Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
- In: Big Labor Unions | Commentary | Economy/Money | Education | Environment | EPA Environmental Protection Agency | Government Failure Series from Cato Institute | Health Care | Health Care Reform Summary | Ineffective Government Programs | Islam, Muslim, jihad, terrorist | Know the enemies of America | Laws and Regulation--stupidities | Obama Against America | Obama and ethics | Obama Executive Decress | Obama's moratorium on drilling in the Gulf | Obamanation | Obamcare repeal and replace | Progressives Movement to Destroy America | public service employees
- 1 Comment
To my Readers, I am sorry to have been so very lax these past months in keeping up with my blog, but it just seemed that the news was so very depressing. More and more scandals which our President and his cohorts refused to do anything about or even to investigate. Remember the Presidents words that “there is not even a smidgen of evidence” of wrong doing by anyone in the IRS! when all know that Americans rights were being trampled and denied and the President and all involved were lying. Remember Benghazi and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s outburst of “what dopes it matter?” when 4 people died while everyone who could have possibly come to their aid had orders from on high to stand down! And it goes on and on! Those of you who follow FOX NEWS know what is going on and my comments would not have added anything. I would sincerely suggested that if you do not subscribe to Heritage Online you do so as an added source of in-depth information. Here is the latest issue.
I hope and believe that the American people have finally awakened to the evil monster that Obama is and will vote in a Republican Senate this year so that we may begin to undo some of the great damage he and his appointees have done to our country. It will of course take decades to rec0ver from this assault on our nation and values, and in some areas we may never become the America that we once were . I do have hope however. First we must vote in a Republican Senate and then in 2016 a Republican President. Then we MUST begin to replace the old dogs in both the House and the Senate who have grown lazy, complacent and greedy with power with younger Americans who are trying to remember what our country stood for when formed: a government by the people and for the people. Yours sincerely, Brenda Bowers
Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
May 31, 2014
Latest Studies: 28 studies, including a report from the John Locke Foundation on what helps schools succeed, and a report from the Fraser Institute on the deadly consequences of rationing health care via wait times
Notes on the Week: Over 1 million restrictions in federal regulations, reasons an Article V convention wouldn’t work, The Insider looks at Obama’s disastrous foreign policy, and more
To Do: Remember the victims of Tiananmen Square, examine China’s human rights practices
Budget & Taxation
• Four Myths about American Taxes – Independent Women’s Forum
• A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom – Institute of Economic Affairs
Crime, Justice & the Law
• New York’s Next Public Safety Revolution – Manhattan Institute
Economic and Political Thought
• Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy (Revised Second Edition) – Institute of Economic Affairs
Economic Growth
• Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed – Encounter Books
• Patent Trolls: Predatory Litigation and the Smothering of Innovation – Independent Institute
• Machines v. Lawyers – Manhattan Institute
• The Economic Situation, June 1, 2014 – Mercatus Center
Education
• Educational Freedom Works – John Locke Foundation
• Blended Learning: Leveraging Teachers and Technology to Improve Student Outcomes – Maine Heritage Policy Center
• How to Address Common Core’s Reading Standards: Licensure Tests for K-6 Teachers – Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research
Elections, Transparency, & Accountability
• Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment – Encounter Books
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Al Qaeda Isn’t ‘On Its Heels’ – American Enterprise Institute
Health Care
• The Effect of Wait Times on Mortality in Canada – Fraser Institute
• How to Sustain Sound Dietary Guidelines for Americans – Hudson Institute
• The Political Roots of Health Insurance Benefit Mandates – Mercatus Center
• Specialty Drugs and Pharmacies – National Center for Policy Analysis
• The Biggest Myths of ObamaCare – National Center for Policy Analysis
• The VA Health System Is a Tragic Warning Against Government-Run Health Care – Reason Foundation
Immigration
• The ENLIST Act: A Back Door to Instant Citizenship – Heritage Foundation
Labor
• Why the Earned Income Tax Credit Beats the Minimum Wage – Independent Women’s Forum
National Security
• From Black Boots to Desert Boots: The All-Volunteer Army Experiment Continues – Foreign Policy Research Institute
• Reforming DHS Through the Appropriations Process – Heritage Foundation
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• Ending Ex–Im Would Remove Wasteful Energy Subsidies – Heritage Foundation
• Property Rights Save the Environment – Hoover Institution
• Smaller, Faster, Lighter, Denser, Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong – PublicAffairs
Regulation & Deregulation
• Evaluating Regulatory Reforms: Lessons for Future Reforms – Mercatus Center
The Constitution/Civil Liberties
• The Case Against Reparations for Slavery – Hoover Institution
Image of the week: Federal regulations now contain over 1 million restrictions.
How many of those regulations are beneficial on net? How would anybody know? As Patrick McLaughlin and Richard Williams point out: “The American regulatory system has no working, systematic process for reviewing regulations for obsolescence or poor performance […] .” [Mercatus Center, May 27]
Maybe the federal government should take a cue from Minnesota and hold an “unsession”:
It’s no longer a crime in Minnesota to carry fruit in an illegally sized container. The state’s telegraph regulations are gone. And it’s now legal to drive a car in neutral – if you can figure out how to do it.
Those were among the 1,175 obsolete, unnecessary and incomprehensible laws that Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature repealed this year as part of the governor’s “unsession” initiative. His goal was to make state government work better, faster and smarter.
“I think we’re off to a very good start,” Dayton said Tuesday at a Capitol news conference.
In addition to getting rid of outdated laws, the project made taxes simpler, cut bureaucratic red tape, speeded up business permits and required state agencies to communicate in plain language. [St. Paul Pioneer-Press, May 27]
As the governor said: A very good start.
The dose of Rachel Carson makes the poison. May 27 was the 107th birthday of Rachel Carson, and Google decided to devote a doodle to celebrating the environmentalist on its homepage. Carson is most famous for her 1962 book Silent Spring, which warned of the detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment. Carson’s warnings were particularly influential in curbing the use of DDT, an insecticide that had been widely used in agriculture and to control mosquito-spread malaria and typhus. The book is not without its critics, including Henry I. Miller of the Hoover Institute. In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, Miller wrote that the book was “an emotionally charged but deeply flawed denunciation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the control of insects.” Miller continued:
In the words of Professor Robert H. White-Stevens, an agriculturist and biology professor at Rutgers University, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
In 1992, San Jose State University entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, a long-time member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, offered a persuasive and comprehensive rebuttal of “Silent Spring.” As he explained in “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” a stunning, point by point refutation, “it simply dawned on me that that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about [pesticides] and that I was being duped along with millions of other Americans.” He demolished Carson’s arguments and assertions, calling attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.
Consider, for example, this passage from Edwards’ article: “This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse effects. Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that ‘in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.’ The World Health Organization stated that DDT had ‘killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance.’”
In addition, DDT was used with dramatic effect to shorten and prevent typhus epidemics during and after WWII when people were dusted with large amounts of it but suffered no ill effects, which is perhaps the most persuasive evidence that the chemical is harmless to humans. The product was such a boon to public health that in 1948 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Paul Müller for his discovery of the “contact insecticidal action” of DDT. [Forbes, September 5, 2012]
Also in 2012, Roger Meiners and Andrew Morris examined the book in some detail, highlighting the book’s impact on the mindset of the environmental movement. They noted that Carson was inconsistent in claiming on the one hand that she was against only the overzealous application of pesticides while also suggesting that policy should strive to reduce chemical residues to zero. Meiners and Morris:
The problem is that a “no-residue” policy is tantamount to a no-use policy. As Larry Katzenstein explains‚ Carson’s rhetorical question is an articulation of the present-day environmentalists’ version of the precautionary principle. Carson’s view that policy regarding synthetic chemicals should be “no risk” was not uncommon in her time‚ as exemplified in the Delaney Amendment. The policy is not only unrealistic but poses significant harm […] .
The contradiction could be reconciled by striving to balance the risks and benefits of not using pesticides against those of using them. Many of Carson’s disciples‚ however‚ do not favor such balancing of the risks of using DDT versus the risk of abandoning its use. This is evident from their support of a global ban on all DDT uses prior to the signing of the Stockholm Convention’s ban on persistent organic pesticides and the continuing efforts to phase out DDT despite its public health benefits. [“Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic,” by Roger Meiners and Andrew Morris, Property and Environment Research Center, April 2012]
See also: “Rachel Was Wrong: Agrochemicals’ Benefit to Human Health and the Environment,” by Angela Logomasini, Competitive Enterprise Institute, November 2012.
The Insider: Why the Obama foreign policy has been a disaster: Making the world safe for classical liberal values like individual liberty, free trade, and constitutionally constrained government requires a foreign policy that does more than just not start wars. Our cover story for the Spring 2014 issue takes up that theme. The editor’s note:
If you follow the news, you probably know that a Select Committee of the House of Representatives is investigating whether the Obama administration has been sufficiently forthcoming about the security situation in Benghazi in the fall of 2012 and about how it responded to terrorist attacks on U.S. government facilities there on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. In particular, investigators are trying to determine why the administration downplayed terrorism and insisted that the attack had been merely a spontaneous protest against an Internet video that got out of hand.
Indeed, there are unanswered questions about Benghazi, but one thing we do know is that Islamist terrorism has not gone away. That was clear enough when we learned that the supposed spontaneous demonstration in Benghazi consisted entirely of men bearing rocket launchers driving trucks displaying Ansar al-Sharia logos. Two years later, foreign policy failures abound. Russia is in the Crimea, democratic reformers have been marginalized in the Middle East, and nobody takes our “red lines” seriously, to name just a few.
The problem, as Mackubin Thomas Owens explains, is that the Obama administration thinks peace and order are the natural conditions of world affairs, and that military force is only an alternative to diplomacy not an integral part of an overall diplomatic strategy. These confusions leave the administration unable to meet the challenges of maintaining a world order based on liberal democracy and open trade. And that is a tragedy for the whole world, not merely the United States.
Also in this issue, we have Bob Moffit and Nina Owcharenko reminding us that fixing health care doesn’t mean just repealing ObamaCare; it means implementing the consumer-oriented reforms that conservatives have been championing for decades. Nathaniel Ward and Tim McGovern show how a culture of testing can help you improve your marketing. Mike Gonzalez reveals the Left’s complaints about partisan commentary to be rather, well, partisan. And finally, if you’ve ever wondered what studies actually show about which policies lead to economic growth, then you should read John Hood’s summary of the literature.
There’s no theory in that theory. There’s something missing from Thomas Piketty’s argument (contained in his bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century) that year-in and year-out the returns to capital exceed the growth rate of the economy as a whole. As Don Boudreaux points out, Piketty offers no explanation for why that must be so:
The entire tenor of Piketty’s volume suggests that he thinks capital reproduces itself, both from the perspective of its individual owners and from the perspective of society at large.
The creativity and fortitude of entrepreneurs, the skillful risk-taking by investors and the insight and effort of managers are all strangely absent throughout Piketty’s performance. These very fonts of modern prosperity are at best assumed to play uninterestingly routine and unseen roles backstage. Onstage, capital—the stuff that is in fact created and skillfully steered by flesh-and-blood entrepreneurs, investors and managers—appears to grow spontaneously, without human involvement. [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, May 27]
Of course, when you attempt to explain economic conditions—like inequality—you run the risk of discovering that capitalism might not be the problem. For example, here is this point from Robert Murphy:
[…] Mother Jones loved this chart showing income inequality soaring in the late 1920s and in the mid-2000s: Look everyone, if we let the 1% earn too much, it sets the world up for a giant financial crash! But actually what happened is that loose monetary policy drove down interest rates, thereby fueling asset price booms, which showed up as huge income (in the form of capital gains) accruing disproportionately in the hands of the wealthy. It’s not surprising that these Fed-fueled asset bubbles eventually collapsed, leading to the Great Depression and Great Recession. To prevent a repeat, the government doesn’t need to confiscate property from the super-rich; instead the Fed needs to stop inflating asset bubbles. [Rare, May 29]
Beth March, scarlet fever, and Thomas Piketty: One secret to Thomas Piketty’s success in selling Americans his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is his embrace of great literature. Piketty retells key moments in Honore de Balzac’s Pere Goriot to illustrate the importance of inheritance in the 19th century and draws on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park when he discusses the value and the vexation of overseas investments. Piketty’s insight is that books capture the sense and flavor of their era—and occasionally report typical prices and incomes.
