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February 2009
Imitate FDR? That could be a grave error
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For a Southern boy who walked into every living room expecting to see a picture of Jesus and FDR, it is a shocker. Heresy, really, disrespect to the unquestioned faith of my Depression-era Georgia ancestors that FDR had saved us from economic ruin.
Comes now economic historian Burton Folsom Jr., a part-time Atlanta resident, professor at Hillsdale College in Michigan, an institution beloved by conservatives for offering a superior education while refusing to take federal money or other taxpayer subsidies for any of its operations, to suggest that my Southern ancestors were… uh, how to put this delicately? Were, on the subject of FDR, a generous and charitable people who saw President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a most favorable light. They were wrong, utterly and completely wrong, by the economic analysis of Professor Folsom, author of “New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.”
Rather than salvaging prosperity, FDR’s policies damaged the economy and prolonged the Depression, Folsom argued last week in an appearance before the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, an influential Atlanta-based think tank.
FDR’s approach — tax, regulate and spend — is Barack Obama’s. Folsom thinks FDR took an economic downturn that could have been short-lived and prolonged it into World War II. Obama, because his party is first acting on their frustrations at having a social agenda held in check for eight years, and their ambition to punish the rich and expand the regulatory state, will deepen and prolong the current recession. They may well do permanent harm.
“In the Panic of 1893, U.S. unemployment briefly hit what was then the all-time high of 18.4 percent,but the panic was over in a little more than five years,” writes Folsom. “In the mini-recession of 1921, unemployment reached 11.7 percent, but hard times lasted less than two years.” In both, Presidents Cleveland and Harding “cut federal expenses and Harding cut the income tax rate as well.
“Soon investments in business became attractive again, capital slowly flowed back into the American economy, and it bounced back.” Herbert Hoover increased federal spending, imposed excise taxes and hiked the top income rate to 63 percent. Roosevelt promised to cut spending and taxes and to reduce the job-killing and economically destructive Smoot-Hawley tariffs that protected the few at the expense of all consumers.
Hoover, in signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and in spending wastefully, invited disaster. FDR enshrined it. Two examples go to the programs that shaped the memories of my ancestors. One is the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) passed in 1933 that set up a complex regulatory scheme for fixing prices and production on farm products. The nation is, to this day, almost four generations later, unable to shake the excesses and miscalculations wrought by the effort. It’s why we still get what George W. Bush last year called “a massive, bloated farm bill that would do little to solve the problem” of high food prices, while transferring $300 billion to a favored few.
A great-uncle whose name I share was part of the WPA crew that started Fontana Dam in North Carolina. While some individuals were undoubtedly helped and useful projects were completed, some historians argue that the WPA may have worsened unemployment by keeping workers from pursuing private-sector jobs.
Folsom notes that the Tennessee Valley Authority public works effort, the biggest of the New Deal projects, transferred wealth from 98 percent of the population for the benefit of 2 percent and, furthermore, he points out that Tennessee lagged behind nearby states for 50 years in economic development. He quotes William Chandler, author of “The Myth of TVA,” in writing that “Among the nine states in the southeast United States, there has been essentially an inverse relationship between income per capita and the extent to which the state was served by the TVA.”
Why? Subsidized power, Chandler concluded, caused people to delay moves that could have brought them greater prosperity. The lesson is that everything government spends or regulates buys behaviors, good or bad. The massive spending, regulation and taxing imposed in an effort to buy a permanent liberal majority, and the constant overreaching necessary to control the free market response, point to a long, deep economic downturn.
This is a bunch fully capable of throwing this country into depression.
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DeKalb drama, the best for free
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
DeKalb. More drama. Where do they find these fellows, like fired DeKalb police Chief Terrell Bolton, who seems to think himself entitled to a public job? Oh. In Dallas, where he’d been fired. There’s no good reason to have department heads protected by a merit system. Police chiefs shouldn’t punch a clock, keep tabs of comp time or serve a day longer than the elected boss wants.
• “If I’m standing before the bar [of justice] with my life in the balance I want the most extensive defense I can get,” explains Georgia Senate Minority Leader Robert Brown (D-Macon). This is where liberalism has wandered: An expectation of entitlement to “the most extensive defense I can get” at the public’s expense. No need ever to work a day. From cradle to grave, the best of everything, at no cost.
I’ve always marveled at the world-class people small towns produce. Case in point is Michael Guido, seen on 100 television stations and whose voice and simple stories of faith were heard on 435 radio stations and read in 1,500 newspapers. He died this week in Metter at the age of 94. The evangelist, originally from Ohio, married a Metter woman and decided on the broadcast ministry in 1957 while Audrey, his wife of 66 years, recovered from an auto accident at an Atlanta hospital and he couldn’t find good religious programming on the radio dial.
Let D.C. have voting representation in Congress. Give it back to Maryland. Otherwise, no.
Georgia Legislature take note: The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld an Idaho law prohibiting local governments from using payroll deductions to collect dues that are to be used for political activities. Anticipate troubles and act before they come.
Barack Obama is the pleasant face and soothing voice the hard left has long needed. Believe it when he declares an intent to implement government-managed universal health care. And local schools? Consider them federalized. Get in a little, as the feds did decades ago with impact grants to local systems with a heavy burden caused by military and federal civilian employment, and sooner or later the central government will dominate. Under Obama, that’ll be sooner.
The trillion-dollar “stimulus” and the $410 billion spending bill that follows profess to lift up the poor. But not from failing schools. Language in the omnibus spending bill would end the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program which allows school choice to 1,700 poor children in D.C. The education workplace unions, like the Georgia Association of Educators, which is vehemently opposing Senate Bill 90 here, are terrified by the prospect of giving parents choice. SB90 would allow parents to take about $5,000 of the money allocated to their child’s education and use it to buy services in the private sector, or from other public schools or districts willing to take them. Lose in D.C., win in Georgia.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke suggests that the recession might end this year. Why might it? Just ‘cause it might. My confidence is now buoyed.
