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.

Can I send Time magazine the bill for the new crack in my desk and the splinters in my forehead? Because their latest excretion on the case of Colleen “Jihad Jane” LaRose and its relation to Patriot Act surveillance powers is absolutely maddening:

The Justice Department won’t say whether provisions of the Patriot Act were used to investigate and charge Colleen LaRose. But the FBI and U.S. prosecutors who charged the 46-year-old woman from Pennsburg, Pa., on Tuesday with conspiring with terrorists and pledging to commit murder in the name of jihad could well have used the Patriot Act’s fast access to her cell-phone records, hotel bills and rental-car contracts as they tracked her movements and contacts last year. But even if the law’s provisions weren’t directly used against her, the arrest of the woman who allegedly used the moniker “Jihad Jane” is a boost for the Patriot Act, Administration officials and Capitol Hill Democrats say. That’s because revelations of her alleged plot may give credibility to calls for even greater investigative powers for the FBI and law enforcement, including Republican proposals to expand certain surveillance techniques that are currently limited to targeting foreigners.

Sadly, this is practically a genre resorted to by lazy writers whenever a domestic terror investigation is making headlines. It consists of indulging in a lot of fuzzy speculation about how the Patriot Act might have been crucial—for all we know!—to a successful  investigation, even when every shred of available public evidence suggests otherwise.  My favorite exemplar of this genre comes from a Fox News piece penned by journalist-impersonator Cristina Corbin after the capture of some Brooklyn bomb plotters last spring, with the bold headline: “Patriot Act Likely Helped Thwart NYC Terror Plot, Security Experts Say.” The actual article contains nothing to justify the headline: It quotes some lawyers saying vague positive things about the Patriot Act, then tries to explain how the law expanded surveillance powers, but mostly botches the basic facts.  From what we know thanks to the work of real reporters,  the initial tip and the key evidence in that case came from a human infiltrator who steered the plotters to locations that had been physically bugged, not new Patriot tools.

Of course, it may well be that National Security Letters or other Patriot powers were invoked at some point in this investigation—the question is whether there’s any good reason to suspect they made an important difference. And that seems highly dubious. LaRose’s indictment cites the content of private communications, which probably would have been obtained using a boring old probable cause warrant—and the standard for that is far higher than for a traditional pen/trap order, which would have enabled them to be getting much faster access to more comprehensive cell records. Maybe earlier on, then, when they were compiling the evidence for those tools?  But as several reports on the investigation have noted, “Jihad Jane” was being tracked online by a groups of anti-jihadi amateurs some three years ago. As a member of one group writes sarcastically on the site Jawa Report, the “super sekrit” surveillance tool they used to keep abreast of LaRose’s increasingly disturbing activities was… Google. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the FBI could’ve handled this one with pre-Patriot authority, and a fortiori with Patriot authority restrained by some common-sense civil liberties safeguards.

What’s a little more unusual is to see this segue into the kind of argument we usually see in the wake of an intelligence failure, where the case is then seen as self-evidently justifying still more intrusive surveillance powers, in this case the expansion of the “lone wolf” authority currently applicable only to foreigners, allowing extraordinarily broad and secretive FISA surveillance to be conducted against people with no actual ties to a terror group or other “foreign power.” Yet as Time itself notes:

In fact, Justice Department terrorism experts are privately unimpressed by LaRose. Hers was not a particularly threatening plot, they say, and she was not using any of the more challenging counter-surveillance measures that more experienced jihadis, let alone foreign intelligence agents, use.

Which, of course, is a big part of the reason we have a separate system for dealing with agents of foreign powers: They are typically trained in counterintelligence tradecraft with access to resources and networks far beyond those of ordinary nuts. What possible support can LaRose’s case provide for the proposition that these industrial-strength tools should now be turned on American citizens?  They caught her—and without much trouble, by the looks of it. Sure, this domestic nut may have invoked to Islamist ideology rather than the commands of Sam the Dog or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories… but so what? She’s still one more moderately dangerous unhinged American in a country that has its fair share, and has been dealing with them pretty well under the auspices of Title III for a good while now.

According to Roll Call:

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

So…before you can amend a law, it has to be a law?  What a concept.

According to MSNBC, Democratic leaders have given up on trying to appease pro-life House Democrats:

House leaders have concluded they cannot change a divisive abortion provision in President Barack Obama’s health care bill and will try to pass the sweeping legislation without the support of ardent anti-abortion Democrats.A break on abortion would remove a major obstacle for Democratic leaders in the final throes of a yearlong effort to change health care in America. But it sets up a risky strategy of trying to round up enough Democrats to overcome, not appease, a small but possibly decisive group of Democratic lawmakers in the House…

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee…predicted some of the anti-abortion lawmakers in the party will end up voting for the overhaul anyway.