The writers of the past are equally valuable for illuminating the astounding progress of economic growth in the past two hundred years, a fact Piketty acknowledges but to which he devotes little ink. Reading Capital, one comes away with the impression that the distribution of wealth and income is the central fact of each era: He reports most statistics as percentages of national income. But when per-person national income was doubling every generation, it was surely a more noticeable phenomenon than a few percentage points of national wealth more or less in the portfolios of the top centile.
Long-term comparisons of income levels are tricky: How many buggy whips is an iPhone worth? Stories of human life under different conditions can help us appreciate the immensity of growth.
In One Thousand and One Nights, hilarity ensues when characters meet in the dark and fail to recognize one another. Artificial light was expensive. Roger Fouquet and Peter J. G. Pearson estimate that a dollar’s worth of lighting in the year 2000 would have cost $3,000 two centuries before. Like all long-term economic growth, the cheapness of modern light comes from applying free enterprise to technological innovation. At times, the British government stood athwart history, taxing windows and Dutch whale oil. [“Seven Centuries of Energy Services: The Price and Use of Light in the United Kingdom (1300-2000)“ by Roger Fouquet and Peter J.G. Pearson, The Energy Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006)]
In Little Women, Beth March dies of strep throat (scarlet fever) despite being an affluent New Englander. Today, an antibiotic would have cured her quickly, and the entire episode might warrant a few Facebook status updates. Oliver Twist is thrown into a life of poverty and loneliness by the death of his mother in childbirth, a common occurrence in 19th-century London. The advances in medicine alone make the era of enterprise and innovation a success.
Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days celebrates the breakneck speed of an era of dynamic growth and technological progress. Steam, rail, and telegraphy remade the world in a generation.
Although Piketty has introduced some new data on the distribution of income and wealth in different eras, we should not lose sight of the great progress that has lifted all standards of living since the times of Charles Dickens and Jules Verne. —Salim Furth
A note from Martin Feldstein: A couple of weeks ago, we pointed to some analysis by Martin Feldstein on the inequality argument put forth by Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Feldstein had pointed out that Piketty was looking at U.S. income tax return data, which is misleading because the tax reforms of 1986 encouraged high earners to increase the amount of income reported on individual income tax returns. The income didn’t change so much as how it was counted on tax forms.
Dr. Feldstein has let us know that his article, originally published behind a paywall at Wall Street Journal, is now available ungated at www.nber.org/feldstein/wsj05152014.pdf.
Piketty’s book, we see, is still in the news—perhaps more so this week than in previous weeks—because of some questions about his data. Those who are following the argument should be sure to read Dr. Feldstein’s contribution.
The contradictions of European union: A report on Greece, from Alexander Skouras:
Golden Dawn’s rise from a tiny group of radical Hitler-sympathizers to the third largest party in Greece occurred when the Greek economy was collapsing. The origins of this crisis are well-known and well-documented: excessive borrowing, low productivity, corruption, and a profligate welfare state. At the height of the crisis the entire nation was angry; the people felt betrayed by their political elites. The Nazi party arose from the need to blame outsiders and to feel special. […]
In this political climate Golden Dawn rose from 0.3 percent of the vote in 2009 to approximately 7 percent in the 2012 national elections. For the last year many analysts thought that the prosecution of Golden Dawn members on charges of organized crime and the imprisonment of many of its elected leaders, including General Secretary Nikos Michaloliakos, would keep the party from further electoral success. But the May 18 municipal and gubernatorial elections and the May 25 European ones told a different story. Golden Dawn received 9.4 percent of the European parliamentary vote, enough to elect three members. Among them there are two former high-ranking army officers. The week before that, in Athens, the country’s capital and largest city, Golden Dawn’s municipal candidate and MP, Ilias Kassidiaris, who made global headlines when he slapped a female communist MP on live television, gathered 16 percent of the vote, securing him fourth place in a close election. Ilias Panagiotaros, Golden Dawn’s gubernatorial candidate in Attica, the region that includes Athens and its suburbs, won 11 percent and also finished fourth.
From these results it is safe to assume that Golden Dawn is no longer merely the beneficiary of a protest vote. The Greek electorate has been fully informed of the party’s Nazi affiliation, Holocaust denial, anti-immigrant slurs, and raw violence in the streets of Athens. We can now safely conclude that Greece has a viable, robust, and dangerous national socialist political force. [AtlasOne, May 28]
Wasn’t preventing a rebirth of nationalist parties the point of a united Europe?
Video of the week: Reasons an Article V convention would not give conservatives what they want: The main problem with the country’s constitutional set-up, says Trent England, is not the words of the Constitution but a lack of fidelity to what those words mean. Amending the Constitution will just give liberals different words to ignore. England is the Executive Vice President of the Freedom Foundation, Washington State’s free-market think tank. Talking with the Daily Caller’s Ginny Thomas, England outlines some other reasons conservatives should be wary of an Article V constitutional convention.
For one thing, says England, the convention would not necessarily work the way conservatives imagine it would work. Convention delegates would have their own constitutional standing, and their work could not simply be constrained by an act of Congress. Furthermore, says England, sitting federal judges—most of whom are not conservatives—would likely play a bigger role than Congress in shaping any convention.
Also, it’s not easy to amend the Constitution and conservatives might be wiser to invest their resources pushing other levers of change (e.g., the Senate). And England notes that it’s probably a good thing that the Constitution is hard to amend because the Left has bigger dreams of changing the Constitution that conservatives do; there’s a lot of freedom that could be lost at an Article V convention, too.
The point of federalism is to protect the rights of the people, not the rights of states. Noting the rash of stories about new federal requirements for school lunches, David Corbin and Matt Parks point out how inadequate is the Republican waiver-based defense of federalism, which they say “simply shovels a little less dirt on [federalism’s] grave”:
Approximately one out of every fourteen Americans is a government employee today, compared to one in twenty-two Americans in 1955. The greatest part of the total increase of government employees amounts to the enlargement of state and local government employment. It matters little if the lunch lady pouring chocolate milk down the sink and serving fruits and vegetables is a local government employee if her job ultimately depends on monies slopped out by federal bureaucrats wielding carrot sticks.
Which brings us to the third part of Madison’s argument as to why the proposed federal republic was a great improvement over the earlier confederation; namely, its powers would be “few,” “defined,” and “exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.” Madison likely never could have imagined the Federal government adding management of sodium intake to this list as the American people sat listless on the political sidelines.
As troubling as the death of federalism is, we need more fundamental reform, as the Republican response to the school lunch mandates makes clear. There is, after all, an even more important third leg to the governing stool, implicit in Madison’s argument, but made explicit in the 10th Amendment: the people. Often conservatives read that Amendment as if it is meant to protect the rights of the states. But it is much better understood, both textually and historically, as an attempt to protect the people’s distribution of powers among themselves, the states and the national government. If we really want to restore 10th Amendment government, we’ll need to work much harder at removing power from both state and federal hands than at replacing the divine right of the Washington King with the divine right of state Barons. [The Federalist, May 26]
Michael Greve made a similar argument in a recent issue of The Insider:
The balance question isn’t just beside the point; it is an assault on the foundations of the republic. To quote Madison’s impassioned language in Federalist 45:
Was … the American revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual states, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty?
The answer he is trying to evoke is: Hell, no. […]
States are Purely Instrumental. If they can advance the “real welfare of the great body of the people,” good for them. If they stand as a hindrance, ignore them or get rid of them. That is the fundamental calculus and the irreducible premise of the United States Constitution. The cartel federalism we have is profoundly state-friendly: It serves the interests of the political class. The constitutional, competitive federalism we need is citizen-friendly: It would discipline government, not help it grow. [“But What Kind of Federalism?“ by Michael S. Greve, The Insider, Winter 2013.]
And speaking of states doing the wrong things … Low-income people in Arkansas used to be able to get their teeth cleaned cheaply, thanks to Dr. Ben Burris. Now, instead of paying $99 (or $69 for children), they have to pay hundreds of dollars for a cleaning. Burris, who is a dentist, had to stop offering the cleanings because the state board of dental examiners told him that he couldn’t offer basic dental services.
According to the board, Arkansas law says dentists can’t offer dental services if they are also licensed as a specialist. Burris is a licensed orthodontist. Orthodontists, by the way, normally employ dental hygienists who clean teeth, and that’s all perfectly legal as long as the teeth getting cleaned also get fitted for braces later.
Of course, the restriction on specialists offering services outside their specialty has nothing to do with protecting consumers and everything to do with limiting competition in basic dental services—so that dentists can charge more. No patients had complained about Burris’s service. At a hearing of the dental board, notes the Institute for Justice, “Board members and general dentists condemned Ben for offering the cleanings. There was no allegation that Ben had endangered, much less harmed, anyone.”
On behalf of Burris and his colleague Elizabeth Grohl, IJ filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the board of dental examiners. The lawsuit contends that the restriction against specialists offering basic dental services serves no purpose except to protect general dentists from competition, and that the restriction thus violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection, Due Process and Privileges or Immunities Clauses.
• Learn about the human rights situation in China on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng will talk with American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks. The conversation will begin at 1:45 p.m. at the American Enterprise Institute on June 3.
• Examine the connection between liberty and character. The Beacon Center of Tennessee will host a talk by Lawrence Reed, President of the Foundation for Economic Education. Reed will speak at the Nashville City Club on June 3 at 6 p.m.
• Show what a great communicator for liberty you are by entering Think Freely’s Great Communicators Tournament. All you have to do is make a one- to three-minute video in which you take the moral high ground while making an argument for liberty. Submissions are due by July 15. Twelve finalists will be selected to compete in the Great Communicators Tournament at the State Policy Network’s Annual Meeting in Denver in September.
• Discover whether administrative law is even lawful. Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law at Columbia University, thinks it is not, and he’ll explain why at the Cato Institute at noon on June 5.
• Find out how sex education courses have become caught in the crosshairs of the “war on women” debate. Valerie Huber, President of the National Abstinence Education Association, will speak at the Family Research Council at noon on June 4.
• Learn how the Left want to amend the First Amendment so they can stifle criticism of elected officials. The Heritage Foundation will host a panel discussion featuring Bobby Burchfield, who argued the recent and important McCutcheon case before the Supreme Court; Don McGahn, former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission; and Hans von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. The discussion will begin at 2 p.m. on June 2.
• Cartoonists, get your submissions in for the Center for International Private Enterprise’s 2014 Global Editorial Cartoon Competition. Hurry—the submission deadline is June 2.
• Check out The Daily Signal, The Heritage Foundation’s new media platform, launching June 3.
(Want more stuff to do? Check out InsiderOnline’s Conservative Calendar.)
Have a tip for InsiderOnline? Send us an e-mail at insider@heritage.org with “For Insider” in the subject line.
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/InsiderOnline.
Looking for an expert? Visit PolicyExperts.org.