There’s no reason at all for members of the Public Service Commission to represent districts. The Legislature should deep-six that requirement, as Commissioners Doug Everett and Lauren McDonald propose. Partisan politics was the motive behind the requirement.
If ethics watchdog-gadfly-nuisance George Anderson can file complaints that aggravated politicians think are harassment, he should be equally free to level them against judges. Fulton Superior Court Judge T. Jackson Bedford is threatening to file an “abusive litigation” lawsuit. Anderson thinks Bedford has a conflict in ordering people with cellphones that ring in court to make a contribution to certain charitable organizations, one of which is run by Bedford’s family.
Urban scene: Panhandler, about 35 with no visible physical limitations, approaches passersby outside restaurant. One, obviously a young Georgia State student, hands the panhandler his take-out. When he’s out of sight, panhandler glances inside and drops the meal in the trash. Minutes later, I leave the restaurant. Panhandler approaches. “Could you buy me some soup, please.” Now all’s clear. The student offered no cash — or soup.
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Why work?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Obviously convinced to strike quickly while the opposition’s still dazed, and while the country’s distracted by the bummer economy, President Barack Obama unveils his first budget today.
HillaryCare never went away. Democrats chipped away, narrowing the number of people outside the system of taxpayer-provided health care, and now Obama proposes to close the loop with a budget requesting $634 billion over 10 years as payment towards single-payer universal health care. The yearly cost of health care in this country is $2.4 trillion and rising.
We are racing toward the day where citizenship becomes an entitlement to an income, medical care, lawyers if needed, retirement care — and no real need to work. The differences, in fact, between working and not working, saving and not saving, being responsible and irresponsible, and practicing thrift or funding immediate gratification of every want and whim, are quickly being eroded.
Part of Obama’s budget request, too, is a tax increase on those who earn in excess of $250,000, with proposed income tax rates of 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent. That is just the beginning, of course. Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi cannot possibly finance their programs, much less reduce the deficit by the end of Obama’s first term, on the taxes now being collected.
The day will come when entrepreneurship in America is directed toward moving and hiding income and assets, where enterprise is capped at $249,000 yearly, and where industrial production is shipped overseas, forcing Obama-Reid-Pelosi Democrats to find yet more creative ways to control economic activity. Once industry flees Obama taxes and regulations, that’ll mean liberals have to resort to trade barriers and import restrictions to punish them — or else to force them to pay American wage rates on production abroad and to abide by U.S. environmental and labor law.
Oh, my. America is on the wrong road home.
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On the road to socialism
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You have to hand it to Barack Obama and to the Democrats who run Congress.
They do have a vision and in short order will have placed this nation so firmly on the road to European-style socialism that three decades of occasional efforts by conservatives to check the power of the central government will be wiped away.
Universal health care provided at taxpayer expense? It’s coming. Heavy regulation of business and commerce? It’s coming. Every kooky idea the left ever wanted to impose on American industry (cap-and-trade) is coming.
Outlining his vision before a joint session of Congress, President Obama could have been the clueless campus radical of the 60s promising revolution without any idea of how a free-market economy works. Somebody — the rich 2 percent of tax filers making more than $250,000 — will pay for it and everybody else will get free pizzas, fine rides and complete relief from worry. He was purposefully vague about how the nation will afford the left’s vision while cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Oh, but no worry. He’s “already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”
As Georgia’s former Gov. Marvin Griffin used to say: “Everybody who believes that pick up a bale of cotton and follow me.” It’s a pipe dream, on the order of the promised “savings” that come down the road when advocacy groups are clamoring for substantial sums to be “invested” in some program they’re pushing — smoking cessation campaigns, for example.
Obama Democrats are pursuing agendas that will wreck the American economy and drive offshore the manufacturing that’s not owned or subsidized by taxpayers. In the Republican response, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal pointed out the obvious: Irresponsible expansion of government will “increase our taxes down the line and saddle future generations with debt.”
The left was frustrated for eight years, angry that a war on terrorism had side-tracked their ambitions. That pent-up frustration now erupts and before there’s another election that’ll check their power, they’ll get HillaryCare, cap-and-trade and everything else on their agenda. Then they’ll turn their sights, as President Obama declared last night, to public education.
Rest assured, what they can do for the economy and for individual initiative, they can do too for local schools.
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Leave money in Washington? It’s right road to take
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This could be the moment when the Republicans who run Georgia answer the question: What difference does it make?
What difference does it make whether one party or the other runs Georgia?
What they say and do today in response to the $787 billion spend-a-thon that’s been disguised as “economic stimulus” will tell us a great deal about the horse flesh in the 2010 race for governor and lieutenant governor.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, bless his disciplined soul, took a risk Sunday in declaring that Georgia is prepared to leave stimulus money in Washington. It’s the right thing to do.
Faced with an atrocious spending bill masquerading as something it’s not, every single Republican in the U.S. House of Representative opted for a principled course. They voted no. Same in the U.S. Senate, but for the Mainers Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and for Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
In the face of every pressure to push money out the door quickly to save Main Street, Republicans balked. It was a single vote that began the process of reaffirming principle in the drive to reclaim the White House in 2012.
A few Republican governors, including Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, one or both of whom should be on the GOP ticket in 2012, have begun to balk at taking borrowed money, temporarily given, as incentive to expand social programs.
Jindal, speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” noted that the “stimulus” merely delays the necessity for states to align spending and revenues.
“Why would you turn down $100 million for federal unemployment assistance for your state?” he was asked.