Pro-life Democrats will vote for taxpayer-funded abortions?  Without even a fig leaf of a compromise?

Ezra Klein quotes the Congressional Budget Office’s latest cost estimate of the Senate health care bill when he writes:

“CBO expects that the legislation would generate a reduction in the federal budgetary commitment to health care during the decade following 2019,” which is to say that this bill will cover 30 million people but the cost controls will, within a decade or so, leave us spending less on health care than if we’d done nothing.  That’s a pretty good deal. But it’s not a very well-understood deal.

Indeed, because that’s not what the CBO said.

First, the CBO said the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” would rise by $210 billion between 2010 and 2019 under the Senate bill.  Then, after 2019, it would fall from that higher level.  And it could fall quite a bit before returning to its current level.

Second, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” is a concept that includes federal spending on health care and the tax revenue that the federal government forgoes due to health-care-related tax breaks, the largest being the exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance premiums.  If Congress creates a new $1 trillion health care entitlement and finances it with deficit spending or an income-tax hike, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” rises by $1 trillion.  But if Congress funds it by eliminating $1 trillion of health-care-related tax breaks, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” would be unchanged, even though Congress just increased government spending by $1 trillion.  That’s what the Senate bill’s tax on high-cost health plans does: by revoking part of the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, it makes the projected growth in the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” appear smaller than the actual growth of government.

Third, the usual caveats about the Senate bill’s Medicare cuts, which the CBO says are questionable and Medicare’s chief actuary calls “doubtful” and “unrealistic,” apply.  If those spending cuts don’t materialize, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” will be higher than the CBO projects.

Fourth, Medicare’s chief actuary also contradicts Klein’s claim that the Senate bill would “leave us spending less on health care than if we’d done nothing.”  The actuary estimated that national health expenditures would rise by $234 billion under the Senate bill.

And really, Klein’s claim is a little silly.  Even President Obama admits, “You can’t structure a bill where suddenly 30 million people have coverage and it costs nothing.”

Jay makes a number of good points in his blog post on the subject, but particularly effective is his likening of “voluntary” education standards to “voluntary” state speed limits tied to federal highway funding.

When someone takes your money and will only give any of it back if you do as he says, are your actions really voluntary? That’s what the Obama administration and other “voluntary” standards advocates are proposing.

More soon on the folly of imposing a single set of age-based education standards on the entire nation. Stay tuned.

Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education, and understate what is actually spent.

In a new study, Cato’s Adam B. Schaeffer reviews district budgets and state records for the nation’s five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. Schaeffer finds that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.

In this new video, Schaeffer explains the whole thing in under three minutes:

From my op-ed in The Daily Caller:

ObamaCare would dramatically expand government control over health care.

Each new power ObamaCare creates would be targeted by special interests looking for special favors, and held for ransom by politicians seeking a slice of the pie.

ObamaCare would guarantee that crucial decisions affecting your medical care would be made by the same people, through the same process that created the Cornhusker Kickback, for as far as the eye can see.

When ObamaCare supporters, like Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman, claim that “voters are rejecting the process more than the substance” of the legislation, they’re missing the point.

When government grows, corruption grows.  When voters reject these corrupt side deals, they are rejecting the substance of ObamaCare.

If Obama is serious about fighting corruption, he should invite C-SPAN to into every meeting he holds with members of Congress.

Then we’ll see whether he’s lobbying House members based on the Senate bill’s merits, or promising House members judgeships or ambassadorships in exchange for their votes.

What’s going on behind those closed doors, anyway?  Aren’t you just a little bit curious?

Or does corruption only happen when Billy Tauzin is in the room?

• Greece, here we come…. Congressional Budget Office estimates budget deficits will average nearly $1 trillion per year for the next decade.

• Matt Drudge re-titles a Cato op-ed: “Mob Tactics Used to Push Healthcare Through.”

• Daniel Griswold: “On trade, as on so much else, the populists have it wrong again. Free trade and globalization are great blessings to families across America.“

• Could Dennis Kucinich bring both sides of the aisle  together to end the war in Afghanistan?

• Podcast: “Seventies Redux?” featuring John Samples, author of the forthcoming book The Struggle to Limit Government.

There seems to be a real trend in Washington to declare support for a bill now, but actually have the bill exist later. It’s been most obvious in the health care marathon, where often purely notional pieces of legislation have been boisterously celebrated or bemoaned for months. It’s also the case with the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which may or may not be tacked on to health-care reconcilation because supporters don’t, you know, want to actually debate the thing. Currently, there is no Senate version of SAFRA, and it’s unclear what changes would need to be made to the House version to make it reconcilable.

