Education: California Cuts Weigh Heavily on Its Colleges

The compromise to close the state's huge budget gap included cuts to state agencies of all kinds, but none were as deep as those to the state's public colleges and universities. The state's two systems were each cut by $650 million, and they each could lose $100 million more if the state's optimistic revenue expectations do not materialize. For both systems, the $650 million is roughly a 20% cut of operating money from the state.

[Emphasis added].

For more, see California Cuts Weigh Heavily on Its Colleges by Jennifer Medina, July 8, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

California: Huge Cuts for Court

The San Francisco Superior Court announced Monday that it was laying off more than 40% of its staff and shuttering 25 courtrooms because of budget cuts. Presiding Judge Katherine Feinstein said the actions were necessary to close a $13.75 million budget deficit caused by state budget cuts. The civil justice system in San Francisco is collapsing, Judge Feinstein said.

From California: Huge Cuts for Court by The Associated Press, July 18, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Race: Does the Minimum Wage Help or Hurt Blacks?

... Walter Williams of George Mason University. Williams, who is black, says "there's a huge segment of the black population for whom upward mobility is elusive, and it's because of the welfare state -- because of government."

Williams elaborates in a new book, "Race and Economics." A chief culprit, he insists, is the minimum wage. "Let's not look at the intentions behind minimum wage," he said. "We have to ask, what are the effects? Put yourself in the place of an employer who must pay $7.25 no matter whom you hire. Will that employer hire a person who can only add $3 or $4 of value per hour?"

He will not. And so fewer young people get hired and "get their feet on the bottom rung of the economic ladder." This hurts all young people, but black teens most, he says, because "many of them get a fraudulent education in the public school system. So a law that discriminates against low-skill people has a doubly negative effect on black teenagers. The unemployment rate among black teens today is unprecedented in U.S. history. In the '40s, black teenage unemployment was less than white teenage unemployment."

And yet a Pew survey says 83% of Americans support raising the minimum wage.

"People have the misguided notion that the minimum wage is an anti-poverty tool."

Economists understand the truth. A survey of the American Economic Association found that 90% of economists say the minimum wage increases unemployment.

For more, see Is Government Aid Helping or Hurting Blacks? by John Stossel, June 2, 2011 at Fox News.

Policy: War on Drugs Worse than Drugs

Many people fear that if drugs were legal, there would be much more use and abuse. That's possible, but there is little evidence to support that assumption. In the Netherlands, marijuana has been legal for years. Yet the Dutch are actually less likely to smoke than Americans. Thirty-eight percent of American adolescents have smoked pot, while only 20 percent of Dutch teens have. One Dutch official told me that "we've succeeded in making pot boring."

By contrast, what good has the drug war done? It's been 40 years since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. Since then, government has spent billions and officials keep announcing their "successes." They are always holding press conferences showing off big drug busts. So it's not like authorities aren't trying.

We've locked up 2.3 million people, a higher percentage than any other country. That allows China to criticize America's human-rights record because our prisons are "packed with inmates."

Yet drugs are still everywhere. The war on drugs wrecks far more lives than drugs do!

Need more proof? Fox News runs stories about Mexican cocaine cartels and marijuana gangs that smuggle drugs into Arizona. Few stop to think that legalization would end the violence. There are no Corona beer smugglers. Beer sellers don't smuggle. They simply ship their product. Drug laws cause drug crime.

From John Stossel: War on Drugs Worse than Drugs by John Stossel, June 22, 2010, at unionleader.com.

Government: A Tea Party Without Nuts

The radical center is “radical” in its desire for a radical departure from politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice; guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract more job-creators to America’s shores; increasing corporate tax credits for research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers, principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear, while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition.

See A Tea Party Without Nuts by Thomas L. Friedman, March 23, 2010.

Mind: Everybody Have Fun

It’s not just hitting the jackpot that fails to lift spirits; a whole range of activities that people tend to think will make them happy—getting a raise, moving to California, having kids—do not, it turns out, have that effect. (Studies have shown that women find caring for their children less pleasurable than napping or jogging and only slightly more satisfying than doing the dishes.) As the happiness researchers Tim Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have put it, “People routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events will bring.”

