a deal! …[F]or all practical purposes, the same multipliers that were used to predict how many jobs would be created are being used to estimate how many jobs have been created.

Interestingly, CBO’s analysis is completely schizophrenic. Its short-run budget numbers are based on free-lunch Keynesianism that assumes deficit-financed government spending boosts growth, while its long-run numbers are driven by an assumption that government borrowing is terrible for growth (which is why CBO actually claims higher taxes boost economic output — see, for example, Figure 3 of this CBO analysis). It is impossible to know whether the people at CBO actually believe their own work, or whether they are simply trying to please their political paymasters by producing results that (conveniently) match up with political preferences for more spending today and higher taxes tomorrow. You can draw your own conclusions, but keep in mind that CBO is now making the absurd claim that a giant new healthcare entitlement will reduce budget deficits.

But I digress. Let’s now give a defense of the Keynesian model. The folks at CBO and other Keynesians who publish estimates that inevitably turn out to be wrong (Mark Zandi comes to mind) will claim that they are right because they are predicting results compared to what otherwise would have happened. So when they claim that Obama’s so-called stimulus created jobs, they are really saying that the economy would have lost even more jobs if the government didn’t spend all that money. The problem with this approach is that there is no independent benchmark, but this is not why Keynesianism is wrong. Indeed, most of the economic profession relies on this kind of “counterfactual” analysis. Instead, the problem with Keynesianism is that it fails the empirical test. The Keynesians may be good at constructing models, but that doesn’t mean much if the models don’t match the real world. Here’s what Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise said in recent congressional testimony:

[M]ost economists learned in graduate school that models like those relied upon most heavily by the CBO provide nonsensical results. The reason the original large scale Keynesian Macro forecasting models were discarded by most of the profession is that they make a simple logical error in assuming that individuals do not change their behavior based on the expectation of future policy. …Professor Barro has been one of the primary contributors to the macroeconomic time series literature that has tried to estimate effects from observed economic data, rather than assume affects, as is done by the Keynesian models. …Barro’s analysis is based on econometric evidence, a reliance on experience. The CBO analysis is based almost exclusively on speculation within the context of Keynesian Macro models that were discredited decisively in the 1970s. …Dating at least back to the seminal work of Nelson (1972), economists have known that the empirical time series approach significantly outperforms macroeconomic models in forecasting competitions. …Ashley (1988) compares data-based time series forecasts to those from the large macro forecasters and concludes not only that the time series approach is superior, but that the macro forecasts were so bad that, “most of these forecasts are so inaccurate that simple extrapolation of historical trends is superior for forecasts more than a couple of quarters ahead.” …Finally, one should note that this literature, combined with an earlier public finance literature, raises questions concerning the welfare gain associated with short-term increases in spending. …Browning (1987) finds that the marginal cost ranges widely, between 10% and 300%. Thus, the welfare costs of paying the bill may be greater than the short-term boost to the economy from the most optimistic estimates. This literature would be consistent with Barro’s analysis that suggests the stimulus makes us worse off in the long run.

The question at National Journal’s Security Experts blog concerning NATO and the future of Europe has stimulated quite a spirited debate. I decided to take another bite at the apple.

My response:

Gordon Adams objects to the framing of the question, arguing that Europe is more important than ever because European governments have chosen to invest in civilians, not men and women at arms. In this context, Europe’s military weakness is a feature, not a bug.

Dan Serwer agrees, saying that the “Europeans are on to something,” that their civilian capabilities are vast, that they’ve been deployed in 22 different operations, and are involved in a dozen currently.

But even if they have such capabilities, all the soft power in the world isn’t worth much without some military power to back it up. In many of the places where nation building might be called for, various thugs, murderers and warlords use weapons to steal food aid, intimidate local officials, and kidnap wealthy foreigners. Such situations cry out for hard power: people who pry the weapons from the cold dead hands of the warlords, and convince the warlords’ followers to get onboard or else meet a similar fate. The aftermath of this dynamic, played out dozens of times in the past several decades, is what allows the guys in wingtips and the gals in sensible pumps to do development assistance, legal reform, institution building, etc.

In this respect, I agree with Messrs. Killebrew and Carafano. Hard power still matters. Unlike them, however, I would much prefer that locals be responsible for adjudicating these internal disputes, and, failing that, that others beside the U.S. military be capable and willing to deliver that hard power.