“The $100 million we turned down was temporary federal dollars that would require us to change our unemployment laws,” Jindal replied. “That would’ve actually raised taxes on Louisiana businesses. We as a state would’ve been responsible for paying those benefits after the federal money disappeared.”
Taking the money would have resulted in a permanent obligation, he said. “It would be like spending $1 to get a dime. Why would we take temporary federal dollars if we’re going to end up having a permanent program?”
Jindal’s position should be Georgia’s — for this governor and the next. Perdue, in fact, expressed similar sentiments Sunday. “We’re going to be doing due diligence on each one of these components and deciding what’s in the best long-term interest of Georgians,” he said.
Interest groups are lined up six deep to persuade legislators to take the money and worry about the consequences later. “The Medicaid program has been underfunded for years, and this is a good opportunity to make the system what it should be,” Georgia Hospital Association vice president Kevin Bloye told the AJC’s James Salzer last week. The “stimulus” allocates an immediate $340 million more to Georgia starting Wednesday with a higher reimbursement rate and an invitation to expand caseloads. After two years, the added money goes away.
Georgia’s strategy should be to take the money that is consistent with what state officials intended to do anyway. Spending on roads and bridges, for example, is an easy take. The state has far more in transportation needs than it has money to build. Sure the money’s borrowed — or printed — but the state would be levying the taxes anyway. Take that money.
If the money is programmed to go away, it should stay away.
This is a time that requires real discipline. It requires discipline because turning down money is difficult, something Nancy Pelosi-Democrats knew in larding up the “stimulus” bill with incentives to expand existing programs. Even a stout fiscal conservative like State Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) has said both that it’s a “bogus loan program” but that “it would be ridiculous not to spend the money if they send it to us.”
Democrats will hammer those who decline “free” money. Republicans running for governor in 2010 will be forced repeatedly to explain why they let money stay in Washington.
And yet, it’s the right thing to do. It’s the principled, politically courageous thing to do. A politician who won’t say no now lacks the backbone to be governor or lieutenant governor.
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President (Bush’s Fault) Obama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President Barack Obama, determined not to be thought responsible for anything having to do with the economy, has attracted the two-fer advice of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, who urges the President to ease-up on the gloom. Be positive, Clinton urged. Not happy-talk, but positive.
It’s true that Obama and his pals can make you want to stuff the butter-and-egg profits in the mattress. Bill Clinton is convinced that it’s all George Bush’s fault for not moving earlier to bail out those who weren’t paying their mortgages. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) sends the value of bank stocks to the toilet with speculation about the need to nationalize several of the larger banks.
Obama’s first speech to Congress as President comes up Tuesday night. It’ll be another occasion to remind the country that nothing’s his fault and that he and the Democrats who brought us the $787 spend-a-thon are the country’s economic saviors. Typical of that stimulus is an $8 billion allocation for high-speed rail. While the “stimulus” didn’t include earmarks, per se, the $8 billion is greater than either the House or Senate recommended.
Among the projects that are thought likely to get funded is an Anaheim, Calif. to Las Vegas line strongly supported by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or another project to connect Chicago and 11 metro areas within 400 miles of hometown of President Obama, his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and the home state of Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood. In any event, there’s little immediate “stimulus” to come out of it.
On Tuesday night, Obama is expected to remind Americans that he inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit and expects to reduce that in half by the end of his term, largely by reducing expenditures for the war in Iraq and by raising taxes on “the rich” while making government more efficient. Count on the first two.
In Tuesday’s address, he’ll explain how the stimulus works to put the economy back on sound footing.
Here’s the two-part game of the day. What can he say that will help you to believe that this administration and this Congress is doing anything more than advancing yesterday’s agenda? And is your prediction that the stock market rises or sinks on Wednesday?
Man the mattresses.
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Transportation issues should drive 2010 race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Education governors? Dime a dozen in Georgia.
Transportation governors?
By that you mean, of course, Mr. Jim Gillis, the former Treutlen County commissioner and state legislator who served as director of the state Highway Department from 1948 to 1955 and again from 1959 to 1970. His power to disburse roads and jobs, the currency of Georgia politics, made him a one-man State Transportation Plan.
That was not all bad. Since a state in the mud needed paved roads everywhere, and since power shifted around rural Georgia, the state got built-out with relatively little waste. It was, for a time, the alignment of need and power to build a first-class network of well-maintained roads across Georgia.
Governors have for decades sought the power that Jim Gillis had.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, with the cooperation of Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson, may be on the verge of succeeding. “We need to abandon the scattered approach that spreads resources too thin, and instead focus on projects that actually move the needle on congestion, job creation and take full advantage of the investments we have made in our ports, rail lines and airports,” Perdue says.
Their proposal would fold the State Road and Tollway Authority and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority into a new State Transportation Authority that would develop a state plan that would be approved by the General Assembly. The new proposal would effectively gut the state Department of Transportation’s board and diminish the department, while increasing a governor’s direct power. The changes Perdue, Cagle and Richardson are proposing wouldn’t have any real impact before Perdue’s term ends. While the proposal has not yet been introduced, it may not be an improvement over the present or past approach to solving transportation woes.
Admittedly it was a legislative majority that’s now history, but when the Legislature last intervened to pick projects two decades ago it was to set in law a requirement that Georgia build a 2,400-mile network of four-lane roads, called “developmental highways.” The cost was initially projected at $2.5 billion, a sum that later doubled. The 17 specifically named projects were intended to promote economic development.
No. 17 on that list was a never-built project called the Outer Perimeter, a loop about 20 miles beyond I-285 around Atlanta.
Whether the state intended to build the loop in whole or part, acting on the route was the state’s most urgent transportation need — urgent because rapid development in metro Atlanta was soon to make land expensive and sprouting subdivisions were to make four-lanes politically unpopular.