So why are so many people willing to take big chances on legislation that only exists in the fertile minds of congresspeople? As this Inside Higher Ed article on community colleges illustrates, it’s often because they want taxpayer money — $12 billion is the community colleges’ hoped for windfall – no matter what:

Sensing the urgency of the moment on Capitol Hill, many community college advocates believe that budget reconciliation is the most likely route for passage of the AGI this year. They argue that time is of the essence for those community college trustees and presidents visiting town for the summit to lobby their representatives and senators without focusing on quibbles over the bill.

“I know there’s a lot of discussion for many of you [about] what’s in the program,” said Jee Hang Lee, ACCT director of public policy. “‘What’s in the final program for SAFRA? What’s in the final program for AGI? What is it going to look like?’ What we’ve heard is that, for the most part, the House and Senate staffs and the White House have something in place. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know many people who do know what it looks like. But they have a broad agreement on the structure of these programs, so that’s nice to know that they have because that means it’ll likely get funded.”

Still, he advised visiting trustees and presidents to be direct in their support for the bill and wait until later to work out potential kinks in its specific provisions.

“My point is that you just need to press hard to get this money and get it passed, and we can work out some of the details, I guess, later, I guess through the negotiated rule-making period,” Lee said.

Hmm. And I guess money grabs like these explain a good bit of why the national debt is now approaching $12.6 trillion.

Compromise is catnip in Washington, D.C. That’s my best guess at why Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) would endorse New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D) widely reviled plan to create a mandatory biometric national ID system.

Schumer’s national ID plans have no more definition today than when he wrote about them in his 2007 campaign manifesto Postitively American. Among the thin gruel of that book is a two-page lump displaying more ignorance than understanding of how identity systems work and fail. Schumer doesn’t know the difference between an identifier—a characteristic used to distinguish or group people—and an identification card or system, which does the entire task of proving a person’s previously fixed identity. (My thin gruel on the topic is the book Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood.)

“All the national employment ID card will do is make forgery harder,” says Schumer.

No, that’s not all it would do: It would also subject every employment decision to the federal government’s approval. It would make surveillance of law-abiding citizens easier. It would allow the government to control access to health care. It would facilitate gun control. It would cost $100 billion dollars or more. It would draw bribery and corruption into the Social Security Administration. It would promote the development of sophisticated biometric identity fraud. How long should I go on?

Senator Graham’s take is equally simple: “We’ve all got Social Security cards,” he said to the Wall Street Journal. “They’re just easily tampered with. Make them tamper-proof. That’s all I’m saying.”

No, Senator, that’s not all you’re saying. You’re saying that native-born American citizens should be herded into Social Security Administration offices by the millions so they can have their biometrics collected in federal government databases. You’re saying that you’d like a system where working, traveling, going to the doctor, and using a credit card all depend on whether you can show your national ID. You’re saying that bigger government is the solution, not smaller government.

The point for these senators, of course, is not the substance. It’s the thrill they experience as nominal ideological opponents finding that they can agree on something, securing a potential breakthrough on the difficult immigration issue.

They’re only ”nominal” ideological opponents, though. Chuck Schumer has always been a big government guy—and long a supporter of having a national ID, despite the lessons of history. Lindsey Graham is not really his ideological opponent. Typical of politicians with years in Washington D.C., Graham is steadily migrating toward the big-government ideology that unites federal politicians and bureaucrats against the people.

The President has announced a government crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. The effort appears to be an attempt to make it easier for Americans to swallow the health care “reform” he’s trying to shove down their throats. As House Republican leader John Boehner correctly asked, “Why can’t we crack down on fraud without a big-government takeover of health care?”

As I’ve noted before, improper payments made by Medicare and Medicaid is may well be $50 billion more than the already appalling $100 billion annual figure the president cited. Administrative efforts to rein in fraud and abuse are welcome, but they won’t solve the huge and fundamental inefficiencies of these programs. Because the law requires government health care programs to quickly get payments out the door, Uncle Sam will always be engaged in a costly game of “pay and chase.”

The broader problem is that government programs aren’t subject to market discipline. Policymakers and administrators have little incentive to be frugal because they face few or no negative consequences when playing with other people’s money.

Most of us have noticed how good private companies can be at reducing fraud. I recently received a call about questionable charges on my Discover credit card. After quizzing me on a list of purchases made with my card in the past 24 hours, it became clear that someone had gotten control of my account. Discover immediately closed the account, opened an investigation, and removed me from any liability for the fraudulent charges.

What amazed me is that I only had about $300 worth of charges on my card. It’s not a big account and thus not a big money maker for Discover. Yet, within 24 hours of a string of suspicious charges, the company was right on top of it before I even realized anything nefarious was going on. Private markets don’t always work this well, but government programs almost never do.