Bob Killebrew, the most emphatic defender of NATO as a concept (even if he advocates some reforms at the margins) concludes with three different points:

1. “NATO makes highly unlikely the kinds of European arms races and alliances that led to war so many times in recent history.”

In other words, with respect to Gates’s contention that Europe’s military weakness is a problem (bug), Killebrew still thinks it a good thing (feature).

2. “Without NATO, the Greeks and Turks would have long had their war, and perhaps others as well.”

Ummmm, hello? One could argue that NATO prevents small disputes like the 35-plus year Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus from spiraling into a major European war, but that is not what Col. Killebrew wrote (and it would be a very difficult assertion to prove in any case because there are in fact many things to explain the absence of wars between traditional enemies).

3. Killebrew concludes that we are, in fact, subsidizing the defense of other, far more vulnerable, allies, and that we should continue to do so. “With NATO, the Poles and others feel less pressure to prepare for their defense. That can, and should, irritate U.S. policymakers, but it’s good for the U.S. in the end.”

Jim Carafano appears to reject the argument — he wants Europe to get serious about military power and “join the real world” — but he is especially dismissive of the claim that greater restraint by the United States will induce the Europeans to do more. “The less we spend,” he writes, “the less they spend.”

Evidence please.

To reiterate, the current U.S. posture toward Europe is based on precisely the opposite premise: many of the defenders of the NATO status quo believe that if we were to do less, the Europeans would do more — and that would be bad.

Our intentions are ultimately irrelevant here. In my previous post, I alluded to the literature showing that even if our policies in Europe were not intended to discourage other NATO members from spending more money on their militaries, they would still be disinclined from doing so simply because it makes sense for each of them to shelter behind the strongest member of the alliance.

One need not sift through dusty economics journals or boring white papers to understand that while we have done more, the Europeans have done less.

• Andrew Coulson on national education standards: “The whole idea of imposing a single set of age-based standards on all students rests on a false premise: that children are identical widgets capable of being dragged along an instructional conveyor belt at the same pace, benefiting equally from the experience.”

• Question of the day: Would Obamacare end corruption—or expand it?

• Making things worse: How increasing the minimum wage will kill even more jobs for black teens, a group already facing 45 percent unemployment.

• The unintended consequences of a National ID card. (Now with support from both sides of the aisle.)

• Podcast: “Bad Statutes, New Crimes” featuring Marie Gryphon.

The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department recently sent out a letter to the chairs of the Asian Pacific, black, and Hispanic caucuses in Congress, reassuring them that the Patriot Act’s expansion of information-gathering powers, including the controversial Section 215, does not override federal statutes guaranteeing the confidentiality of census data.  DOJ’s view, according to Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, is that “if Congress intended to override these protections, it would say so clearly and explicitly.”

Section 215, recall, is colloquially referred to as the “business records” provision of Patriot, though in fact it permits investigators to obtain “any tangible thing” from a designated person or entity by obtaining an order from the secret FISA court, subject only to a showing that the records sought are “relevant” to a national security investigation. As Weich observes, §215 does not contain the “notwithstanding any other law” language present in other parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which means that it cannot be presumed on face to override other federal privacy statues establishing a higher degree of protection for specific categories of sensitive records. 

What’s interesting to me, however, is that a similar issue arose several years ago, not with respect to the census confidentiality statute, but rather the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (aka FERPA, aka the Buckley Amendment). Initially, DOJ attorneys similarly opted not to seek education records under §215 on the grounds that the FISA court might conclude FERPA trumped Patriot in the absence of language giving §215 explicit priority, as the Office of the Inspector General’s initial report on the use of §215 explains. Nevertheless, the Counsel for Intelligence Policy told OIG that his office “would have been willing to present an application to the FISA court for educational records if the FBI considered the information important enough and wanted to press the issue with the FISA Court.” 

Subsequent amendments to the statute alleviated those concerns:

According to [National Secrity Law Branch] and [Office of Intelligence Policy and Review] attorneys, this legal impediment to obtaining educational records has been addressed.  Section 106(a)(2) of the Reauthorization Act amended FISA by ading 50 U.S.C. §1861(a)(3), which specifically addresses educational, medical, tax and other sensitive categories of business records.  The amendment provided that when the FBI is requesting such items, the request must be personally approved by the FBI Director, the FBI Deputy Director, or the Executive Assistant Director for National Security. According to several NSLB and OPPR attorneys we interviewed, because this provision clarifies that educational records are obtainable through the use of a Section 215 order, the non-disclosure provisions of Section 215 apply rather than the notification provisions of the Buckley Amendment.