In fact, that’s what happened. One of the first decisions Perdue made, one he will someday regret, is that he gave in to neighborhood politics and abandoned the northern arc, which would have provided both congestion relief and economic development opportunities across North Georgia.
The point is that when the Legislature last wrote some version of a state transportation spending plan into law, it was parochial.
A draft list of priorities is contained in a bill that passed the House Transportation Committee Thursday. An accompanying resolution would raise the state sales tax by a penny, with the proceeds to be spent on transportation projects. It’s a wish list, with set priorities, that could not possibly be implemented with available or anticipated money. It conveys a lot of information and, really, nothing.
It’s not a statewide transportation plan that would tell us what new revenue buys — or which projects are to be tolled. The fear here is that metro Atlantans will get toll roads while their sales tax dollars go to projects that have not been subjected to honest cost-benefit analysis, based on actual, measured congestion relief, with all proposed projects competing against each other.
This is heresy nowadays, but the DOT has never been the real problem and isn’t now.
It’s that we’ve not had visionary leadership on transportation. Maybe that’s because governors couldn’t enforce their will. Maybe it’s because education reform had more appeal to voters. As long as governors throw money at education and rearrange the desks, they’re never in danger of failing. It’s different on transportation. Children may not know they’re getting a bad education, but the parents know when they’re stuck in traffic.
The top issue in the 2010 governor’s race should be transportation. What are we buying and what are we getting?
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Sunday booze buying, Ill. politics, wild pets
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Headline on a story about whether to sell beer, wine and liquor on Sunday: “Could booze boost state economy?” If that doesn’t, should we try prostitution? Or crack? “Boosting the economy” and “helping education” are the two bogus arguments most often employed to sell a vice. “Somebody else pays” works to sell tax hikes. Sunday sales? I don’t care in the least. I buy Monday to Saturday. I do hate, however, that lobbyists and not legislators decide what the people of Georgia “need.”
Love Illinois politics? It has an impeached governor. And a replacement Senator for President Barack Obama who conveniently remembers, when word leaks that the feds have it on tape, that indeed he did discuss fund-raising for the appointing governor with Rod Blagojevich’s brother, Robert. (And we should not be alarmed that the product of Southside Chicago politics intends to move the 2010 Census out of the Commerce Department and into the White House? “How many people are huddled in the dark?” ask the census-takers. “Oh, about 7,851.” “No, make that 78,510.”)
The North Dakota House recognizes human rights. A fertilized human egg has the legal rights of a human, the House declares. The bill moves now to the Senate. The male and female whose actions caused the birth of octuplets pulls me to the North Dakota House’s position.
I love living in a city (Smyrna) and county (Cobb) that’s governed without drama. Residents are said to be sick of it in DeKalb. Who can blame them? Public officials should be like body parts: They’re best when functioning painlessly.
Based on my memories of the ’60s, I’m thinking more “civil rights activists” are dying now than were living then, especially among whites. Among blacks, I really can’t say. Seems more, though.
The Associated Press declares President Obama a winner for using “his popularity and bully pulpit to get the notoriously sluggish Congress to work through the huge” alleged stimulus “package in relatively short order.” Some bully pulpit. Pelosi-Reid Democrats got to write the bill and the bully pulpit produced three Republicans in the entire Congress to support the $787 billion eruption of social spending. The AP also declares Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) a winner. That requires a certain point of view.
MARTA’s smarta. General manager Beverly Scott says she’ll take the federal giveaway money and use it on neglected repairs and maintenance. Nothing should be funded from the “economic stimulus” money that’s not already on a to-do priority list.
Drive west from the Atlantic Station-Georgia Tech area, view the massive unfinished condo projects, and you’ll see first-hand why Forbes.com ranks Metro Atlanta behind only Detroit and Las Vegas in vacant rental units. Look at that condo excess and wonder: What were they thinking? Banks. Developers. Speculators. Metro Atlanta will be years getting out from under the excessive housing inventory. Future bargains for buyers; deep woes for banks. The marketplace, not government, has to solve this problem — or it’ll still be around a decade from now.
Holy cow! General Motors says it’ll need $30 billion in taxpayer loans. The welfare state is here.
Quote of the week: “At the end of the day, they are not human and you can’t always predict their behavior. …” A lesson for people who try to turn animals into little humans. In this case the domesticated 200-pound chimp savagely mauled the owner’s friend.
You really have to hand it to the Republicans who run Georgia. Last year, and the year before, they were PR disasters. Now they end any promise of homeowner property tax relief, and the news is that the grants survive for this year. You have to give them credit, too, for declaring up-front that they intend to eliminate the corporate income tax some day, as they should. Have a vision. Be bold. Do it.
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Let Washington keep money
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 may come from one of these six states: South Carolina, Alaska, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Idaho.
Those are the states with governors who are debating whether to take the federal dollars that are being run off the printing press and/or stolen from future generations. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a promising candidate for one of the top two offices in 2012, says his state may not opt to take all $4 billion of the social spending directed to Louisiana in the $787 billion bill signed last week. “We’ll have to review each program, each new dollar to make sure that we understand what are the conditions, what are the strings and see whether it’s beneficial for Louisiana,” said Jindal, who will deliver the Republican response to next week’s address to Congress by President Obama.
One concern a number of governors have, and state legislators should too, is that the federal money encourages states to expand programs with no promise that federal funding will continue after two years.
My belief is that the state should take money for any existing program that requires no expansion at state taxpayers’ expense, either now or in the future. If the federal money’s not guaranteed after two years, take it but don’t use the “economic stimulus” money to enlarge the program. Rebate it, dollar-for-dollar to Georgia taxpayers. One option for that is the $200 to $300 in state grants per homeowner for property tax relief, which are not likely to be continued after this year.
One other rule should be that the state takes no money for any project — rail, roads and bridges, among them — that it didn’t intend to construct anyway. Nobody should build anything just because a portion of the money’s there.
