That’s what this NY Times reviewer calls Waiting for Superman, the much-anticipated documentary on the failure of the U.S. public school system. Here are the John Heilemann/New York Magazine, the Lloyd Grove/Daily Beast and John Nolte/Big Hollywood reviews (h/t Craig Newmark).
Watch and think about this one, folks. It’s for our children and grandchildren.
Who needs enemies? That’s what Nola.com’s James Gill is asking after sitting through U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Porteous, Jr.’s impeachment trial last week (previous post here). Several of the judge’s friends testified for the defense about how they would slip him some money on the side:
Several of those friends were in the habit of slipping Porteous money, and Turley decided to put one of them, Don Gardner, on the stand. That was asking for trouble too, and Gardner promptly provided it by admitting that a federal litigant, alarmed to discover that the other side had retained some friends of Porteous, paid him $100,000 as a counterbalance.
Gardner conceded that he was recruited for the case, although he lacked any relevant expertise, as "a pretty face, someone who knew the judge." He added that he could have pocketed an extra $100,000 by persuading Porteous to recuse himself, but made no attempt to do so, not wanting to be a "whore."
Senators probably did not agree that Gardner’s virtue was intact.
Which reminded me of one of the following joke about a crooked judge:
Taking his seat in his chambers, the judge faced the opposing lawyers.
"So," said the judge. "Each of you has presented me with a bribe."
Both lawyers squirmed uncomfortably.
"You, attorney Mohanty, gave me $50,000," observed the judge. "And you, attorney Venkat, gave me $60,000."
The judge reached into his pocket, pulled out $10,000, and handed it to attorney Venkat.
"Now that I’ve returned $10,000 to attorney Venkat," exclaimed the judge proudly, "I’m going to decide this case solely on its merits!"
Who had the worst week in Washington? According to WaPo, former President Jimmy Carter.
Special business interests commonly use governmental power to stifle competition. Nevertheless, you really couldn’t make this example up (H/T Jeff Miron):
The folks who deliver beer and other beverages to liquor stores have joined the fight against legalizing marijuana in California.
On Sept. 7, the California Beer & Beverage Distributors gave $10,000 to a committee opposing Proposition 19, the measure that would change state law to legalize pot and allow it to be taxed and regulated. [. . .]
“Unless the beer distributors in California have suddenly developed a philosophical opposition to the use of intoxicating substances, the motivation behind this contribution is clear,” Steve Fox, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project, said in statement.
“Plain and simple, the alcohol industry is trying to kill the competition. Their mission is to drive people to drink.”
Amazingly, the alcoholic beverage distributors don’t realize that one of the unintended consequences of the misguided drug prohibition policy is that illegal drugs are often much less expensive than legal alcoholic beverages.
Clear Thinkers favorite Peter Gordon is a very astute fellow:
David Brooks wrote about The Genteel Nation and “gentility shift” last Friday. He was addressing long-term labor market problems that have nothing to do with aggregate demand or any lack of “stimulus,” but rather with the tastes of young people making career choices. He cited the example of Michelle Obama, telling an audience of young women, “Don’t go into corporate America … become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse … Make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry.”
It’s an old theme and many people think of the choices before them as between being self-serving and "helping people". I am not sure what sacrifices the First Lady has had to make in her personal life in order to get on the high road, but given a platform, we hold forth — and also tell ourselves all sorts of stories about ourselves. There is always the lovely conceit that some of us are all about "helping people" and, thereby, so much better than the rest.
Labor markets provide their own signals (in terms of compensation packages as well as employment and unemployment prospects), but the problem with rhetoric such as the First Lady’s in the Brooks cite is that it nourishes the idea that we see repeated on so often that our own pay is “unfair” in light of the job’s assumed social worth.
Many public sector unions have managed to extract promises from their politician employers that these employers cannot keep. There is naturally unhappiness and resentment, but not at the employers. Rather, at the “stingy” taxpayers who just don’t get it: those who have chosen to “help people” simply “deserve” more.