Census records, of course, are not mentioned, and the statutory language protecting those records from legal process is unusually strong and unqualified. On the other hand, neither does the amended language explicitly override the federal statutes protecting the specified categories of records. Rather, it adds a layer of oversight for several types of requests that are implied to fall within the scope of §215. Indeed, at the time, this portion of the Reauthorization Act was publicly portrayed as increasing protections for sensitive records.

That, at any rate, was the spin the Congressional Research Service gave it. Based on OIG’s account, it sounds as though a reform that had been painted as a concession to civil libertarians actually allowed the acquisition of those sensitive records for the first time, since they’d previously been regarded as off-limits by statute. So I suppose we should be glad they didn’t decide to simultaneously “enhance” the safeguards on census records.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily impossible for those records to ever be obtained via a §215 order. As Weich’s letter clearly says, the Census Act prohibits “the Commerce Secretary and other covered individuals from disclosing protected census information.” But as the Supreme Court clarified in St. Regis Paper v. United States, that confidentiality requirement is only binding on specific covered individuals.  If the government is able to get its hands on a copy of a census record by serving some non-covered individual, the record itself is not off limits.

Since I know approximately nothing about the fine points of record handling protocol within the Census Bureau, I can’t really say how much of a practical difference that makes. Still, given that we’ve seen statutory records protections effectively stripped away under the guise of enhancing those protections, I think it’s reasonable to infer that census records will be considered fair game under §215 if they can be obtained from a source other than the designated officials.

If you follow education news at all, over the last week or so — until the national-standards stories took over — you probably saw a lot about education historian Diane Ravitch’s supposedly sudden determination that school choice isn’t good after all. That’s one of the major selling points of her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, and just about every major newspaper has devoted a fair amount of ink to it.

Now I’ve devoted some ink — okay, pixels — to it, too. You can check out my review of Ravitch’s book on the brand-new School Reform News website. When you’re done with that, you can take a gander at my Cato Journal review of Core Knowledge guru E. D. Hirsch’s new offering, The Making of Americans. I think you’ll detect a unifying theme: Ravitch and Hirsch are excellent at their specialties — history and pedagogy, respectively — but they ignore just about everything they have lamented for decades about government schooling in order to proclaim that, um, we somehow need more government schooling.

Go figure!

Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Six reasons to downsize Washington.
• The chances of a taxpayer bailout for the FHA are probably larger than it wants to admit.
• The same people that say Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shouldn’t be on the government’s books are often the same people who once dismissed concerns that the two companies were headed toward financial ruin.
• Here’s a shocker: the private sector does a better job of fighting fraud than the government.
• Bailing out state and local governments creates a disincentive for state and local policymakers to implement necessary reforms to get their budgets and future liabilities under control.

With national curriculum standards now getting some real attention, I haven’t been able to give the plan to shove bankrupting student aid legislation down our thoats via health-care reconciliation the scourging it deserves. I will soon, but until then this “Water Cooler” piece from the Washington Times should slake your thirst. Here’s a choice quote:

Watching the Democrats create two massive pieces of rotten legislation by themselves is bad enough, but piling them together is like watching someone make an enormous Dagwood sandwich with mysterious fillings and make you eat the mile high concoction in one sitting.

Darn — acckkk! — right!

It’s not often (especially these days) that a trade news item makes me laugh out loud. But, via an article in Inside U.S. Trade today, I saw a letter from United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk to Rep. Michael Michaud (D, ME) that did the trick.

Representative Michaud leads the House Trade Working Group, which is indeed working very diligently to stymie any hopes of meaningful trade liberalization. They wrote a letter in January to the USTR outlining their concerns about the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. (I, too have concerns, but not the same ones as the HTWG.) Ambassador Kirk wrote back a fairly anodyne response that did not commit the administration to much of anything, except to follow up on the comments they have received from the Federal Register Notice.