Over the past three and a half decades, real per-capita income in the United States has risen from just over seventeen thousand dollars to almost twenty-seven thousand dollars. During that same period, the average new home in the U.S. grew in size by almost fifty per cent; the number of cars in the country increased by more than a hundred and twenty million; the proportion of families owning personal computers rose from zero to seventy per cent; and so on. Yet, since the early seventies, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as either “very happy” or “pretty happy” has remained virtually unchanged.

If “rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier over the last fifty years,” he writes, “what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our Gross Domestic Product?”

After scratching growth and income redistribution off his list, Bok goes on to discuss measures that, the evidence suggests, would increase aggregate happiness [job loss, chronic pain, depression, ...].

Two years ago, the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, appointed a commission to look into ways to improve the measurement of government performance. When the commission, headed by Amartya Sen and another Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, issued its final report, last fall, it was critical of the current reliance on G.D.P., which, it argued, is a poor proxy for social progress: “For example, traffic jams may increase G.D.P. as a result of the increased use of gasoline, but obviously not the quality of life.”

See Everybody Have Fun by Elizabeth Kolbert, March 22, 2010.

Healthcare: Healthcare Costs Around the World

For the rest, see Healthcare Costs Around the World, March 1, 2010.

Government: The Public Online Information Act

Good idea or great idea?

The Public Online Information Act (POIA) is legislation, introduced by Rep. Steve Israel, that embraces a new formula for transparency: public equals online. No longer will antiquated government disclosure practices bury public information in out-of-the-way offices and in outmoded formats.

POIA requires Executive Branch agencies to publish all publicly available information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats. It also creates an advisory committee to help develop government-wide Internet publication policies.

See The Public Online Information Act by Sunlight Foundation, March, 2010.

Economics: Consumer Protection Agency

There’s no question that consumers need much better protection. The late Edward Gramlich — a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to get Alan Greenspan to act against predatory lending — summarized the case perfectly back in 2007: “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.”

See Financial Reform Endgame by Paul Krugman, February 28, 2010.

Healthcare: Afflicting the Afflicted

Look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House G.O.P. plan. That analysis is discreetly worded, with the budget office declaring somewhat obscurely that while the number of uninsured Americans wouldn’t change much, “the pool of people without health insurance would end up being less healthy, on average, than under current law.” But here’s the translation: While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is now.

See Afflicting the Afflicted by Paul Krugman, February 25, 2010.

Climate: We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change

About flaws in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report ...

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

See We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change by Al Gore, February 27, 2010.

Healthcare: Remembering the 1993 Republican Bill

The proposal President Barack Obama unveiled on Monday is based largely on the bill passed by the Democratic Senate on Dec. 24, 2009 .... It has some similarities to a GOP proposal sponsored by Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., during the Clinton presidency.

This chart compares those two bills with the Nov. 3, 2009 proposal from House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio....

See Chart: Comparing Health Reform Bills: Democrats and Republicans 2009, Republicans 1993 by Maggie Mertens, Feb 24, 2010. Thank you, Obama Health Proposal = 1993 Republican Proposal by Ed Brayton, March 1, 2010.

Climate: Can we trust the IPCC on the big stuff?

About flaws in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report ...

We focus on three key topics: the impact of climate change on water supplies, food, and biodiversity. The investigation reveals that the IPCC's broad conclusions were sound. Indeed, the stringent rules of the IPCC means the report sometimes understated the potential impacts of climate change - on biodiversity, for instance.

But our findings suggest there may have been problems with the way its conclusions were presented. It was too easy for some numbers mentioned in passing in academic papers to find their way into public presentations of IPCC reports without sufficiently rigorous assessment.

See Can we trust the IPCC on the big stuff? by Fred Pearce, February 24, 2010.

Healthcare: Why Health Insurance Is Increasing 39%

Paul Krugman explains why some individual health insurance policies in California are rising 39% this year in California Death Spiral, February 18, 2010.