The Heritage Foundation
214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4999
phone 202.546.4400 | fax 202.546.8328
- In: Barack Obama | Communism in America | Economy/Money | Education | Environment | EPA Environmental Protection Agency | Ineffective Government Programs | Obama admistration | Obama and ethics | Obama Executive Decress | Obamcare repeal and replace | Progressives Movement to Destroy America | Subverting America by Uri Bezmenov
- 1 Comment
Some very important articles in this weeks Insider Online Newsletter so do pan down and read any articles that interest you. BB
Oct 12 at 8:05 AM
Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
October 12, 2013Latest Studies: 37 new items, including a Pioneer Institute report on Common Core’s bad math standards, and a Mercatus Center report on debt limit myths
Notes on the Week: Shutdown government seems busier and more annoying than ever, the power of the purse is the power to change policy, and more
To Do: Find out how ObamaCare will affect your insurance premiums
Budget & Taxation
MUST READ• The President’s Legal Authority at the Debt Limit – The Heritage Foundation
•MUST READ The Debt Limit Debate 2013: Addressing Key Myths – Mercatus Center
• What Makes a Good Tax Structure? – Show-Me Institute
• 2014 State Business Tax Climate Index – Tax Foundation
• Loosening the Federal Straightjacket – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Economic and Political Thought
• America’s Debt, Through the Eyes of the Founders – The Heritage Foundation
Economic Growth
• Why Growth Is Getting Harder – Cato Institute
• Has Income Inequality Really Risen? – e21 – Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• A Comparison of the House and Senate Farm Bills – The Heritage Foundation
Education
• Dollars, Flexibility, and an Effective Education: Parent Voices on Arizona’s Education Savings Accounts – Goldwater Institute
(MUST READ as it may be coming to your school soon. BB) Common Core National Standards and Tests: Empty Promises and Increased Federal Overreach Into Education – The Heritage Foundation
• Why the Gap? Special Education and New York City Charter Schools – Manhattan Institute
• Closing America’s High-Achievement Gap – Philanthropy Roundtable
(MUST READ and understand what the government is doing to dumb down the population because a stupid populus is easier to control! BB )• Lowering the Bar: How Common Core Math Fails to Prepare Students for STEM – Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research
Elections, Transparency, & Accountability
MUST READ THIS ARTICLE! These people are out of control and they have almost unlimited power over us! BB)(• The Truth About the IRS Scandals – Encounter Books
Family, Culture & Community
• Why We Won’t Talk Honestly About Race – Encounter Books
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Crunch Time for the Trans-Pacific Pact — and for U.S. Leadership in Asia – American Enterprise Institute
• Falling Short: How Bad Economic Choices Threaten the U.S.-India Relationship and India’s Rise – American Enterprise Institute
• German Hard Power: Is There a There There? – American Enterprise Institute
• 2014 NATO Summit: Laying the Groundwork Now – The Heritage Foundation
• U.S.-Japan Security Agreement Enhances Allied Goals – The Heritage Foundation
• Prestige and Power in Statecraft – Hoover Institution
• The Decline of Europe’s Military Might – Hoover Institution
Health Care
• How Medicaid Fails the Poor – Encounter Books
• Race, Medicine, and Political Correctness – Hoover Institution
Immigration
• Biometric Exit Improvement Act: Wrong Solution to Broken Visa and Immigration System – The Heritage Foundation
International Trade/Finance
• In Name Only: Are Free Trade Zones Assisting Capitalism or Criminals and Crony Capitalists? – American Enterprise Institute
Labor
• Unions Take High Culture Hostage – Hoover Institution
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• The ‘Science’ of Global Warming, Part 1 – American Enterprise Institute
• The ‘Science’ of Global Warming, Part 2 – American Enterprise Institute
• The EPA’s War Against the States: States Are Supposed to Lead in Fighting Pollution, but Federal Bureaucrats Have Usurped the States’ Role – Capital Research Center
• Let the Wind PTC Die Down Immediately – The Heritage Foundation
• The Global Environmental Facility: A Dismal Failure – National Center for Policy Analysis
Philanthropy
• A Triumph for Donor Intent: The Daniels Fund Achieves a Rare Victory – Capital Research Center
Regulation & Deregulation
• The Regulatory Improvement Act: A ‘Least-Best’ Solution for Regulatory Inefficiency – American Enterprise Institute
The Constitution/Civil Liberties
• Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government – Encounter Books
• The Supreme Court Considers the President’s Power to Make Recess Appointments – The Heritage Foundation
The federal government is still shut down, which means it’s busier than ever finding ways to annoy you. “If you loved this country, you would not be closing it down,” said Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) last week. Scott was blaming Republicans for the government shutdown. As David Boaz points out, however, Scott was confused: The government and the country are not the same thing; Congress can’t shut down the country merely by failing to fund the government. [Cato Institute, October 3]
It turns out, however, that a shutdown government can be awfully pushy. As many news stories reported last week, the administration’s idea of shutting down means doing things the government doesn’t normally do, like putting up barricades to otherwise fenceless open-air spaces, telling people to leave privately-run establishments that sit on federal land but require no federal resources to operate, and creating “website not available” redirect pages instead of just leaving static content up on federal websites. The stories about National Park Service bullying keep coming from around the country:
• The Park Service told Joyce Spencer, 77, and Ralph Spencer, 80, they had to leave their house on Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada. The Spencers own the house, but not the land. [KTNV, October 4]
• The Park Service told private boat operators that they could not operate their own boats launching from their own docks on the St. Croix River, which is designated a National Scenic Riverway. “[P]roviding visitor services within the riverway during a government shutdown is a breach of your (permit), and noncompliance with the shutdown could result in permits not being renewed during the next two-year cycle,” said the Park Service in a letter to boat operators. [TwinCities.com, October 3]
• The Park Service issued a notice forbidding charter boats, tour boats, fishing boats, and paddling boats from going out onto the Florida Bay—i.e., 1,100 square miles of ocean. [Miami Herald, October 3]
• The Park Service closed the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, including the Foothills Parkway in Tennessee. That closure left some residents in Eastern Tennessee with few good options for getting around: “The closure caught locals by surprise and left the school district scrambling to alert parents that they would need to find a way to get their kids back home. And until the partial government shutdown ends, school buses will not run. That means parents will have to transport their children to and from school using treacherous ‘white knuckle routes.’” [Fox News, October 7]
• Armed park rangers issued John Bell a $100 ticket for taking a jog in Valley Forge National Historic Park. Bell saw a sign announcing the park’s closure, but he also saw other joggers and bikers. Also, there was no barrier blocking entrance to the park, so he figured the sign was meant for vehicles. He was wrong. Rangers were waiting to give him a ticket when he exited the park. [Fox News, October 8]
• A bus carrying senior citizens through Yellowstone National Park stopped briefly when a herd of bison passed by. The tourists got out to take pictures and were immediately confronted by armed park rangers who told them that taking pictures was recreating, which they could not do. Later, when the seniors—some from Japan, Australia, and Canada—were sent out of the park on a two-and-a-half-hour ride, they were told the bus could not stop for bathroom breaks. [Eagle Tribune, October 8]
• Volunteer Chris Cox of South Carolina spent a number of days mowing the grass and picking up trash on the National Mall because he thought veterans visiting the war memorial shouldn’t have to trip over banana peels. When Park Police eventually told him to leave, Cox said: “I’m not here trying to make headlines. I’m here trying to prevent headlines.” The officer replied: “Well, maybe there should be a picture of the trash cans overflowing in the newspaper. Maybe that would help us.” [Daily Mail, October 9]
Mark Steyn explains the point of these harassments: “[T]he thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades.” [National Review, October 4]
[See also: “The List: Unnecessarily Shut Down by Obama to Inflict Public Pain,” by John Nolte, Breitbart.com, October 5.]
Some governments truly are shutdown. For example:
Cherry-picking the government you want is the how you get the government you want instead of the government you don’t want. The President and his allies keep telling people that using a funding bill to change Obamacare is out-of-bounds. But this crowd has also said that changing Obamacare without passing any bill at all is A-OK. According to the Congressional Research Service, the President has changed Obamacare five times on his own, including delaying the mandate on employers to provide qualifying health insurance. (He’s also signed 14 bills that amend the law, for a total of 19 changes since Obamacare became law.) [Washington Times, September 11]
In a letter sent to his Republican colleagues on August 21, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) quotes a Founding Father approving of the House of Representatives tying policy changes to funding decisions. The full quote comes from Federalist 58, written by James Madison and published February 20, 1788:
The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.
Now comes the Washington Post with an article by Valerie Strauss titled: “Stop Blaming James Madison for the Shutdown.” Since the word “shutdown” appears nowhere in either Madison’s Federalist 58 or Meadow’s missive, we’d have to agree. But here is University of Virginia professor J.C.A. Stagg, the article’s only source:
Rep. Meadows’s quote is also correct — but again only so far as it goes. None of the Founders doubted that the power of the purse could be an ultimate sanction in the hands of the House, though it would be impossible to prove that their understanding of this would have extended to the point of shutting down the entire government as opposed to refusing appropriations for particular policies.
Prof. Stagg is an authority on Madison, but he’s no authority on the last few weeks. To recap: Since September 20, the House of Representatives has passed at least a dozen bills to fund various parts of the government. That includes one bill that preserved funding for ObamaCare but made some changes to the program such as delaying the individual mandate and repealing the medical device tax. The Senate either amended and then refused to go to conference on the bills, or ignored them. The President said he would veto partial funding bills. [ABC News, October 9]
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid explained: “Why would we want to have the House of Representatives, John Boehner, cherry-pick what stays open and what should be closed?”
As a matter of logic, the House cannot simultaneously cherry-pick what government it wants to remain open while also shutting it down entirely. It’s the Senate and the President who want the budget to be an all-or-nothing choice in order to get one particular policy they want. If Strauss’s article was meant to be a debunking, it failed.
Government shutdowns used to be common. Contrary to President Obama and his supporters, it’s not unusual at all for policy choices to get mixed up in bills that fund the government. From Dylan Matthews’s shutdown rundown, we learn that between 1981 and 1990, when Democrats controlled Congress (mostly) and Republicans were in the White House, there were nine government shutdowns. Those shutdowns happened because Congress and the President couldn’t agree on major policy issues such as supporting the Nicaraguan Contras, foreign aid for Syria and El Salvador, the Fairness Doctrine, the MX missile, and welfare expansions. Also, the issue of abortion figured prominently in five shutdowns when Democrats controlled Congress and another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, was in the White House. [Washington Post, September 25]
Video of the week: Environmental exaggeration makes people poorer. Also, it doesn’t help the environment, explains Ivo Vegter, in this recent TEDx talk:
Canada is still beating the United States. For the eighth year running, the United States has less economic freedom than Canada, according to the Fraser Institute’s latest Economic Freedom of the World Report. Higher U.S. taxes and more U.S. regulations account for much of the gap, explains Jared Meyer:
Canada has a federal corporate tax rate of just 15 percent whereas the United States has a top rate of 35 percent, the highest among OECD countries. Canada’s federal debt-to-GDP ratio is 35 percent. It is targeting a ratio of 25 percent by 2021 thanks to a strong commitment to spending cuts from Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The U.S. ratio is 73 percent and rising. Mr. Harper has publicly pushed for approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would benefit the economies of both countries, while President Obama has done all he can to block the State Department’s permit. Canada also has an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, lower than America’s.
From 1980 until 2000 the United States was generally rated the third freest country behind only Hong Kong and Singapore. Now it is #17. It is not only developed countries, such as New Zealand (#3), Switzerland (#4), and Finland (#7), overtaking the United States—developing countries are catching up. America’s ranking fell 10.5 percent from 2000 to 2011. Over that same period the world’s economic freedom rose by two percent. This is not a good sign for the future of America in an age of global competition.
U.S. rankings fell from the previous year in every category. According to Fred McMahon of the Fraser Institute, a co-author of the Index with Robert Lawson and Joshua Hall, the main factors that brought down America’s scores were overspending, weakened rule of law, and regulatory overkill.
If the United States continues to lag in economic freedom, its standard of living will also fall below those of the more economically free countries: “Those people living in the freest quartile of countries produce a GDP per capita that is on average eight times larger than those in the least free quartile. They produce two times as much per capita as those in the second freest quartile.” [Economics 21, October 9]
Is your state’s tax system competitive? Which states have tax systems that enhance (or harm the least) the business environment? According to the Tax Foundation’s 2014 State Business Tax Climate Index, the 10 best states are Wyoming, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Florida, Washington, Montana, New Hampshire, Utah, and Indiana while the 10 worst are Maryland, Connecticut, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Vermont, Rhode Island, Minnesota, California, New Jersey, and New York.
What’s gone wrong with HealthCare.gov? Wall Street Journal:
Information technology experts who examined the healthcare.gov website at the request of The Wall Street Journal said the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation. Such a hastily constructed website may not have been able to withstand the online demand last week, they said.