Towards the end, though, came the punchline:

We are conducting follow-up meetings with these groups, including the AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers, the Sierra Club, Oxfam, and Global Trade Watch, among others, to ensure we are hearing a full range of views on these issues. (My emphasis)

In today’s Washington Post, Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen warn that ObamaCare will be a disaster for Democrats:

Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats’ current health-care plan…

[A] solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it…while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data…

By 51 percent to 39 percent, respondents feared the decisions of federal government more. This is astounding given the generally negative perception of insurance companies…

Health care is no longer a debate about the merits of specific initiatives…[but] about the government and a political majority that will neither hear nor heed the will of the people.

This oped reminds me of a Bruce Reed article on the differences between hacks and wonks:

Strip away the job titles and party labels, and you will find two kinds of people in Washington: political hacks and policy wonks. Hacks come to Washington because anywhere else they’d be bored to death. Wonks come here because nowhere else could we bore so many to death. These divisions extend far beyond the hack havens of political campaigns and consulting firms and the wonk ghettos of think tanks on Dupont Circle. Some journalists are wonks, but most are hacks. Some columnists are hacks, but most are wonks. All members of Congress pass themselves off as wonks, but many got elected as hacks. Lobbyists are hacks who make money pretending to be wonks. The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the entire political blogosphere consist largely of wonks pretending to be hacks. “The Hotline” is for hacks; National Journal is for wonks. “The West Wing” is for wonks; “K Street” was for hacks.

After two decades in Washington as a wonk working among hacks, I have come to the conclusion that the gap between Republicans and Democrats is as nothing compared to the one between these two tribes. We wonks think we’re smarter than hacks. Hacks think that if being smart makes someone a wonk, they’d rather be stupid. Wonks think all hacks are creatures from another planet, like James Carville. Hacks share Paul Begala’s view that wonks are all “propeller heads,” like Elroy on “The Jetsons.” Wonks think the differences between hacks and wonks are as irreconcilable as the Hutus and the Tutsis. Hacks think it’s just like wonks to bring up the Hutus and the Tutsis.

The Democrats’ dogged, bloodthirsty crusade for universal coverage has been possible only because the wonks have seduced or silenced the hacks within the Democratic Party.

The hacks may be launching a rebellion, with Caddell and Schoen’s oped the opening salvo.

That’s the subject of my op-ed this morning over at Pajamas Media. Check it out, and discover who realized that education standards tied strictly to student age were a bad idea… 411 years ago.

Rep. George Miller (D-CA) has introduced a bill that would give state and local governments another $100 billion to prevent public sector job cuts. The bill was written at the behest of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and other local special interest groups addicted to federal largesse.

These days it’s hard to open a newspaper without reading a tug-at-the-heart-strings story about state and local officials having to make the “painful” decision to cut supposedly crucial government spending. Very rarely do journalists dig in deeply and examine in detail where state and local governments are actually spending their giant budgets.

Sometimes stories highlight some superficial waste, such as this Los Angeles Times story reporting that “As Los Angeles County supervisors prepare to carve deeply into everything from public safety to social services, they also are spending millions in taxpayer dollars to burnish their public images, pay for chauffeurs, hold parties for friends and lobbyists and support pet projects.”

The story assumes that every penny L.A. County spends on public safety and social services is a penny well spent. Like their federal counterparts, state and local programs are rife with waste, fraud, and excess. Unfortunately, for every 100 stories you read about teachers being furloughed, you might read one that questions the basic efficiency of the services being provided or possible private-sector alternatives.

In a new Cato Policy Analysis on the cost of public education, Adam Schaeffer found that the Los Angeles school district’s real per-pupil cost is $25,000 – not the $10,000 it reports. This compares to average Los Angeles private school per-pupil spending of $8,400.

The rise of public sector unionism is another subject that should be getting more media attention as state and local politicians warn of having to “slash” programs. According to a recent study by Chris Edwards, half of the $2.2 trillion that state and local governments spent in 2008 went to employee wages and benefits. Edwards found that “public sector unions push up the costs of the public sector workforce in the United States by about 8 percent, on average, but the increase would be more in states with highly unionized public sectors such as California.”

The lavish benefits that state and local politicians have bestowed upon public employees have created massive unfunded liabilities. A recent study by Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh calculated that state and local pensions are underfunded by a whopping $3.2 trillion. Jagadeesh Gokhale and Chris Edwards estimate that public employee health benefits are underfunded by an additional $1.4 trillion.