The pressure will be intense on legislators to take and spend. Now is when we see what this Republican majority in Georgia is made of.
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Pay to drive, flush?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Pay by the flush. Or pay by the mile. Take your pick. It’s the nanny state at work.
In Massachusetts, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick is expected to unveil a proposal this week to use GPS chips to charge motorists a quarter-cent per mile traveled. “It’s outrageous; it’s kind of Orwellian, Big Brotherish,” said a Republican state senator, Scott Brown, who’s drafted legislation to prohibit the practice.
A similar plan is under study in Idaho and Rhode Island and one has been tested in Oregon. In North Carolina, a proposal has been made to go to a similar system in lieu of a gas tax.
The Oregon test involved 300 paid volunteers who allowed the state to install GPS receivers that didn’t allow real-time tracking, but did allow a satellite to locate the vehicle by coordinates. The recorded mileage was paid as a tax when refueling.
A similar idea is at work with water in Australia. Under a proposal being touted now to combat drought, residents would be charged for each flush of the toilet. It would replace a system that bases sewage charges on a home’s value rather than water use.
“It would encourage people to reduce their sewage output by taking shorter showers, recycling washing machine water or connecting rainwater tanks to internal plumbing to reduce their charges,” said Adelaide University Water Management Professor Mike Young, who’s promoting the idea across Australia.
The pay-to-flush proposal has sparked a flurry of outrage, but it’s essentially the same system that exists here — that is, you pay for the water you use. Unless the charges are engineered to escalate quickly to gouge consumers because some water czar has determined they’re being wasteful, it’s no big deal.
The miles-traveled proposal is of more concern. It introduces a system that’s easy for government to manipulate. Rates will creep upward, a fraction of a cent at the time, until government collects easily and painlessly what it wants. For those who live in rural areas of Georgia and commute long distances, a practice that’s not uncommon, the tax would be onerous. What’s more, it invites the lifestyle police to play games with those who have chosen to live outside central cities and commute across Metro Atlanta.
Pay-per-mile? Definitely not. Pay to flush? We’re there now.
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Georgia’s public schools on the right course
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Back off. Don’t touch it. Please.
A word now to everybody running for governor in 2010. It’s not necessary, not even helpful, to have an education platform that involves any blue-ribbon commission, any bright ideas for overhaul of schools, curriculum or classrooms, or any new fix-it brainstorms that involve reinventing anything. Got it?
The picture’s clear. There’s nothing Georgia’s likely to do in public education that offers any more hope of success than what it’s already doing. Just leave ‘em alone. Give the current approach time to work — time that may amount to another eight to 10 years. There’s no quicker fix.
Listening five years ago to legislators debate whether to truly make the HOPE stipend a true merit-based scholarship, it was readily evident that high-school grades were virtually meaningless.
Teachers gave Bs to placate parents and to qualify favored dullards for HOPE. While HOPE required B averages, 32 percent of HOPE scholars had grade-point averages below B. What’s more, because of a loosey-goosey curriculum statewide, algebra here and algebra there could range from “Fun Numbers for Big Dummies” to college-level course work, depending on the teacher, the school and the system. HOPE eligibility was tightened.
Essential to any effort to upgrade public education was a requirement to equalize curriculum and grades, so that a B is not academic welfare but a true indicator of what students know and how they are likely to perform in a more rigorous college setting.
That’s what State School Supt. Kathy Cox and the state school board have been doing.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, meanwhile, has been pursuing another crucial piece of the puzzle. One is to find a way to push authority down to the local level. Local systems promise results — in higher graduation rates, for example — in return for freedom from some regulation.
Another is to attempt to come up with a dollar amount that should be a fair price for which parents and taxpayers are able to buy a decent education from the local system.
A free-market price ought to exist; it’s just a matter of striking the right balance. The problem now is that all attempts to find the precise formula are akin to efforts to predict global warming a thousand years from now. It’s a constant, never-adequate, never-accountable, funding-formula game.
In any event, the first long-term requirement to upgrade public education is to get all Georgia on the same curriculum and grading standard.
For that reason, alignment of the End of Course Tests and classroom grades, pointing to systems and schools and specific teachers who award feel-good grades or fail to teach the material, represents exciting progress.
Standardize the curriculum, test to make certain that students are getting it regardless of where they live in Georgia, and then — over time — upgrade standards. Please, don’t elect a new governor who alters the course.
Set and then upgrade standards.
Provide a sum that, if given to competent school administrators, should allow them, or any willing and capable provider, to produce a child educated to state standards. And hold them accountable for results, not for intent and not for sums spent.
And, for goodness sakes, pray that Georgia can cultivate a judiciary without activist judges tempted to come up with education funding formulas on their own.
Work for a judiciary that respects the rights and prerogatives of elected officials in the legislative and executive branches to work this through. No judge could possibly know whether Georgia spends too much or too little on education services. Their opinions are no more valid than those of any reasonably informed spectator.
Georgia is on the right course to upgrade public education. Even though I fervently believe that parents should be able to take the money that taxpayers allocate for the education of their children and buy the schooling they think best, the state still has to concentrate on improving public education.
Georgia’s doing that. Don’t go wimpy. And, for goodness sakes, don’t launch off in a new direction — especially a new direction involving the same failed model.
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U.S. policies don’t put children first
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The octuplets have called America’s bluff.
We pretend that we are a nation that puts children first. It’s a lie.
It’s a lie born of one of those old, Reagan-era wars between the left and the right over whether to reform welfare. The “welfare queen” label persisted, prompting the left to recast the debate from “welfare queen” to “children.” A nation fed up with the entitlement mentality of adults could be coerced into expanding social programs so long as the beneficiaries were “children.”