Engineers at Web-hosting company Media Temple Inc. found a glut of stray software code that served no purpose they could identify. They also said basic Web-efficiency techniques weren’t used, such as saving parts of the website that change infrequently so they can be loaded more quickly. Those factors clog the website’s plumbing, Media Temple said.
The identity-checking foul-ups are also triggering problems for state-run exchanges, which rely on the federal system. The problem caused delays last week for users of MNsure, Minnesota’s exchange, as they waited for federal confirmation to create their accounts, said April Todd-Malmlov, MNsure’s executive director. She said the issue in her state was largely resolved by Friday. [Wall Street Journal, October 6]
One of the problems that surfaced this week, reports Sean Gallagher, is that “individuals whose logins never made it to the site’s database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo.” Also: “[C]hanges made to profiles already within the system may not be saved either—a problem that is only indicated by a very non-descriptive error message.” [Ars Technica, October 8]
Remember, Obamacare requires you to enroll in the exchanges or pay a fine if you don’t receive qualifying health insurance from your employer. But enrollment hasn’t taken off yet, reports David Martosko:
Just 51,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week the Healthcare.gov website was online, according to two sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services who gave MailOnline an exclusive look at the earliest enrollment numbers. […]
The open enrollment period for Obamacare coverage is slated to last for six months. If the first week’s total were an indication of how many Americans will sign up during that time through the Obama administration’s website, its final tally would reach a paltry 1.32 million. […]
If the state-run exchanges were to have a similar response rate for six months, the national enrollment total would be approximately 2 million.
That number is less than 29 per cent of the 7 million the Obama administration would need, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, in order to balance the new health insurance system’s books and keep it from financial collapse. [Daily Mail, October 10]
Democrats shut down the government in order to make sure this mess launched on time.
• Find out how Obamacare will affect health insurance rates across the country. Heritage Foundation analyst Drew Gonshorowski will reveal the findings of his new study at a panel discussion at Heritage. The discussion begins at 10 a.m. on October 16.
• If you’ve found out how Obamacare will affect your own insurance premiums and would like to share the information, then please let The Heritage Foundation know. Take a picture, as George Schwab did (featured in Friday’s Heritage Morning Bell) and send it to morningbell@heritage.org, or post it on The Heritage Foundation Facebook page, or tweet it to@Heritage and with the hashtag #ObamaHikes, or post it on Instagram with the hashtag #ObamaHikes.
• Learn how economic freedom helps people from around the world build better lives for themselves and their communities. The Cato Institute will host a screening of Economic Freedom in Action: Changing Lives. The film is based on the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report. Discussion will follow featuring Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute and Johan Norberg of the Cato Institute. The screening starts at 4 p.m. on October 16.
• Examine the case for a U.S. nuclear arsenal based on the concept of minimum deterrence. Douglas Feith, Ambassador Robert Joseph, and Keith Payne will be among the panelists at a Hudson Institute discussion. The event begins at noon on October 16.
• Hear Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) discuss the National Park Service’s shuttering of open-air, previously unfenced spaces around America’s national monuments—supposedly an activity that’s now essential because the Park Service has no authority to spend money. Bishop’s talk begins at noon on October 15 at The Heritage Foundation.
• For those in the nation’s capital, greet an Honor Flight when it arrives at the airport. The program to bring World War II veterans to Washington, D.C., to see the World War II Memorial is continuing, despite the government shutdown. A lot of folks come out to greet the veterans at the gate when they arrive at Reagan National Airport. If you want to do that, too, you’ll need to request a gate pass by e-mailing dca.honorflight@gmail.com. A schedule of Honor Flights arriving at Reagan National Airport is available online. Volunteers are also welcome to greet veterans at the memorials, too.
• Discover the seven principles of sound public policy. Lawrence Reed, President of the Foundation for Economic Education, will talk about the principles during a discussion hosted by the Illinois Public Policy Institute. Reed’s talk begins at 6 p.m. on October 17 at the Illinois Policy Institute in Chicago.
• Help the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs celebrate 20 years of working for free markets. OCPA will hold its 2013 Liberty Gala on October 17 at the Tulsa Hyatt Regency. President George W. Bush will address the diners. The reception begins at 5:45 p.m.
Have a tip for InsiderOnline? Send us an e-mail at insider@heritage.org with “For Insider” in the subject line.
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/InsiderOnline.
Looking for an expert? Visit PolicyExperts.org.
The Heritage Foundation
214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4999
phone 202.546.4400 | fax 202.546.8328
Heritage Foundation Insider Online Newsletter–topics of interest to all patriots.
Posted on: June 23, 2013
- In: AFT American Federation of Teachers | amnesty | Big Labor Unions | Black community family | Communism in America | Economy/Money | Education | Environment | EPA Environmental Protection Agency | Federal Reserve | Financial Industry Reform | Government Failure Series from Cato Institute | Health Care | illegal immigration | Immigration | Ineffective Government Programs | Internet | National Defense | national deficit, taxes, national budget | NEA National Education Association | Obama 2013 and beyond | Obamcare repeal and replace | Off Shore Drilling for oil and natural gas | Redistributing wealth | Supreme Court | Supreme Court rulings | Taxes | teachers unions in politics | United States taxes
- Leave a Comment
The following article is from the Heritage Foundation and is a listing of studies made by various groups on the state of our government and social programs. I found many of them informative and felt that perhaps my Readers would also. Just check out the listings and click on the topics that interest you. You may also wish to subscribe and have the Insider Online newsletter delivered to your home page. sincerely, BB
Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
June 22, 2013Latest Studies: 38 new items, including a Manhattan Institute report on the student debt problem, and an American Legislative Exchange Council report on environmental overcriminalization
Notes on the Week: Not even low-income workers can count on benefiting from ObamaCare, things to know about the CBO’s immigration scoring, and more
To Do: Keep an eye on Russia
Budget & Taxation
• Four Tenets to Less Government Spending – e21 – Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• The Municipal Government Debt Crisis – Heartland Institute
• Proposed New Farm Programs: Costly and Risky for Taxpayers – The Heritage Foundation
• Soaring National Debt Remains a Grave Threat – The Heritage Foundation
• Taxing Online Sales: Should the Taxman’s Grasp Exceed His Reach? – The Heritage Foundation
• The Big Choice for Jobs and Growth: Lower Tax Rates Versus Expensing – The Heritage Foundation
• The Many Real Dangers of Soaring National Debt – The Heritage Foundation
• The Simple Economics of Pro-Growth Tax Reform – The Heritage Foundation
• Turn Down the Heat, Switch On the Light: A Rational Analysis of Tax Havens, Tax Policy and Tax Politics – Institute of Economic Affairs
• The Best Solution from Both Budgets: “Reverse Logrolling” Shows the Best Option for Government Spending and Tax Reform – John Locke Foundation
• Creating a Fair Property Tax System: Is it Possible? – Public Interest Institute
• Kansas 2013 Tax Reform Improves on Last Year’s Efforts – Tax Foundation
• New Zealand’s Experience with Territorial Taxation – Tax Foundation
• A Review of the 83rd Session of the Texas Legislature – Texas Public Policy Foundation
• Virginia Economic Forecast 2013-2014: State to Add Jobs Despite Sequestration – Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public PolicyCrime, Justice & the Law
• Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse, But It Is Reality – The Heritage Foundation
• Comeback States Report: Reducing Juvenile Incarceration in the United States – Texas Public Policy Foundation
• Scientific Evidence in State Courts: Florida Reform as a Model – Washington Legal FoundationEducation
• Beyond Retrofitting: Innovation in Higher Education – Hudson Institute
• College Credit: Repairing America’s Unhealthy Relationship with Student Debt – Manhattan InstituteForeign Policy/International Affairs
• Beyond the Border: U.S. and Canada Expand Partnership in Trade and Security – The Heritage FoundationHealth Care
• The Right Way to Fight Obesity – Hoover Institution
• An Analysis of the Proposed Medicaid Expansion in Michigan – National Center for Policy Analysis
• Veterans Affairs Fails to Curb Suicide Epidemic – National Center for Policy AnalysisImmigration
• Advancing the Immigration Nation: Heritage’s Positive Path to Immigration and Border Security Reform – The Heritage Foundation
• Senate Immigration Bill Does Not Require Payment of All Back Taxes – The Heritage FoundationInformation Technology
• FCC Must Maintain Open Eligibility for Incentive Spectrum Auction – Free State FoundationMonetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• Rethinking the FHA – American Enterprise Institute
• Recent Arguments against the Gold Standard – Cato InstituteNational Security
• Obama’s Wish to Cut Nuclear Arsenal Undermines National Security – The Heritage Foundation
• Preventing the Next “Lone Wolf” Terrorist Attack Requires Stronger Federal–State–Local Capabilities – The Heritage FoundationNatural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• Efficiency Policy – American Action Forum
• Five Solutions for Addressing Environmental Overcriminalization – American Legislative Exchange Council
• Improving Incentives for Federal Land Managers: The Case for Recreation Fees – Cato Institute
• Denial of Supreme Court Review Leaves Ninth Circuit ESA Case Intact – Washington Legal Foundation
• Ohio Court Limits Localities’ Authority over Energy Exploration – Washington Legal FoundationTransportation/Infrastructure
• Paint Is Cheaper Than Rails: Why Congress Should Abolish New Starts – Cato Institute
• Moving the Road Sector into the Market Economy – Institute of Economic Affairs
Notes on the Week
Rector on CBO on immigration: The Congressional Budget Office told us this week that letting large numbers of immigrants into the country and changing the status of those currently here illegally will be great for the economy and the federal budget. Robert Rector has a few things to say about the CBO’s scoring of the Gang of Eight immigration bill. Here are the highlights:
[T]he immigration coming in under this bill looks like previous immigration in the sense that its predominantly lower-skilled plus the fact that you’re taking 11 million illegal immigrants and giving them access to the welfare and entitlement states. They have an average education of 10th grade, so it’s very difficult to imagine that those households would somehow pay enough in taxes to equal their benefits […] .
The trick is the CBO 10-year budget window. […] For mysterious reasons, when an amnesty bill is written, the amnesty recipients become eligible for everything under the sun in about the 11th year. So that they pay taxes in the first 10 years and they don’t get additional benefits for some mysterious reason until you move outside the CBO budget window. […]
[T]he federal government, because of Social Security and Medicare, inherently transfers from the non-elderly to the elderly. State and local governments kind of do the opposite. If you just look at state and local governments you would find that they transfer from the elderly to the non-elderly to pay for education. The elderly pay a lot of property tax; they don’t get any education benefits any more. […] Of course immigrants are not elderly themselves. For a limited period of time they pay in but then they take out more than they have paid in. It’s important to put both flows together because the opposite process is happening down at the state and local level. […]
One of the interesting things that CBO does tell us is that the number of illegal immigrants who will enter the country over the next 20 years goes down by only 25 percent. There would have been, they estimate, 10 million illegal immigrants entering over the next 20 years. They estimate that that will drop to 7.5 million illegal immigrants entering the country […] . The net cost of those illegals alone would be about $400 billion over that period. […]
When you look at the Gang of Eight explain their bill they always say: Oh, we’re shifting from low-skill immigration to high-skill immigration. You can trust us. That’s what we do. But in fact the numbers from CBO show exactly the opposite. Roughly 80 … 85 to 90 percent of the individuals getting green card status are not skill-based. [The Foundry, June 21]
Turn on, tune in, pay up. Online learning may transform higher education someday, but right now it serves mainly as a prop in the familiar university system, say Andrew Kelly and Frederick Hess:
Many online programs generate large revenues because most colleges charge the same price (or more!) for students enrolled online as for those on campus. A survey of 199 universities by the educational technology arm of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education found that 93 percent of universities charged the same or higher tuition for their online programs. This is bizarre, given that online courses are less costly to deliver than in-person courses. But instead of competing on price (meaning that cost savings get passed to the student), institutions have maintained in-person prices for online courses—even as the cost of delivery has fallen.