Another bailout for state and local government like the one Congressman Miller is proposing creates a disincentive for state and local policymakers to implement necessary reforms to get their budgets and future liabilities under control. It also creates a disincentive for local citizens to be vigilant when it comes to state and local spending. Why bother attending city council or school board meetings when the federal and state governments are picking up a hefty portion of the tab for local spending?

The decades of increasing centralization of what were traditionally local responsibilities has fueled extravagant spending at all levels. Instead of continuing to aid and abet state and local politicians who are only too happy to spend the “free” money the federal government shovels their way, it’s time to get back to our constitutional roots with a return to fiscal federalism.

Today, the Congressional Budget Office released what may be the penultimate cost estimate of ObamaCare. Or maybe it will be the 12th-to-the-last.  Whatever.

That document — unlike the CBO’s score of the Clinton health plan — includes no cost estimates of the legislation’s private-sector mandates.  As I have written previously, the private-sector mandates accounted for 60 percent of the cost of the Clinton plan.  The Obama plan is remarkably similar, which is probably why Democrats have systematically suppressed any such estimates this time around.

President Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the CBO estimates do not reflect the legislation’s full cost.  Yet it has now been 265 days since Congress saw the first version of the Obama health plan, and we’re still waiting for a full cost estimate.

And so, the ObamaCare Cost-Estimate Watch maintains its lonely vigil.  At least The New York Times is listening.

The draft national curricular standards released yesterday, as I wrote earlier, will in all likelihood do little or no educational good if adopted. They’ll either be ignored or, if hard to meet, dumbed-down.

That said, the really troubling question is not whether the standards will do any good, but whether they will do much harm.

The answer: Oh, they’ll do harm. They’ll move us one step closer to complete centralization of education, which portends many potentially bad things, from total special-interest domination to even more wasteful spending.

Perhaps the most concerning possibility is that complete centralization — meaning, federalization — will lead to nationwide conflict over what the schools should teach, much as we are seeing in Texas right now and witnessed in the 1990s, the last time Washington tried to push “voluntary” national standards. Back then national standards in several subjects were proposed, and a national firestorm was set off over what they did, and did not, contain.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative folks clearly learned from the nineties experience, assiduously avoiding even the appearance of mandating the reading of specific literary works and focusing instead on skills. (The draft standards include a lot of reading exemplars but don’t require knowledge of any specific literary pieces). As a result, the response so far seems much less heated than occurred in the nineties, though critiques of the proposed standards certainly do exist. Once control over language arts skills and mathematics is fully centralized, however, can we really expect specific content standards in literature and other subjects to be left entirely to states and districts?

It seems unlikely: Once Washington connects receipt of federal funding to performance on national standards for some subjects, it is very likely to expand into others. After all, aren’t science, history, and other topics as important as reading and math?

“Promoting” science is a huge favorite of federal politicians, so it’s certainly hard to imagine science — and the freighted questions about human origins and climate change that go with it — not becoming a target for nationalization. Similarly, since many public schooling advocates argue that we must have government schools to create good citizens, it’s hard to envision the controversy-laden subjects of history and civics not entering the sites of federal politicians.  And when they do, we can either expect the sparks to fly, or the standards that are set to be so milquetoast as to be meaningless.

Wait. Am I being overly alarmist about this, trying to start a trumped-up slippery-slope scare to undermine the current national standards push?

Nope. National standards supporters are already talking about targeting science and history. For instance, in the forward to International Lessons about National Standards, a recent report from the national-standards-loving Thomas B. Fordham Institute, it is written about the CCSSI:

Our authors would prefer for science to be included in this first round, and we’d like to get to history sooner rather than later.

And Fordham is not alone. Indeed, the CCSSI folks have already been talking about creating national science and social studies standards!

When should all kids learn evolution, if at all? How much Hispanic history should students know? How many Founding Fathers should high school grads be able to identify? What caused the Civil War? Is global warming a major threat? Are we a Christian nation? How these and numerous other bitterly contested questions will officially be answered will suddenly have to be duked out by every American, and the winners will get to dictate to the entire nation.

So the language arts and math standards revealed yesterday are, almost certainly, just the camel’s nose under the tent.  Unfortunately, that means the whole destructive beast isn’t far behind.