The recently renewed State Children’s Health Insurance Program, now expanded to cover some adults, is a perfect example.
The nation did finally force Congress to act on welfare reform. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, converting an open-ended entitlement into expanded assistance, but with a five-year limit on benefits and a requirement to work. The result was that caseloads dropped from 12.6 million in 1997 to under 5 million in 2007. While details are still filtering out, Congress appears to have signed back on to an open-ended entitlement promise in the just-passed “economic stimulus” bill.
The point here is that the core of these bitterly fought debates has never really been about what’s best for children. It’s adults playing self-empowerment, demanding complete liberty to pursue lifestyles unencumbered by commitment. The consequence is that almost 40 percent of children, such as those of Nadya Suleman in California, are born to unmarried women.
While that may serve the desires of men and women to play at commitment in virtual reality, it’s an adult game that is cruel and abusive to children. Robin Fretwell Wilson of the Washington & Lee University Law School conducted an important analysis of the research on how children fare in different adult living arrangements. “In virtually every comparison done to date, children in nuclear families fare better on average than other children,” she wrote.
It’s clear, too, from others who witness the effects on children firsthand, that those born to adults who don’t bother to marry “are more likely to live in poverty, be incarcerated later in life, suffer from physical and sexual abuse, abuse alcohol and drugs, and engage in early sexual activity and premarital child bearing.” That recognition was the basis for the Georgia Supreme Court Summit on Children, Marriage and Family Law held in Atlanta in November.
Those who believe that public policies should be centered on the “best interests of the child” starting at the moment of conception until the created human life is delivered whole into adulthood should be horrified by the cruelty heaped on 14 children.
If America does care about children, the spectacle of Nadya Suleman, who grotesquely allows the creation of a “family Web site” to solicit credit card donations, should be a defining moment in our national life. The financial costs will be astronomical. Three of the first six children are on Social Security disability; the last eight are low birth-weight, with one featured on the Web site at 1 pound, 8 ounces. The largest is 3 pounds, 4 ounces.
Each of these children has a moral claim, and should have a legal claim, against the physician who assisted Suleman, Dr. Michael Kamrava. He’s being investigated by the California Medical Board, but loss of license does nothing to compensate the children for his lack of judgment. Each has a moral claim, and should have a legal claim, too, to financial support from the sperm donor.
Both men should have assessed the mental condition of the woman, along with her inability to support the needs of the first six, and realized that aiding and abetting in the casual creation of life would be contrary to the “best interests of the child.”
In the modern world where women and men can make flagrantly irresponsible choices, laws need to be changed to protect the unborn. The only real leverage policy-makers have is financial. Limits should be put on the number of children women can bear and for which they may expect to receive public assistance. Fertility clinics should be financially penalized if they knowingly put children at risk, as was clearly done here. Men, even sperm donors, should be liable, too, if they knew or should have known children would suffer from their act.
Our bluff’s been called. Are we about protecting children or not?
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On school vouchers, chief’s comp time
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Horror of horrors, a Clayton County parent has been placed on five years’ probation, fined $1,000 and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service for moving into her sister’s home in Henry County so her son could attend classes there. The woman, Tanja Revette Hale of Rex, has also been ordered to pay $1,200 in tuition costs to the Henry school system. When we make criminals of parents trying to do what they think best for their children’s education, it is, indeed, time for vouchers. State Sen. Eric Johnson’s bill will allow parents to buy services from any school or system willing to take them. No games required.
Didn’t know that people at the top got “comp time.” But, yes, DeKalb Police Chief Terrell Bolton does — 37 days of it in 2007 and 24 days over the first 10 months or so of last year. I always thought the top dog was there when needed, off when required, and that nobody ran a punch-the-clock tab.
Believe passionately enough in anything and the evidence you see will confirm it. Some 305 species of birds are wintering over about 35 miles farther north than they did 40 years ago, according to an Audubon Society study, thus confirming global warming. Forty years is a speck in time.
More evidence that the embittered left cannot let it go: U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants a “truth commission” to investigate claimed abuses of suspected terrorists and other decisions made during the Bush Administration. The haters won’t go away until they see George W. Bush in leg irons or in the grave, with their historians writing the textbooks on his performance in office.
If the problem’s simply that business has fallen off temporarily, it’s smart management to do as executives and board members at Mueller Water Products company of Atlanta have done. The company is temporarily furloughing about 5,900 workers at 26 plants nationwide and bigwigs are taking a 20 percent pay cut. Decisions on which plants to close and for how long will be made by those closer to the factory floor. If it works, it means that when business does pick back up, a loyal, trained work force is available to ramp back up quickly. Smart, good-sense management.
Jurors do play so many games nowadays that it’s just as well that Georgia legislators give prosecutors a straight life-without-parole alternative to the death penalty. It’s a slow and costly alternative, but it’s the death penalty still, a meal at a time, spread out over decades.
Clip this phrase — “a little noticed provision of” for future use in revealing how radical and dishonest the alleged “economic stimulus” bill is. Only three Republicans in the entire Congress voted for the bill — the three who will always be there for the Obama administration. That’d be Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
Quote of the week, from Clayton County Commissioner Wole Ralph: “This [development around the Atlanta airport] will allow citizens to get more services by shifting the tax burden to businesses.” Spoken like a true liberal — and the formula for driving business offshore, unless, of course, you give them a monopoly and allow them to charge enough to cover all their political obligations.
Will somebody in the state’s leadership — the governor, or at least the lieutenant governor or the Speaker — tell the Georgia Lottery board that it is not to permit video lottery in Underground Atlanta? In about two minutes, this PR campaign to gamblize-up (it’s a newly coined word) Underground that has the various politicians and interest groups lining up for a piece of the pie, can be put to a screeching halt. Lead. Be leaders. Act. The way to get something unpopular approved, whether it’s a tax increase or more opportunity to feed a bad habit, is to promise all the gimme-crowd a slice of the pie.