What do colleges do with that extra revenue? They cross-subsidize activities on the brick and mortar campus: unfunded research, student life, institutional aid programs, and so on. Put more genteelly, they “reinvest” it in their traditional campus.
Real innovation, as Kelly and Hess point out, is about unbundling the research-based university, and that’s not going to happen until the government regulations, subsidies, and accreditation policies that protect that model from competition are reformed. [“Beyond Retrofitting: Innovation in Higher Education,” by Andrew P. Kelly and Frederick Hess, Hudson Institute, June 2013.]
Not even low-income workers can count on coming out ahead under ObamaCare. Some low-income workers could end up paying a lot more for health insurance than they paid before ObamaCare became law, reports Jillian Kay Melchior. ObamaCare requires employer-provided health insurance to cover at least 60 percent of health-care costs while not costing employees more than 9.5 percent of their household incomes. Since low-income households may have multiple sources of income, it can be difficult for companies to figure out if a particular plan is sufficient to avoid penalties. The federal government has proposed “safe harbor” standards in order to provide clarity: Companies offering plans that have a $3,500 deductible, a $6,000 cap on out-of-pocket costs, and premiums of $90 or less per month would put companies in the clear of any penalties. Under those standards, says Melchior, a low-income worker not eligible Medicaid has few good options:
He could take the employer’s plan — but if it’s a safe-harbor plan, it would cost, at minimum, $1,080 a year. And that’s before the deductible is even factored in. For someone who earns $28,725 a year, falling at 250 percent of the poverty level, these costs are sizeable.
Option two: He could shop around on the health exchange for an alternative. But because his employer provides a sanctioned plan, he’s disqualified from any subsidy he might have received to help offset costs. Even a very basic plan would cost up to $2,316 a year in premiums alone.
Option three: Forgo insurance altogether and pay the steadily increasing penalty to the federal government. In 2014, for an individual, that’s $95 for the year or 1 percent of household income, whichever is greater. But by 2016, it will rise to either $695 or 2.5 percent of household income. And that’s not even factoring in whether the worker has kids. In that case, he could face an annual penalty of $2,085 or more by 2016. […]
Before, many employers who paid by the hour offered limited medical plans. These policies often got a bad rap because of their lack of catastrophic coverage. But to their credit, they were inexpensive and contributed to health-care costs immediately, without workers needing to first meet a deductible.
Now, these low-wage hourly workers would be forced to spend at least $5,300 before their coverage really begins to benefit them. [National Review, June 17]
Who elected those guys? ask teachers in Kansas. Last week, teachers in Deerfield, Kansas, did something that almost never happens, report James Sherk and Michael Cirrotti: They voted to decertify their union:
Unlike most public officials, unions do not stand for re-election, so their members cannot regularly hold them accountable. Workers can remove an unwanted union only by filing for decertification. But bureaucratic obstacles make it difficult to hold a vote on decertification. The hoops Deerfield’s teachers had to jump through illustrate this problem.
Joel McClure, the teacher who led the effort, submitted the appropriate paperwork to the Kansas Department of Labor in November 2012. But Kansas teachers can request a vote only in a two-month window every three years. KNEA officials contested the petition by claiming that the teachers missed the December 1 deadline. (The Department of Labor had misplaced the initial petition paperwork.) Then the KNEA objected that the teachers’ attorney was not certified in Kansas and that they did not have enough signatures. However, the teachers prevailed and voted out their union—in June, just eight months after the initial submission.
When asked why they went through such protracted effort, the teachers said their union ignored their concerns. They wanted instead to be actively involved in negotiations and work collaboratively with the school district. “The desire is for teachers to participate at the [bargaining] table, to have free access to information,” McClure said. “In our little school district, there’s no reason we can’t sit down at the table and work out our issues.” [The Foundry, June 18]
Did we mention that next week is National Employee Freedom Week?
The death panel is coming. Last week, a federal judge in Philadelphia blocked the enforcement of an age-limit rule on lung transplants, thus allowing a very sick 10-year-old girl to obtain a new set of lungs. Doctors had said the girl, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, would live only three to five weeks without new lungs. Earlier, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius had said she would not to intervene in the case by overturning the rule.
When the ObamaCare-created Independent Payment Advisory Board is up and running in two years, it too will make decisions on matters of life and death, but unlike Sebelius’s decision on lung rules, the decisions of the IPAB cannot be reviewed by courts. Those decisions are also protected from politics in some extraordinary ways. As David Rivkin and Elizabeth Foley explain, the IPAB set-up is certainly unconstitutional, but likely not challengeable in the short run because no one would have standing to sue:
Once the board acts, its decisions can be overruled only by Congress, and only through unprecedented and constitutionally dubious legislative procedures—featuring restricted debate, short deadlines for actions by congressional committees and other steps of the process, and supermajoritarian voting requirements. The law allows Congress to kill the otherwise inextirpable board only by a three-fifths supermajority, and only by a vote that takes place in 2017 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 15. If the board fails to implement cuts, all of its powers are to be exercised by HHS Secretary Sebelius or her successor. […]
The power given by Congress to the Independent Payment Advisory Board is breathtaking. Congress has willingly abandoned its power to make tough spending decisions (how and where to cut) to an unaccountable board that neither the legislative branch nor the president can control. The law has also entrenched the board’s decisions to an unprecedented degree.
In Mistretta v. United States (1989), the Supreme Court emphasized that, in seeking assistance to fill in details not spelled out in the law, Congress must lay down an “intelligible principle” that “confine[s] the discretion of the authorities to whom Congress has delegated power.” The “intelligible principle” test ensures accountability by demanding that Congress take responsibility for fundamental policy decisions.
The IPAB is guided by no such intelligible principle. ObamaCare mandates that the board impose deep Medicare cuts, while simultaneously forbidding it to ration care. Reducing payments to doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers may cause them to limit or stop accepting Medicare patients, or even to close shop.
These actions will limit seniors’ access to care, causing them to wait longer or forego care—the essence of rationing. ObamaCare’s commands to the board are thus inherently contradictory and, consequently, unintelligible.
Moreover, authorizing the advisory board to make rules “relating to” Medicare gives the board virtually limitless power of the kind hitherto exercised by Congress. For instance, the board could decide to make cuts beyond the statutory target. It could mandate that providers expand benefits without additional payment. It could require that insurers or gynecologists make abortion services available to all their patients as a condition of doing business with Medicare, or that drug companies set aside a certain percentage of Medicare-related revenues to fund “prescription drug affordability.” There is no limit. [Wall Street Journal, June 19]
What is candy? Depends on which state wants to tax it online. Forcing online retailers to remit sales taxes to the state where the purchaser resides, as the federal Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA) does, is not going to level the playing field between online and bricks-and-mortar retailers. Rather, as James Gattuso explains, it will tilt the playing field heavily against online retailers—especially smaller ones:
While the legislation does require states to provide retailers with free software for managing tax compliance, that software need only cover the individual state. Retailers are left on their own to get nationwide software, unless they want to integrate 46 individual software packages. No compensation is offered for recurring costs incurred by retailers, such as accounting services or online tax management services.
In addition, internal staff time would be needed for an array of tasks, including handling claims by tax-exempt customers, fielding inquiries from tax authorities, and addressing the inevitable glitches.
Even the simple act of classifying the item being sold can be problematic, with thousands of idiosyncratic distinctions and definitions through each state’s tax code. In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin flag as well as the U.S. flag is not subject to tax. All other flags are taxable. Unless they are bundled with flagpoles, in which case the rules change yet again.
Similarly, candy is defined—under the “streamlined” sales tax agreement, as “a preparation of sugar, honey, or other natural or artificial sweeteners in combination with chocolate, fruits, nuts or other ingredients in the form of bars, drops, or pieces.” But sellers beware: “‘Candy’ shall not include any preparation containing flour and shall require no refrigeration.” Thus defined, states still vary on whether the concoction is taxable or not.
The problems do not end with the sale. Each of the 46 state tax authorities with which retailers would have to deal directly require tax returns to be completed, on an annual, quarterly, or even weekly basis. To ensure that it is all done correctly, sellers would be subject to audits from each of 46 states. (If tax authorities on Indian reservations are included—as they are in the MFA as passed by the Senate—the number of tax forms and potential audits jumps to the hundreds.) [The Heritage Foundation, June 19]
Carbon taxers forget the externalities of not using cheap, abundant energy. One reason putting a tax on carbon in order to price its negative externalities is not a free-market idea:
[E]ven if SCC [social cost of carbon] estimates were not assumption-driven hocus-pocus, their use by activists, policymakers, and agencies would still be biased and misleading, because proponents of “climate action” always ignore the social costs of carbon mitigation.
As Cato Institute scholar Indur Goklany explains in a recent study, fossil fuels are the chief energy source of a “cycle of progress” responsible for the amazing improvements of the past 250 years in life expectancy, health, nutrition, safety, comfort, human capital formation, and per capita income. The cycle of progress is to no small extent a “positive externality” of fossil fuels. Thus, policies that suppress the extraction, delivery, and consumption of fossil fuels, or that make fossil energy less affordable, have social costs in addition to whatever compliance burdens and economic losses the policies entail.
For example, the more stringent the carbon mitigation scheme, the more severe the impacts on household income and job creation. Numerous studies find that poverty and unemployment increase the risk of sickness and death. Carbon tax advocates never acknowledge this side of the ledger.
Given the continuing importance of fossil fuels to human flourishing and the undeniable connection between livelihoods, living standards, and life expectancy, carbon taxes can easily do more harm than good to public health—even if one accepts the IPCC’s version of the science.
That’s from Marlo Lewis’s excellent summary of the recent R Street-Heartland Institute debate on the carbon tax. [GlobalWarming.org, June 16]
Progressives make use of rights that progressives think should not exist. It’s a good thing for progressives—and everybody else—that one particular progressive idea hasn’t been adopted, observes Wendy Kaminer:
If progressives had their way, the ACLU’s latest challenge to the NSA’s domestic surveillance would easily be dismissed.ACLU v Clapper, filed in the wake of the Snowden revelations, is based on the ACLU’s First and Fourth Amendment rights, which, according to progressives, ACLU should not possess. It is, after all, a corporation, and constitutional amendments aggressively promoted by progressives would limit constitutional rights to “natural persons.”
“The words people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities,” the popular People’s Rights Amendment declares. [The Atlantic, June 17]
Arthur Koestler’s protagonist in Darkness at Noon referred to the first-person singular as a “grammatical fiction” because it conflicted with the logic of self sacrifice demanded by the party. Today’s real progressives are now trying to subvert the plural form. By insisting that only individuals, not corporations, have rights, they elide the fact that corporations are made up of individual people. Individuals can’t fully exercise their rights if the things they choose to do cooperatively with others do not have the same protections as the things they choose to do alone. Maybe the American Civil Liberties Union can spread the word.
• Find out what Russia is up to with its efforts to construct a Eurasian Union. The Heritage Foundation will host a half-day conference on June 27 in Washington, D.C.
• Reflect on the Battle of Gettysburg and its meaning for the nation, which happened 150 years ago this July. Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College will make remarks at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., at 4:30 p.m. on June 26.
• If you are a young, professional, conservative woman, come meet other young, professional, conservative women at the Network of enlightened Women’s National Conference. The conference will be held June 27 – June 28 at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Christina Hoff Summers will deliver a keynote address.
• Request a free copy of the movie Amazing Grace, which tells the true story of William Wilberforce’s fight to abolish slavery. The offer is part of the Foundation for Economic Education’s Blinking Lights Project, which educates about the importance of personal character as a vital element of free society. Be sure to check that out, too.
• Don’t forget that next week is National Employee Freedom Week, “a national effort to inform union employees of the freedom they have regarding opting out of union membership and making the decision about union membership that’s best for them.”
• Save the dates! These events are no longer classified, are they?