Labor markets signal facts of life that challenge the “gentility” view of the world. But the gentility view fortifies the idea that market signals are "unfair" and further politicization is the way. This is the way we get street demonstrations such as the ones we saw in Paris last week. We’ll always have the barricades.
This dynamic is the other side of the coin from what leads us to ostracize famous people such as Ken Lay, Tiger Woods and Roger Clemens. We try in any way to avoid confronting our innate vulnerability, so we use myths to distract us. We rationalize that a wealthy and powerful person did bad things that we would never do if placed in the same position even though we really have no idea how we would react to such incentives. As a result, we scorn and ridicule the rich and powerful as we attempt to purge collectively that which is too shameful for us to confront individually.
Be wary of those who justify their world view on the supposed moral superiority of their cause versus how markets would reward that effort. As Gordon notes, this view assumes that market signals are unfair and that political corrections are the answer. The mob is never wrong in the moment of its action.
On one hand, the vested interests in America’s unending War on Drugs continue to rationalize the enormous cost of drug prohibition by suggesting that the alternative is worse:
Every past administrator of the 37-year-old Drug Enforcement Administration is calling on the Justice Department to sue California if its voters decide to legalize marijuana in November.
Peter Bensinger, who ran the D.E.A. from January 1976 to July 1981, said legalizing the recreational use of pot, even in one state, would be a “disaster,” leading to increased addiction, traffic accidents and trouble in the workplace.
Meanwhile, the WSJ’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes about the wages of the War on Drugs just across the Texas border near El Paso:
Ju√°rez is dying. Since the beginning of this year, more than 2,200 people in the city have been murdered. Since 2008, the toll is almost 6,500. On a per capita basis this would be equivalent to some 26,000 murders in New York City. Drug warriors play down these numbers by claiming that some 85% of the dead were themselves involved in trafficking. But that claim is dubious since in many of the murders-more than 90% of cases this year-there hasn’t even been an arrest. And what about the hundreds of innocents, the other 15% of the victims, that the government admits were not criminals? [. . .]
In the 40 years since Richard Nixon declared war on drug suppliers abroad-because American consumers had consistently demonstrated that they had no interest in curtailing demand-illicit drug use in rich countries has remained fairly constant. Only preferences have shifted.
A report released in June by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that “drug use has stabilized in the developed world.” Cocaine use in the U.S. has dropped in recent decades, but there is “growing abuse of amphetamine-type stimulants and prescription drugs around the world.” The report also said that “cannabis is still the world’s drug of choice.” In other words, billions of dollars in warring has left us about where we started, except, according to the report, that the indoor cultivation of cannabis is now a major source of funding for criminal gangs.
As I’ve noted many times, America’s War on Drugs is lost and it is long past time that we require our leaders to acknowledge that and end it.
Even if legalization would increase drug abuse and addition (not clear, but certainly possible), at least such a policy would allow the abusers to harm themselves rather than impose substantial risk of harm on innocent citizens.
The War on Drugs is dangerously close to becoming a war on us.
No, really. Get a load of this:
The unexpectedly deep plunge in home sales this summer is likely to force the Obama administration to choose between future homeowners and current ones, a predicament officials had been eager to avoid.
Over the last 18 months, the administration has rolled out just about every program it could think of to prop up the ailing housing market, using tax credits, mortgage modification programs, low interest rates, government-backed loans and other assistance intended to keep values up and delinquent borrowers out of foreclosure. The goal was to stabilize the market until a resurgent economy created new households that demanded places to live.
As the economy again sputters and potential buyers flee – July housing sales sank 26 percent from July 2009 – there is a growing sense of exhaustion with government intervention. Some economists and analysts are now urging a dose of shock therapy that would greatly shift the benefits to future homeowners: Let the housing market crash.
When prices are lower, these experts argue, buyers will pour in, creating the elusive stability the government has spent billions upon billions trying to achieve.
As regular readers of this blog know, the notion that housing markets need to allocate risk of loss before those markets can stabilize and recover is not rocket science.