Here I draw the line: I refuse to join former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in declaring that public officials who are drunkards, adulterers and double-dippers who don’t know how to do their jobs should be barred from office. A quorum is required for all public bodies.
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Congratulations, Sen. Isakson
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Among those less attuned to workings of Georgia voter’s mind, this pronouncement may seem premature. It’s not. U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson won his 2010 reelection campaign on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2009, the day the House and Senate struck a deal on a $789 billion “economic stimulus” bill .
He surely must have been tempted to join three renegade Republicans from Maine and Pennsylvania in supporting a larger bill that passed the U.S. Senate Tuesday. In some respects, it would have been a “free” vote — free in the sense that his vote would not have been the one the Democrats needed to put it over the top. The Mainers, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter, who’s up for reelection in 2010, did that dirty deed.
Specter, who’s regarded higher by Pennsylvania Democrats than by Republicans, will be 80 when he runs again. Even if the seat goes Democratic, there’s no real reason to keep Specter around. He’ll always be there when Harry Reid needs him.
Isakson had to be tempted because he’d succeeded in getting a $15,000 tax credit for those who buy a primary residence, something he thinks essential to jump-start the housing sector. Had he agreed to support the pent-up demands of Democrats who’d had their spending ambitions partially checked for eight years, his tax credit language would undoubtedly have stayed in the final bill. He, too, could have stood with Reid and received the showering of blessings as a Great American Patriot that Reid bestowed on Collins, Specter and Snowe.
That photo op would, of course, have been political suicide back in Georgia since, in about two years, the details of this spending bill — which are largely unknown to members of Congress and to the media — would have filtered out. The more we know, the more likely it is that the nation will come to understand how little this had to do with economic stimulus and how much it had to do with enacting a social agenda that includes national single-payer health insurance.
So congratulate Isakson. He made the right choice for the country and for his political future in Georgia.
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Washington dishonesty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Face it: We’re in for four years of dishonesty in Washington, where an army of accountants, policy analysts and subject-experts will be required to examine the real story behind the campaign-style rhetoric.
We know already, for example, that the $838 billion “stimulus” bill is not about stimulus, but is instead about the pent-up demands for taxpayer-financed universal health care, about undoing welfare reform, about payoffs to ACORN and other Democratic constituencies and about throwing money at pet projects and causes.
Two or three other examples come from the day’s news. As a candidate, President Obama defined new offshore drilling as component of a national energy policy. On Tuesday, however, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that he’s putting the brakes on the Bush Administration’s plan to open more areas of the Atlantic and Pacific to exploration. He vows instead a “new way forward” that would capitalize on “the great potential for wind, wave and ocean tides.” Ah, yes. More boondoggles, less energy and when the economy recovers and world oil prices skyrocket, the U.S. will be no better prepared than it was when gas hit $4 a gallon. But, of course, liberals welcome $4 gas, since it’s an opportunity for the central government to expand regulation of our lives and of our automobile companies — “our” meaning those in Detroit that are essentially run by Washington bureaucrats.
The other story that reflects a dishonesty is the Obama Administration’s announcement that it’s reviewing the policy that prohibits the media from taking pictures of flag-draped coffins being returned to Dover Air Force Base in Deleware from Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-war opponents wanted the photos to show the high cost of war in hopes of further alienating the country from the war. Their pretense is that showing the coffins “honors” the “fallen heroes.” It is absolute dishonesty. The sole reason activists on the left push for photos of the unloading of coffins is to advance their political agenda.
There’s a report, too, that while the nation’s attention was focused on the dishonest “stimulus” bill, a group of nine House members (eight Democrats and Ron Paul) slipped a bill called the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act to lift the ban on travel to Cuba that’s been in place since 1963. It furthermore prevents the President from being able to regulate travel to Cuba unless armed conflict is real or imminent.
There’s no indication yet that the administration has signed on, but the reality is that had this legislation been proposed in October, Democrats would have had no chance of carrying Florida.
This administration and its allies in Congress are beginning to look a whole lot more like the gang of old — old as in the party of George McGovern — than the party of change. Watch ‘em. Not what they say, but what they do.
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Stimulus road rocky, reckless
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With good reason, Gov. Sonny Perdue and Georgia legislators are wary of the money dump coming from Washington.
Other Georgians should be wary, too.
It’s an invitation to bloated budgets, to expanded social spending, to funding for projects that are marginally useful and, ultimately, to fiscal recklessness.
When the Senate whittled lightly at the so-called State Fiscal Stabilization Fund — a bailout to the irresponsible — U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, the Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, warned that local communities would be hurt. “To get any Republicans at all,” he said, “you had to adopt a cut that’s going to mean policemen and firemen are going to be laid off.”
When, pray tell, did policemen and firemen in Atlanta or Cobb County become an obligation of taxpayers in Sioux Falls? And when did it become an obligation of taxpayers in Cobb County, who demand and get responsible stewardship from Commission Chairman Sam Olens and other elected officials, to subsidize the spend-thrift actions of those in Atlanta who give excessively generous pensions to public safety officers because they choose to spend the raise money elsewhere?
But that money, dangled through the Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, program, isn’t even limited to high-crime areas. Half of the $8 billion will go to communities of fewer than 150,000, meaning two things: One is that smaller communities are tempted to either staff up beyond what local officials would ordinarily think appropriate. The other is that the money goes to areas with no real crime problem.
In either case, it’s Washington dumping money that federalizes a local concern, money that ramps up the public payroll without creating any private-sector jobs, all in the name of stimulus.
Worse, it puts temptation money and reality avoidance money on the table for politicians who, by virtue of their job description, have no spending discipline.