Noting that premium increases, such as Anthem’s proposed 39-percent hike in California, have caused individuals and employers to purchase less coverage, Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman writes:

Rising health care costs and insurance company practices are leading not just to more expensive premiums, but to skimpier, less comprehensive coverage as well; slowly redefining what we have known as health insurance. To be sure, some economists argue that this is precisely what should happen…But this is not likely how regular people see it. Appropriate cost sharing is one thing, but we may be reaching the point in the individual market where the policies many people have simply cannot be considered meaningful coverage.

Of course, this is the whole idea behind President Obama’s proposed tax on high-cost health plans: higher prices will cause people to purchase less coverage, which will temper health care spending.

But whether Altman is correct depends on what the meaning of “meaningful” is.  When individuals pare back the amount of insurance they purchase, they are revealing what they consider to be meaningful coverage.  (The same is true when employers opt for less-comprehensive coverage, though employers’ revealed preferences are obviously a poor proxy for what their workers value.)

If Altman thinks the coverage that individuals are choosing “cannot be considered meaningful coverage” (note the passive voice), he is implicitly stating that individuals are not the best judges of their own welfare.  And the only way to devise an alternative definition of meaningful coverage is through the political process.

It is difficult to argue that the political process does a better job of selecting meaningful coverage.  That process forces many consumers to purchase coverage that they don’t find meaningful (e.g., chiropractic, acupuncture, circumcision), that they find offensive (e.g., abortion, contraception, in-vitro fertilization), or for treatments that are downright harmful (e.g., high-dose chemotherapy combined with autologous bone-marrow transplant for late-stage breast cancer).

Letting consumers reveal their preferences is possibly the worst way to define “meaningful coverage.”  Except for all the others.

Three days ago I reported that draft, grade-by-grade, national curricular standards would soon be released by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Yesterday, they were. (If you want to get a sense for what the proposed standards are follow the link to them. Don’t bother with the appendices, though, unless you really want to get into the weeds.)

Naturally, in the coming days lots of people will be offering heaps of commentary about what the standards do or do not contain. That’s not my main concern (though reading through the English standards I am dubious that mastery of them could be easily or consistently assessed). You see, the content of the standards is largely irrelevant because the main problem isn’t what the standards are, but standardization itself.

As I’ve blathered about on numerous occasions, it makes little sense to expect all kids to master all the same things at the same rates. All kids are different – they have different talents, desires, and abilities — and to impose one, “best” progression on them is simply illogical.

Another problem with imposing a single standard nationwide — and yes, this will be imposed, unless states suddenly decide they don’t like getting their citizen’s tax dollars back from Uncle Sam – is that it prevents competition between curricula. And that, in turn, kills innovation, the lifeblood of progress. So unless these standards have achieved perfection — and I’m pretty sure they haven’t — it’s a very dangerous thing to make them the end-all and be-all.

Finally, no matter how brilliant the draft standards, there is no reason to believe that they will drive meaningful educational improvement. Government schools will still be government schools, and the people employed by them will still have very little incentive to push kids to excellence, and every incentive to game the system to make the standards toothless. And no one yet has offered a decent proposal, other than school-choice supporters, for getting around that very inconvenient, public-schooling truth.

All of these problems help to explain why there is no convincing empirical evidence that national standards drive superior educational outcomes. Unfortunately, most national-standards advocates will talk themselves blue in the face about what’s in the standards, but avoid at all costs the question of whether standardization makes sense in the first place.

What does it say that the American polity has consistently rejected a wholesale government takeover of health care for 100 years?

What does it say that public opinion has been consistently against the Democrats’ health care takeover since July 2009?

What does it say that Democrats are having this much difficulty enacting their health care legislation despite unified Democratic rule?  Despite large supermajorities in both chambers of Congress, including a once-filibuster-proof Senate majority (see more below)?  Despite an opportunistic change in Massachusetts law that provided that crucial 60th vote at a crucial moment?  Despite a popular and charismatic president?

What does it say that 38 House Democrats voted against the president’s health plan?

What does it say that Massachusetts voters elected, to fill the term of Ted Kennedy, a Republican who ran against the health care legislation that Kennedy helped to shape?

What does it say that the only thing bipartisan about that legislation is the opposition to it?

What does it say that 39 senators voted to declare that legislation’s centerpiece unconstitutional?

What does it say that health care researchers — a fairly left-wing lot — think the Senate bill is unconstitutional?

What does it say that the demands of pro-life and pro-choice House Democrats, each of which hold enough votes to determine the fate of this legislation, are irreconcilable?

What does it say that House Democrats are actually contemplating a legislative strategy that would deem the Senate bill to have passed the House — without the House ever actually voting on it?

Given that ours is a system of government where ambition is made to counteract ambition, what does it mean that the only way to pass this legislation is for the House to trust that the Senate will keep the House’s interests at heart?