—The annual IEA Hayek Memorial Lecture, delivered this year by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, talking on “The Leave Us Alone Coalition vs. The Takings Coalition: The On-going Struggle” at 6:30 p.m. in London;
—The 42nd National Fourth of July Soiree, featuring barbeque, blue grass, balloon artists, and more at Bull Run Regional Park in Centreville, Va., on July 4 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.;
—The Heritage Foundation’s annual Scholars & Scribes review of the Supreme Court’s 2012-2013 term, July 11, in Washington, D.C.;
—Freedom Fest, the largest gathering of free minds, July 10 – July 13 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas;
—and Cato University, July 28 – August 3 at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Have a tip for InsiderOnline? Send us an e-mail at insider@heritage.org with “For Insider” in the subject line.
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/InsiderOnline.
Looking for an expert? Visit PolicyExperts.org.
The Heritage Foundation
214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4999
phone 202.546.4400 | fax 202.546.8328
Facts you really should know about what your government is doing and how to take action against this tyranny NOW.
Posted on: June 20, 2013
- In: amnesty | Barack Obama | Big Labor Unions | Black community family | Brain washing our children | Bribery called Earmarks in congress | Climategate | Commentary | Communism in America | Constitution of the United States of America | Economy/Money | Education | Environment | EPA Environmental Protection Agency | Federal Reserve | Financial Industry Reform | Government Failure Series from Cato Institute | Health Care | illegal immigration | Immigration | Ineffective Government Programs | Internet | Internet Neutrality | Know the enemies of America | Laws and Regulation--stupidities | laws and regulations--stupidities | Left's and Obama's attack on religion | Leftist violence in America | national deficit, taxes, national budget | National Politics | Obama admistration | Obama and ethics | Obama's moratorium on drilling in the Gulf | Obamcare repeal and replace | Off Shore Drilling for oil and natural gas | patriotism | Progressives Movement to Destroy America | Project to Restore America | public service employees | Radical Left at War with America | Redistributing wealth | Regaining our moral standards | Subverting America by Uri Bezmenov | Supreme Court rulings | Taking back our schools | Taxes | The Fight Back | Unfunded liabilities | United Nation's Agenda 21 | United Nations | US in Revolt
- 7 Comments
I thought I was pretty well up on what is happening in our country because I really try hard to keep up and do a lot of reading, but now way was I even close to knowing what is happening to everyday people just like me and you. This article from the Heritage Foundation is an eye opener and a blood pressure raiser. Be sure and go to all the referred sites for all the information. The time for We the People to act is now when we have the momentum with the Tea Party and other groups up and moving. Time for you to get involved too before it has gone too far for the United States and Americans to turn the tide towards tyranny around and defeat those who would imprison us in a country no American wants to live in. Sincerely, Brenda Bowers BB
06/14/2013
Every day, more Americans get trapped by big government. In addition to groups targeted by the IRS, upstanding citizens going about their normal lives are suddenly targeted by law enforcement authorities and charged as criminals. Just a few examples:
- A young girl was fined $535… for rescuing a wounded woodpecker.
- A businessman was jailed for years… for shipping lobsters in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes.
- A Maryland father and building engineer faced a years-long legal ordeal… after being unfairly targeted under the Clean Water Act.
These are only a few of the shocking incidents The Heritage Foundation chronicles in our new project, USA vs. YOU. Experts at Heritage’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies reveal the stories of 22 people from all backgrounds, races, and income levels victimized by carelessly written laws.
Get the FREE e-book USA vs. YOU now >>
When criminal laws are created to “solve” every problem, punish every mistake, and compel the “right” behaviors, this troubling trend is known as overcriminalization. Ultimately, it leads to injustice for honest, hard-working Americans at every level of society.
Public interest groups from across the political spectrum recognize how this flood of criminal laws violates our basic liberties. Diverse organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, the American Center for Law and Justice, and Right on Crime, among others, have joined with Heritage to reaffirm the true purpose of America’s justice system: to ensure public safety and protect the innocent.
When was the last time you saw the ACLU work together with a faith-based group like Justice Fellowship? WithUSA vs. YOU, the problem is grave enough to bring together unlikely allies. And we’re delivering this bipartisan message just as the House of Representatives has launched a task force aimed at correcting this issue.
This morning, Heritage Senior Legal Fellow John Malcolm will testify at the first hearing of the Overcriminalization Task Force—shining a spotlight on the scope and severity of this threat to our liberties. Ending the practice of trapping our citizens with unnecessary laws will be no easy task, with an estimated 4,500 criminal law offenses and 300,000 criminal regulations on the books.
Experience the stories of Americans like you treated unjustly – download the FREE e-book now >>
Over the next six months, Members of Congress from both parties will study this issue in depth, hold hearings, and—with the right encouragement—take steps to enact real reform.
This new effort includes tools for you to raise your voice and make a difference in defending our liberties. So explore the documented stories in USA vs. YOU, follow the links, and take real action today to help turn the tide.
Read the Morning Bell and more en español every day at Heritage Libertad.
Quick Hits:
- President Obama has changed his policy on Syria, saying that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons and that the U.S. will provide military support to the rebels.
- The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, won’t be so “affordable” for many workers, reports the Associated Press.
- What would redefining marriage mean for Father’s Day?
- Investigative journalist James O’Keefe has produced some shocking stories of corruption. In a new book, hedetails his undercover work with Project Veritas.
- For decades, inappropriate IRS behaviors have been revealed. Each time, the agency has assured the public that it takes these breaches “very seriously.”
- Heritage’s Jessica Zuckerman fact-checked President Obama’s latest speech on immigration and amnesty.
- In: Brain washing our children | Communism in America | communist | Education | Jihad in America | Know the enemies of America | Leftist violence in America | Muslims in the United States | NEA National Education Association | Obama Against America | Obama and ethics | Progressives Movement to Destroy America | Radical Left at War with America | Subverting America by Uri Bezmenov | Taking back our schools | teachers unions in politics
- 2 Comments
Americans were told in the early 1960’s by a funny looking short chubby Russian leader named Khrushchev that America would be defeated by Communism and not a shot would be fired. If you care to go to my right side column you will find a series of videos made in the 1980’s by a former KGB (Russia’s top spy agency) agent explaining exactly how the Communist planned to overthrow America (Subverting America by Uri Bezmenov). I am 72 years old and I watched it happen exactly as Bezmenov said it would happen and exactly as Khrushchev claimed as he banged his shoe on the podium. Many laughed and said it would never happen but here we are fifty years later and it is happening. the last brick in the wall of our American prison is being put in place with the federal CORE Curriculum that the government is forcing on states. The text books of the CORE Curriculum have completely rewritten history! Beware!
Do read carefully this article from the Cato Instutute. Then check carefuylllly and keep an eye on your own schools and what is being fed to your children. BB
May 4, 2013
The Great Education Power-Grab
Did you know that reformers intent on implementing the Core Curriculum (National Standards) have invaded public education? They do not care about kids or about individuals. Armed with statistics and vast software systems, their intent is to establish one-size-fits-all curricula and success parameters in public education nationwide. The scope of their ambitions leads this educator to the conclusion that their underlying impulse is totalitarian.
These reformers are driving toward the six- or seven-class-a-day high school teaching load, the 9-5 schedule for the schools (or longer), school provided free and compulsory for ages 2 to 22 (or 26), the six- or seven-day school week, and the 12-month school year (with two- or three-week vacation breaks scattered throughout the school year), all controlled by a vast bureaucracy nationwide and justified by the implementation of “national standards.” A database of answers to 400 questions by all U.S. students K-20 will be compiled and maintained at a tremendous cost to the public. Forty-six states are already on board. This 20-plus years of control and indoctrination will, if implemented, become a cornerstone of statist control.mic
Who’s doing it? These reforms are led by Bill Ayers, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York City. They are also led by educational publishers such as Cengage, Pearson, McGraw Hill, and McDougal Littel. They have a host of supporters including, but not limited to, the Coalition of Essential Schools, New Visions, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and other NGOs that want to bring equality and progress [sic] to institutions supposedly failing to their very core. These “reformers” are being abetted by their so-called adversaries, the education unions: UFT, AFT, NEA, and NYSUT. Claiming to object to some of the teacher hostility expressed by the “reformers,” these unions actually are 100% in tune with the political and social agenda of those reformers. Why? Because the movement toward “national standards” by these reformers means increased membership and dues for the unions, consolidation of power, and national promotion of their left-wing agenda. The education unions become junior partners in one of the greatest power plays in the history of this country.
The key to their vision, if one can call this Brave New World and 1984 nightmare a “vision,” is to bring in a whole new class of school administrators. These administrators do not have teaching experience. Teaching experience tends to breed respect for the individual. Instead, the drive of national standards is to collectivize, to standardize, and to establish one-size-fits-all educational benchmarks, goals, and curricula. The new mandarins of education are people in their twenties or early thirties who are to come in and uproot the supposed garbage of the past. Likewise, pressures are being brought to bear on older teachers and experienced administrators to get out of the way of the “agenda of change.”
A few years ago, this writer attended a meeting to recruit teachers into the New York City Department of Education Leadership Academy for prospective principals, and the sophisticated and attractive hostess of the program was asked, “When reviewing applications to the program, do you take into account whether the applicant has written and published any articles of books?” Without hesitation, the woman answered firmly that she does not. Connection with the world of books is not part of leadership in education. On another occasion, this writer even heard one principal in the New York City Department of Education say that he is not interested in having libraries where books just gather a lot of dust; rather, he wants to replace all books with much cheaper and less space-consuming CDs. He added that students do not need literature in high school; they need only skill-sets for proper English usage. Under the Common Core, literature is being de-emphasized in favor of nonfiction, and excerpts will replace the reading of entire texts.
The thrust during Bloomberg’s years as mayor of New York City has been to recruit people with little or no experience in education to teach and to run the schools. This supposedly is to refresh a profession that has been too insulated from accountability and new ideas for too long. We saw this in Chicago, when Arne Duncan was the head of the schools. He had only had a little tutoring experience, but his goal was to renovate and revamp the failing system. As far as anyone knows, the system there is still failing.
What, then, do we find? From top to bottom, the NYC Dept. of Education is replete with administrators with little teaching experience. Often selected because they are inexperienced and willing to be as insensitive as a cactus in order to please their superiors, they come to impose themselves as “leaders” on those who are already making great sacrifices as teachers.
Then there are teaching fellows and other “career change” types who have decided they want to begin a new career path in education. They soon learn the realities of life in the schools, and many leave. Many teaching fellows are also brilliant and idealistic, and they come into education to make a difference in the lives of individuals and society as a whole. However, they find that they not only have to deal with incredibly complex and difficult classroom and building situations, but many times are being badgered by clueless administrators who are the “new breed” as described above. This author recently heard a highly regarded principal of a New York City high school say that he considered “classroom management” overestimated in importance. Right. Who needs an attentive, orderly classroom? Let students have a watered down curriculum, let them talk during class, and then give them inflated grades to support their self-esteem. This is to be the new formula for national “progress.”
We find people coming into education from facilities management, the petroleum industry, pharmaceutical sales, and lobster wholesaling and delivery backgrounds. This writer has met these people, and the likelihood that they read even one book a year is remote. Are non-readers and non-teachers suited to be educational leaders?
Many, be it for money, security, ideals, or some combination of the above seek administrative positions that they are not ready for. Why aren’t they ready? They are not ready because they have not been mentored and inculcated with core educational values that include, but are not limited to, focus on service and on educational values such as curricular innovation, creativity, knowledge, teacher morale, school tone, the family of man, student character-building, and caring/love of all for all (said list can be summed up as “the pursuit of happiness”).
The above changes are gradually (and sometimes not so gradually) being implemented in various school districts throughout the country, but national standards (Core Curriculum) are the connecting mechanism whereby the philosophy of education outlined above can be managed at the federal level. The rationale for this is that students in China, Japan, and Singapore regularly do better than U.S. students on international tests of math and science. Therefore, a more comprehensive approach (standards) needs to be taken if we are to remain competitive in the world economy.
Even accepting the highly dubious assumption that we are falling behind those countries, should our schools become as authoritarian as those schools? Are not the Judeo-Christian ideals of love and compassion still valid? Do we want the drones we find in these other cultures?