Security: The Underwear Bomber And The Attorney General

Holder, despite the controversy he has inspired, has not actually pushed for radical change. Indeed, critics in left-leaning legal circles have complained that he has kept too many of George W. Bush's counterterrorism policies in place. For example, Holder's Justice Department has continued blocking lawsuits by people who were subjected to extraordinary rendition--the practice of sending suspected terrorists captured abroad to countries known for administering torture--on the ground that such litigation would expose state secrets. Even some former members of the Bush Administration see more continuity than change. Bradford Berenson, who served as a White House lawyer when the Bush Administration was forging its controversial legal approach to terrorism, told me that from the perspective of a hawkish Bush national-security person the glass is eighty-five per cent full in terms of continuity.

For all the tough rhetoric of the Bush Administration, it prosecuted many more terror suspects as criminals than as enemy combatants. According to statistics compiled by New York University's Center on Law and Security, since 2001 the criminal courts have convicted some hundred and fifty suspects on terrorism charges. Only three detainees--all of whom were apprehended abroad--were convicted in military commissions at Guantánamo.

See The Trial: Eric Holder and the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by Jane Mayer, February 15, 2010.

Mind: Our Politics May Be All in Our Head

Researchers have found ... that some humans are particularly alert to threats, particularly primed to feel vulnerable and perceive danger. Those people are more likely to be conservatives.

One experiment used electrodes to measure the startle blink reflex, the way we flinch and blink when startled by a possible danger. A flash of noise was unexpectedly broadcast into the research subjects’ earphones, and the response was measured.

The researchers ... found that those who had a stronger blink reflex at the noise were more likely to take such conservative positions as favoring gun rights, supporting warrantless searches, and opposing foreign aid.

Scholars also measured changes in the electrical conductance of research subjects’ skin, after they were shown images meant to trigger disgust — like a person eating a mouthful of worms....

Liberals released only slightly more moisture in reaction to disgusting images than to photos of fruit. But conservatives’ glands went into overdrive.

[There is] a remarkably strong correlation between state attitudes toward spanking children and voting patterns. Essentially, spanking states go Republican, while those with more timeouts go Democratic.

Professors Hetherington and Weiler contend that the differences stem from profound differences in cognitive styles. Spankers tend to see the world in stark, black-and-white terms, perceive the social order as vulnerable or under attack, tend to make strong distinctions between “us” and “them,” and emphasize order and muscular responses to threats. Parents favoring timeouts feel more comfortable with ambiguities, sense less threat, embrace minority groups — and are less prone to disgust when they see a man eating worms.

See Our Politics May Be All in Our Head by Nicholas D. Kristof, February 14, 2010.

Education: In Utah, a plan to cut 12th grade

A new idea to cut costs ...

The proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars would chip away at Utah's $700-million shortfall. He's since offered a toned-down version: Just make senior year optional.

The notion quickly gained some traction among supporters who agreed with the Republican's assessment that many seniors frittered away their final year of high school, but faced vehement opposition from other quarters, including in his hometown of West Jordan.

Buttars has since toned down the idea, suggesting instead that senior year become optional for students who complete their required credits early. He estimated the move could save up to $60 million, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

See In Utah, a plan to cut 12th grade, February 15, 2010.

Economics: The Federal Budget

Income taxes don't even cover discretionary spending!

Discretionary spending in fiscal year 2009 was $1,219 billion, of which $782 billion is for "security" while income taxes were "only" $1,053 billion, of which $915 billion come from individuals. Mandatory programs such as medicare cost $2,112 billion and interest is $187 billion.

See table S-3 of Summary Tables in The President'S Budget for Fiscal Year 2011 by The Office of Management and Budget, February 2, 2010.

Healthcare: The six Republican ideas already in the health-care reform bill

See The six Republican ideas already in the health-care reform bill by Ezra Klein, February 8, 2010.

Economics: Dick Morris: Doubled Deficit

The claim that Obama almost doubled Bush's deficit is explained in Behind Obama's Phony Deficit Numbers, February 1, 2010.