In fact, the government’s dithering over the past two years in propping up these inflated housing markets has actually made the situation worse because it has postponed the transfer of misallocated resources in the housing markets to other markets.
Another day, another failed bailout. So it goes.
Clear Thinkers favorite Arnold Kling has had some insightful thoughts lately (see also here) about the economics of retirement lately:
[Megan McArdle’s] main point is that if you live about 90 years and spend the last 30 of them not working, it is hard to maintain your standard of living no matter who pays for it. There is a lot of optimism about stock market returns built into state pension funds, individual retirement plans, and–I would say–even Social Security and Medicare. My argument is that without strong stock market returns, general tax revenues are not going to be robust, and Social Security and Medicare will go broke really soon without robust general tax revenues. [. . .]
For any given level of output, more consumption by one group (say, people over 65) is going to reduce what can be consumed by everyone else. As the ratio of people over 65 to everyone else goes up, this increases the ratio of state-confiscated income to total income required to keep Social Security and Medicare going. [To some] this higher confiscation rate represents a kinder and gentler society. But it may not feel kind and gentle to those who earn incomes and have them confiscated.
Kling’s thoughts resonate when reading this WSJ article on teacher’s pensions:
When it comes to shaking up the status quo, however, the most potent education reform may be the one that’s too often considered a side issue: pension reform.
That’s right, pension reform. Over the past 25 years, the private sector has moved from having four of five workers in a defined-benefit pension to having just one of five workers in such a plan. Mostly this means a shift to 401(k)s and the like, where payouts are related to what employees pay in.
Like most government employees, teachers have not made this shift. Their unions fight bitterly to retain the defined benefit plans underwritten by taxpayers. While these plans allow some lucky folks to retire in their 50s with a generous payout, they also feature perverse incentives that punish the young (more on this below) and encourage people to hang on for dear life even when they’d much rather leave. [. . .]
"A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career," said [Governor Chris Christie]. "What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health-care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it ‘fair’ for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?"
The article goes on to point out that the unintended consequence of these subsidized pensions is that – similar to the dynamic of employer-based health care policies – employees lose the incentive to pursue different and potentially more fulfilling careers because of fear that they will lose their non-portable benefits if they change jobs.
Does it really make sense to reward employees who simply wait out the system for the pot at the end of the rainbow that the rest of us cannot afford to provide?
Regular readers know that I’m not a big fan of Treasury Secretary Geithner.
But after poorly-conceived governmental programs subsidizing mortgage loans played a not insubstantial part in the worst financial crisis in a generation, this recent NY Times article left me speechless for a few days:
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, speaking Tuesday at a conference to discuss the possibilities [of reforming the government’s role in housing finance], made clear that the administration was not pondering such radical kinds of surgery as it develops a proposal it hopes to unveil in January.
Rather, Mr. Geithner and the conference after his remarks focused largely on drafting a new and improved version of the current system, in which the government subsidizes mortgage loans made by private companies.
Mr. Geithner said continued government support was important to make sure that Americans can borrow at reasonable interest rates to buy a house even in a downturn. The absence of such support, Mr. Geithner said, would deepen future recessions because unsubsidized private companies would curtail lending.
I mean really. After what we’ve been through, why on earth should the government be involved in mortgage markets in any respect?
Government intervention in mortgage markets is simply a thinly-disguised redistribution of income. But even if you think government should be doing such things, creating moral hazard in mortgage markets is a very costly way to accomplish that goal.
Stated simply, the social benefits of home ownership result from homeowners building equity in their homes through saving and enhancing neighborhoods. Those social benefits are not generated from homeowners who borrow excessively to speculate on housing in which they have no equity.
As with proponents of publicly-financed sports stadiums, proponents of such redistribution policies should simply make their case that redistribution is sound public policy and not disguise it in expensive mortgage subsidies. They don’t because of fear that voters would reject such a redistribution policy if they came to understand the true cost of these subsidies.
Truth in advertising in politics is rare, indeed.