About 46 states have already signed onto “national standards.” There is movement in that direction. There are not many articles in the conservative media and blogs challenging this direction. Nevertheless, the danger to culture, to rationality (substituting what to think for how to think), to individuality, and to the tried and true is palpable.
My question to the reader: Do you want American public education to become even more of an ideological monolith than it is at present?
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/the_great_education_power_grab.html#ixzz2SME2uDEr
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
- In: Economy/Money | Education | EPA Environmental Protection Agency | Federal Reserve | Health Care | Health Care Reform Summary | Ineffective Government Programs | Know the enemies of America | Laws and Regulation--stupidities | Obama 2013 and beyond | Obama and ethics | Obamcare repeal and replace | Off Shore Drilling for oil and natural gas | Privatization of federal projects | Progressives Movement to Destroy America | Racism | Radical Left at War with America | Redistributing wealth | Social Security | Subverting America by Uri Bezmenov | Taxes
- Leave a Comment
This man has so much to say and makes just entirely tooo much sense! Our problems are indeed great but the answers are relatively simple if we but had the guts and intelligence to take our medicine after all these years of living high on the hog on a credit card from China and other countries we are now indebted to. BB
VIDEO: Dr. Ben Carson Speaks Truth to Power at National Prayer Breakfast
Josh Shepherd (CLICK NAME OF AUTHOR TO LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE VIDEO)
February 8, 2013 at 4:30 pm
Yesterday, world-renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson presented the keynote address at the 61st Annual National Prayer Breakfast. With President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other national leaders in attendance, Dr. Carson spoke plainly about the great challenges America faces today: “moral decay and fiscal irresponsibility.”
“One of our big problems right now is our deficit,” Dr. Carson states. “Our national debt, 16 and a half trillion dollars—you think that’s not a lot of money? Counting one number per second, you know how long it would take to count to one trillion—507,000 years.”
Dr. Carson continued:
I don’t like to bring up problems without coming up with solutions… What about our taxation system? It is so complex, there is no one who can possibly comply with every jot and tittle. That doesn’t make any sense.
What we need to do is come up with something that’s simple. The inherently fair principle is proportionality: you make 10 billion dollars, you put in a billion. You make 10 dollars, you put in one. Of course, you have to get rid of the loopholes.
Some people say, ‘That’s not fair! It’s doesn’t hurt the guy who made 10 billion dollars.’ Where does it say you have to hurt that guy? He just put a billion dollars into the pot!
Similar to Dr. Carson’s ideas, The Heritage Foundation has proposed a new flat taxas part of the landmark reform plan Saving the American Dream.
Growing up in dire poverty, Dr. Carson tells of taking responsibility for his own decisions thanks to “a mother who believed in me, who would never allow herself to be a victim no matter what happened—she never made excuses, and she never accepted excuses from us.”
Carson says his mother paved the way for a better life by insisting he and his brother read rather than watch television:
After awhile, I actually began to enjoying reading those books. I read about people of great accomplishment.
As I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread: the person who has the most to do with what happens to you in life is you. You make decisions, and you decide how much energy you put behind those decisions. At that point I didn’t hate poverty anymore, because I knew it was only temporary: I could change that.
Dr. Ben Carson, whose life was dramatized in the 2009 film Gifted Hands, recently authored the book America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great with his wife Candy.
An annual event in Washington, D.C., the National Prayer Breakfast presents “a call to spiritual mobilization” to Congress and “leaders in our nation who carry great burdens.” As keynote speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, Carson follows in the footsteps of author Eric Metaxas who in 2012 delivered a speech equally as challenging to national leaders.
Posted in Entitlements, Taxes & Spending, Ongoing PrioritiesTags: Ben Carson, debt, Entitlements, Taxes & Spending, National Prayer Breakfast, Taxes & Spending, VideoRelated Posts
First Presidential Debate 2012
Posted on: October 4, 2012
- In: Barack Obama | Communism in America | Deficit Reduction Proposal | Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill | Economy/Money | Education | Financial Industry Reform | Health Care | Ineffective Government Programs | Know the enemies of America | national deficit, taxes, national budget | Obama Administrations obstructions in Gulf Oil Spill cleanup | Obama admistration | Obama Against America | Obama and ethics | Obamanation | Obamcare repeal and replace | Off Shore Drilling for oil and natural gas | Politics 2012 | Progressives Movement to Destroy America | Redistributing wealth | Social Security | taking back our schools | Taxes | Unfunded liabilities
- Leave a Comment
I loved the debate last night! Romney was really out there and every bit the President we need. He was respectful of the President but did not tolerate inaccuracies and came right back with the truth. Obama reminded me of nothing more than a little boy who was being scolded by his Daddy. He looked down and wouldn’t look Romney in the eye because he couldn’t; he couldn’t refute the truth of the facts Mitt Romney was putting forth to counter the lies Obama was telling and the dismal facts of Obama’s administration’s mistakes and blunders and bad policies. Then Obama allowed his nasty ego to show when he let us see how upset and affronted he was to have anyone dare to question and confront him. If there had been just five more minutes left Obama would have exploded in a nasty temper tantrum. I expect to see this tantrum in the next debate! because this egomaniac holds a grudge and will just have to come back, and in public. We will see the real Obama next time.. In the meantime Heritage has some great articles on debate questions and facts and follow up that I hope you will read. I am printing just one article here but do go to their site and read several of their articles. In fact, if you do not subscribe to the Heritage Foundation you really should. BB
10 Questions for the First Presidential Debate
Tonight’s debate between President Barack Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney is supposed to focus on domestic policy, with a major concentration on the economy. Health care, the role of government, and philosophy of governing are also on the agenda. The Heritage Foundation’s policy experts have submitted 10 questions they would like to see asked in the debate.
1. In 2008, then-candidate Obama said, “Under my plan,
2. Millions of baby boomers are starting to retire, and spending on Social Security and Medicare as these programs are currently structured is
3. Medicare as we know it today is facing severe financing problems that are unsustainable and putting future generations’ Medicare benefits in jeopardy. Over the long term, Medicare has made $37 trillion worth of promises to seniors that it cannot keep and the hospital insurance trust fund will be empty by 2024. Worse, the President’s health care law will
4. Everyone talks about shoring up our5. The Health and Human Services Department recently
6. The federal government is currently spending much more than it has, and annual
7. One of the few bright spots in America’s economy has been energy production, particularly on state and private lands. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA),
8. Congress—most notably the Senate, which hasn’t produced a budget in over three years—is sorely lacking in its
9. President Obama has previously stated that, in the most important 5 percent of cases before the courts, it matters more what is in a judge’s heart (what has come to be known as his empathy standard) than what the rule of law requires. Is this the correct standard by which to evaluate judicial nominees? If not, what standard would you apply?
10. Former Attorney General of Mexico Victor Humberto Benítez Treviño estimated that approximately 300 Mexican citizens have been killed using Fast and Furious weapons in addition to U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Should Eric Holder resign as Attorney General because of his failures related to Operation Fast and Furious, including his failure to properly supervise the operation? If not, why not?
Watch the debate with Heritage tonight—you can watch it live, streaming on our
Education in our times
Posted on: September 5, 2012
As an educator i watched our schools decline over the past half century until now we are graduating more illiterates than ever. Things were so bad when I was teaching that the really good teachers simply threw their hands up and left the profession rather than continue trying to teach children around and thru the stupid edicts that were being handed down by administrators and school boards. History being replaced by “Social Studies” where now people even in college have no idea when the Civil War ended let alone what it was about. “New math” where children were expected to learn arithmetic thru osmosis during the elementary years so that by high school the math teachers had to demand that they memorize the times tables the way we old timers all had to do in third grade.
More and more students entering college , but having to take remedial reading and math courses their Freshman year! And graduating five or six years later with degrees that will get them a job behind the counter at the local burger joint! AND, still not aware of the date the Civil War ended or what it was all about.
I am happy to see that some sanity and changes are finally being proposed. Heck, in some places in the country some of these things are actually being done. This latest newsletter from The Heritage Foundation is enlightening. BB
As of today, the vast majority of American students have begun a new school year. As lunches are packed and carpool lines grow, Heritage reviews the good, bad, and ugly in education.
The Good
Support for school choice is at an all-time high. In a poll released in August, school choice favorability
Options like the
Social promotion is becoming less popular.In North Carolina, legislators approved a measure to
Online, customized learning is on the rise.
Teachers union membership is declining.The National Education Association is projecting a loss of 308,000 members since 2010. One of the union’s top officials, treasurer Becky Pringle, blames “
The Bad
The Administration is singling out minority students for government “help” instead of raising them up through increased options.Over the summer, President Obama signed an executive order to form the new White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. According to the White House, the new initiative, which will work across federal agencies, “aims to ensure that all African American students receive an education that fully prepares them for high school graduation, college completion, and productive careers.”
Parents and taxpayers would be correct to be skeptical of a new Washington initiative to improve student outcomes. A new evaluation by Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution and Paul Peterson of Harvard shows a
This success has already proven the vital role of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Students who have used vouchers to attend private schools in the nation’s capital have a 91 percent graduation rate, while graduation rates in D.C. public schools hover around 60 percent.
The Ugly
Average per-pupil spending in public schools is reaching historic highs. Nationally, average per-pupil spending exceeds $11,400 this year, meaning a child entering kindergarten today can expect to have no less than $148,000 spent on his or her education by the time the child graduates high school. In all, more than $570 billion will be spent on public K-12 education this year.
Continual increases in the money spent per child and in overall spending haven’t led to increases in academic achievement. Heritage’s Lindsey Burke
We continue to fund institutions—sending that money to schools—instead of actually funding children. Imagine if a child could put those dollars in a funding “backpack” and take that $11,400 to any school—public, private, or virtual. As in every other sector of American life, we would likely see outcomes improve as a result of competitive pressure placed on the government school system.
Despite the successes of more individualized learning and school choice, the Obama Administration wants to further centralize education in Washington through national standards and tests. It has been trying to entice states with waivers from the onerous No Child Left Behind law, which it gives to states that agree to adopt the Administration’s standards instead.
Implementing Washington-controlled education standards means that states, local school boards, and ultimately parents
- In: Barack Obama | Brain washing our children | Education | Europe | Islam | Islam, Muslim, jihad, terrorist | Israel Fight for Survival | Isreal Fight for Survival | jihad | Jihad in America | jihad in the world | Know the enemies of America | Left's and Obama's attack on religion | Muslim | Muslims | Muslims in the United States | Obama admistration | Obama Against America | Obama and ethics | Obama Executive Decress | Obamanation | Progressives Movement to Destroy America | Project to Restore America | Racism | Radical Left at War with America | Regaining our moral standards | taking back our schools | Taking back our schools
- Leave a Comment
Newsletter from ACT for AMERICA.
August 14, 2012
This couldn’t happen here, could it?
Dear Lew and Brenda,
Yes it could—and is.
In fact, the title of the article below (highlights added), posted at the Gatestone Institute website, could just as easily be “How Political Correctness is Transforming American Education.”
To find just one example,
You’ll learn that the typical textbook fails to note that the 9/11 terrorists were radical Muslims and fails to inform students that the state of Israel was created by a UN resolution in 1947.
Most of what is mentioned below is already beginning to happen in America. For example, a couple years ago students at a Boston-area middle school were taken on a field trip to a mosque. The boys were invited to kneel and pray while teachers stood by and did nothing. Can you imagine the outcry from faculty and the ACLU if this had happened at a Christian church?
How Political Correctness Is Transforming British Education
by
Soeren Kern
In Cheshire, two students at the
In Scotland, 30 non-Muslim children from the Parkview Primary School recently were required to visit the Bait ur Rehman Ahmadiyya mosque in the Yorkhill district of Glasgow (videos
British schools are increasingly dropping the Jewish Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, according to a report entitled,
British teachers are also reluctant to discuss the medieval Crusades, in which Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem: lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.
In an effort to
In the East London district of Tower Hamlets, four Muslims were recently
Schools across Britain are, in fact, increasingly banning pork from lunch menus to avoid offending Muslim students. Hundreds of schools have adopted a “no pork” policy,
The culinary restrictions join a long list of politically correct changes that gradually are bringing hundreds of British primary and secondary education into conformity with Islamic Sharia law.
The London Borough of Haringey, a heavily Muslim district in North London, is the latest school district to switch to a menu that is fully
The
Local politicians have criticized the new policy as pandering to Muslims, and local farmers, who have pointed out that all schools in Britain already offer vegetarian options, have accused school administrators of depriving non-Muslim children of a choice.
Following an outcry from non-Muslim parents, the town council removed the guidance from its website, although the new policy remains in place.
At the Cypress Junior School, in Croydon, south London, school administrators announced in the
The announcement states: “Whilst beef, chicken, turkey and fish will all feature, as well as the daily vegetarian and jacket potato or pasta option, the sausages served will now be chicken rather than pork.”
In Luton, an industrial city some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of London where more than 15% of the population is now Muslim, 23 out of 57 schools have banned pork.
In the City of Bradford, a borough of West Yorkshire in Northern England where there are now
Other pork-free schools include
The
According to the UK-based
Lunch menus are not the only area in which “cultural sensitivity” is escalating in British schools.
In West Yorkshire, the Park Road Junior Infant and Nursery School in Batley has banned stories featuring pigs, including “
In Nottingham, the
Also in Cheshire, a 14-year-old Roman Catholic girl who attends
In
Meanwhile, the politically correct ban on pigs in Britain also extends to toys for children. A toy farm set called
The pig removal came to public attention after a British mother bought the toy as a present for her daughter’s first birthday. Although the set contained a model of a cow, sheep, chicken, horse and dog, there was no pig, despite there being a sty and a button which generated an “oink” sound.
After the mother complained, the Early Learning Centre (ELC), which manufactures the toy, responded: “Previously the pig was part of the Goosefeather Farm. However due to customer feedback and religious reasons this is no longer part of the farm.”
After a public outcry, however,
And So I Go: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 
Heritage Insider-Online Newsletter a must read.
Posted by: Brenda Bowers on: August 15, 2014
Dear Readers, I am sure you will find many of the articles in this month’s Heritage Insider-Online of interest so for those who do not subscribe I am putting them on my blog for you use. I have gotten emails from many asking why I am no longer blogging. Frankly because I have said all I can say about the evil of Barack Obama and now can only sit back and cry for my country. Even if the Senate becomes Republican this November and a sane President is elected in 2016 there has been so much damage done that it will take decades to just claw ourselves back to the point we were at when this monster was first elected in 2008. Being an old lady I won’t live to see our America return to the respected place in the world and a country of independent proud people that I knew as a young woman.
I have watched the downward slide of America from the mid 1960’s with Democrat President Lyndon Johnson and his failed “Great Society”. Even at age 23 I knew that Medicare was wrong! Only 40% of elderly Americans were unable to afford health care insurance but instead of helping those individuals the insurance companies insisted that ALL the elderly must be given health insurance paid for by the younger tax payers. The same thi9ng is happening now with Obamacare—the only way the insurance companies will accept everyone with coverage regardless of health or life style or preexisting conditions is if every0ne is forced into the system. So stupid! Give help to those few who need it and let the rest of us take care of ourselves as independent decent Americans always have. It is a fact that has been proven over and over: Any thing the government gets into is badly run, in efficient, full of fraud and outright thievery and therefore very very costly to the tax payers. Medicare, Medicaid and student loans are prime examples of this rule!
I watched the schools and universities as an educator being “dumb down to the lowest common denominator by see and say reading and new math and rewriting history and replacing it with social studies and social justice.
Now during these past 6 years I have watched a President of the United States again and again ignore and violate the laws stated in the Constitution of the United States and no one stopping him! Yes, I have live thru the down fall of a great civilization and I will not live to see the rise to greatness again, but I have faith in Americans. We are a unique nation form by outstanding people who were wise far beyond their times. We today have the blood of those pioneers beating in our hearts and this is augmented daily by new blood of those who leave the old behind and come to the land of the freedom and rights of man so that they too can soar above the masses in the world in the only country on earth that allows its citizens that freedom. .I have faith that we Americans will walk proud again but after the damage done during these 50+ years it will take decades to return.
You, the readers of my blog are the people who will lead the way. God bless you. Sincerely, BB
August 9, 2014
Latest Studies
34 studies, including a Pacific Research Institute handbook on tobacco taxation, and a Hudson Institute report on Iraq’s second Sunni insurgency
Notes on the Week
The environmental costs of delaying Keystone, What does the strategic trade lit really say about the Export-Import Bank? Is administrative law running off the rails?
To Do
Figure out what now for ObamaCare
Latest Studies
Budget & Taxation
• The Export-Import Bank: What the Scholarship Says – The Heritage Foundation
• Abolishing the Corporate Income Tax Could Be Good
for Everyone – National Center for Policy Analysis
• Handbook of Tobacco Taxation – Pacific Research Institute
• Sales Tax Holidays: Politically Expedient but Poor Tax Policy – Tax Foundation
The Constitution/Civil Liberties
• An Originalist Future – Federalist Society
• Repression in China and Its Consequences in Xinjiang – Hudson Institute
• Private Property Interrupted: Protecting Texas Property Owners from Regulatory Takings Abuse – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Crime, Justice & the Law
• Criminal Law and the Administrative State: The Problem with Criminal Regulations – The Heritage Foundation
Economic Growth
• The Long-Hours Luxury – American Enterprise Institute
• Misallocation, Property Rights, and Access to Finance – Cato Institute
• Do Labour Shortages Exist in Canada? Reconciling the Views of Employers and Economists – Fraser Institute
• “Middle-Out” Economics? – Hoover Institution
• How Many Jobs Does Intellectual Property Create? – Mercatus Center
• Thomas Piketty’s False Depiction of Wealth in America – Tax Foundation
Education
• Philadelphia School Trends, 2002-03 to 2012-13 – Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Setting a Course for Obama’s Rudderless Africa Policy – The Heritage Foundation
• The Failure of the E.U. – Hoover Institution
• Iraq’s Second Sunni Insurgency – Hudson Institute
• The Collective Security Treaty Organization: Past Struggles and Future Prospects – Hudson Institute
Health Care
• Changing the Rules of Health Care: Mobile Health and Challenges for Regulation – American Enterprise Institute
• Direct Primary Care: An Innovative Alternative to Conventional Health Insurance – The Heritage Foundation
• How Obamacare Fuels Health Care Market Consolidation – The Heritage Foundation
• A Time for Reform: Close and Consolidate Texas’ State Supported Living Centers – Texas Public Policy Foundation
International Trade/Finance
• Sustaining the Economic Rise of Africa – Cato Institute
• Market Solutions Should Be Central to U.S.’s Taiwan Policy – The Heritage Foundation
Labor
• Asserting Influence and Power in the 21st Century: The NLRB Focuses on Assisting Non-Union Employees – Federalist Society
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• “Choking Off” Disfavored Businesses and Their Clients: How Operation Choke Point Undermines the Rule of Law and Harms the
Economy – The Heritage Foundation
National Security
• Autonomous Military Technology: Opportunities and Challenges for Policy and Law – The Heritage Foundation
• Size Isn’t All that Matters – Hoover Institution
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• The Keystone Delay Is Costing us More than Jobs and Revenue – American Action Forum
• Who Watches the Watchmen? Global Warming in the Media – Capital Research Center
• Rethinking Energy: Supplying Competitive Electricity Rates – Center of the American Experiment
Retirement/Social Security
• A Guide to the 2014 Social Security Trustees Report – e21 – Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Social Security Trustees Report: Unfunded Liability Increased $1.1 Trillion and Projected Insolvency in 2033 – The Heritage Foundation
Notes on the Week
The environmental costs of delaying Keystone: The delay in the Keystone pipeline costs more than jobs and income. There are also environmental consequences that come from shifting pipeline transport of oil to rail transport. Catrina Rorke extrapolates what the costs may be:
Rewarding work: “One factor that is often overlooked in the debate over causes of income inequality is a shift in the distribution of working hours,” writes Tino Sanandaji: “The rich now work more than the poor.”
And the decline of work among the poor is a tragedy, he writes:
What does a gas company have to do with ObamaCare? If you’ve been following the debate about whether ObamaCare creates tax credits in just the state exchanges or in both the federal and state exchanges, you may have heard the word “Chevron.” What’s that all about?
“Chevron” refers to Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council a Supreme Court decision from 1984. Randolph May, observing the 30th anniversary of the decision, describes Chevron’s central holding this way: “When a statutory provision is ambiguous, if the agency’s interpretation is ‘based on a permissible construction of the statute,’ then the agency’s interpretation is to be given ‘controlling weight.’”
When there is ambiguity, why not defer to the agencies? May explains the problem:
In King v. Burwell, the Fourth Circuit relied on Chevron analysis to find that tax credits were permissible in the federal exchanges; in Halbig v. Burwell, the D.C. Circuit decided that the meaning of “an Exchange established by the State,” was plain enough that there was no gap for the IRS to fill. Thus, there was no Chevron analysis needed.
The Constitution doesn’t exist for the convenience of the government. For the past century or so, the federal government has been using its spending and regulatory powers to “turn states into mere field offices of the federal government,” write Richard Epstein and Mario Loyola. Their article in The Atlantic explains not only how we got here but why we should care:
The courts aren’t on board with the plan for unrestrained executive power—at least not all of them, yet. To hear liberals tell the story, the most important thing to know about Halbig v. Burwell is that the D.C. Circuit Court denied ObamaCare subsidies to millions of people in the 36 states that chose not to establish an exchange. The detail that the law says the subsidies are available “through an Exchange established by the State” gets second billing if it shows up at all. Liberals thus blame the court for striking down that which Congress failed to create. What an odd way of looking at judicial decisions. As Michael Greve notes, the acceptance of the government’s arguments as at all plausible is a signal that administrative law is coming apart at the seams. He writes:
And:
Video of the week: Economics is everywhere, including between the goalposts. The start of football season is less than a month away. From Steve Horwitz and Learn Liberty, here’s a look at how the game’s concussion crisis reveals an important lesson about public policy:
Pulling back the curtain on Healthcare.gov: Remember the fiasco that was the launch of Healthcare.gov? The Government Accountability Office has looked into the matter and the agency recently told Congress that, indeed, there was a fiasco. Peter Suderman reports some of the details of the GAO’s testimony:
But don’t think all the problems are in the past:
To Do: Figure Out What Now for ObamaCare
• Assess how the legal challenges to ObamaCare’s subsidies and mandates will unfold now that two federal courts have issued contrary rulings. The Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and Case Western Reserve University’s Jonathan Adler—the guys who noticed that ObamaCare doesn’t allow subsidies in
federal exchanges—will discuss the Halbig and King decisions. The discussion will begin at noon on August 12 in Room B-354 of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C.
• Experience one young man’s harrowing journey to secure his life and liberty in a repressive future society. The Heritage Foundation will host a private advance screening of The Giver, starring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep, at 7:00 p.m. on August 12. To attend, RSVP to enoren@crcpublicrelations.com.
• Shoot guns, eat BBQ, and smoke cigars. The second annual Northwest Freedom Shootout is a fun afternoon event where you’ll meet other fans of the Second Amendment. The Shootout will begin at noon on August 16, at the Evergreen Sportsmen’s Club in Littlerock, Wash.
• Make your own declaration for Think Freely Media’s Great Communicators Tournament. Shoot a video in which you describe a policy issue using moral arguments to support a free enterprise or limited government. Submit it by August 15. The prize for first place is $10,000!
• Get an update on the right-to-work movement. The Heritage Foundation will host a panel featuring two teachers and a home healthcare provider grappling with union power in California, Michigan, and Minnesota. The event will begin at noon on August 12.
• Save the dates: Americans for Prosperity’s 8th Annual Defending the American Dream Summit will take place on August 29 at the Omni Dallas Hotel. The Mont Pelerin Society will meet August 31 at the Kowloon Shangri-La Hong Kong Hotel to discuss the future prospects for liberal reform in Asia.