To states like Georgia that have been reasonably and for the most part responsibly managed, this is a nightmare in the making. To get the money to send south, Congress has to print it or borrow it from the unborn. It’s paid off either with devalued currency or with the future quality of life of the unborn.
Georgia has a temporary revenue problem caused by the downturn. But it also has a rainy-day fund established for emergencies and a triple-A credit rating. At worst, it’ll determine that some programs are less worthy than others and whack their funding.
Or, it’ll look and decide that everything’s essential and furthermore new social spending is warranted for a statewide trauma care network, and legislators will raise taxes.
In either case, a periodically necessary and healthy debate is launched about priorities. What’s important, what’s not.
The alleged stimulus would have been less undesirable if the money had simply been divided up and handed over to state governments. Georgia then could have poured it into transportation or trauma or indigent defense or something else deemed to be a state and local priority. No, it’s program targeted. The $87 billion in proposed new spending on Medicaid, for example, gives states a two-year waiver on the 20 percent match. There’s no promise the feds will provide the money beyond that, nor is the argument here that they should. What will happen, though, is that the Medicaid match will be diverted to other spending, pushing off the need to face the budget problems.
Every dollar that comes into this state via the phony economic stimulus plan should be returned to state and local taxpayers, dollar for dollar.
Otherwise, it’s debt the locals will be repaying on their federal returns to buy more government to be financed with their state and local taxes.
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Dems have filibuster-proof Senate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On the first major bill sweeping through the new Congress, the playbook for the next two years — or longer — is now evident. Call in U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and, if needed, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, plead bipartisanship, whack a few inflated numbers, and, bingo!, Harry Reid has his filibuster-proof majority.
This will be the pattern too for keeping the liberal majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and on filling vacancies elsewhere.
This is no surprise. Once Democrats reached 57 seats in the Senate, Reid was assured of success on most every significant issue. Sure, Republicans will win a few procedural skirmishes, but none that matter in the long-term.
When House and Senate conferees sit down to align their two bills, the procedural victories of Republicans will vanish in the fine print.
“This agreement is not bipartisan,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday. “I’ve been in bipartisan agreements, many. This is three Republican senators. Every Republican congressman voted against it in the House, plus Democrats. And all but three Republicans stayed together on this. That’s not bipartisanship. That’s just picking off a couple of senators.”
One aspect of the Obama Administration’s push on the huge spending bill that’s a little creepy is the house parties being organized to mobilize support. Over the weekend, 38 get-togethers were to be held in Metro Atlanta. The actual purpose of the parties is not clear. Attendees were to watch streaming video from Organizing for America and then talk about it, reports the AJC’s Marcus K. Garner. This is a little bit cult-like for me — either that, or an election campaign that never ends.
Calls from hard-core Democrats to Republicans are unlikely to be persuasive, in any event. Regardless of how they vote on the $827 billion proposal, they’ll not gain or lose a Democratic-base vote.
But no matter. The Dems have Collins, Specter and Snowe. They don’t need any more Republicans, except for show.
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Octuplets and all children deserve better
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The octuplets born to an unmarried woman in California are consequences of self-centeredness gone awry.
The woman, Nadya Suleman, had six children, all conceived with the help of a sperm-donor friend. The eight born last month grew from six implanted embryos, life created with friend-donated sperm.
She told NBC’s “Today” show that she wanted a large family because she felt alone as an only child. “All I wanted was children,” she said. “I wanted to be a mom. That’s all I ever wanted in my life. I love my children.”
At a minimum, the cost to a single mother of raising one child to age 18 is between $118,590 and $250,260, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The woman, injured while working at Metropolitan State Hospital in 1999, collected $165,000 in disability payments between 2002 and 2008. She told a workers’ comp judge in 2001 that she spent most of the day in bed and had been unable to care for her first child. But none of these financial details, regardless of how they affect her ability to provide for the needs of 14 children, are the concern here.
The outrage is that a narcissistic adult, for her own pleasure, intentionally brought 14 children into the world, children who will never know their father.
It was a conscious, medically assisted choice to have multiple births — a decision suggesting an impaired mental state that should have raised questions about her fitness as the primary adult female in the children’s lives.
The octuplets should be a wake-up call to the nation. It is child cruelty to inflict the suffering on human life that Suleman visits upon these 14 children.
A nation that pretends to cherish children allows them to be abused in the worst possible way — by casually denying them a mother and a father living together in marriage, each committed to the child’s welfare. Suleman has eight at once, but millions of children are coming into the world suffering the same fate.
In 1960, 5.3 percent of children were born to unmarried women. By 1970, it had doubled to 10.7 percent. In another decade, it was 18.4. By 1990, it was up to 28 percent. By 2005, it was up to 36.8, highest ever.
For whites, 25.4 percent of babies born in 2005 came into the world without married parents. For Hispanics, it’s 47.9. For blacks, it’s 69.5.
As Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears has noted, children born to unmarried women and to those in cohabiting relationships “must often overcome increased risks of poverty, education failure, child abuse, delinquency, emotional distress and mental illness.”
A single woman’s income is part of the reason, but the lack of a father’s guidance in children’s lives is a major cause of their suffering. “Marriage is the best child welfare, crime prevention, anti-poverty program we have,” Sears said in that same speech. The focus of all law and public policies really should be reoriented to children. They desperately need protection from self-centered adults who casually create life for reasons that are frivolous and self-indulgent.
Every child born to an unmarried woman should have a legal advocate appointed by the state to represent the child’s interest. A primary interest would be in holding both male and female adults financially liable.
In the case of the children born to Suleman, the legal advocate would file suit against the fertility clinic or a physician who knowingly contributed to their abuse — life in a multiple-child household headed by a single woman.
The octuplets’ birth dramatically highlights the plight of children carelessly and frivolously conceived. It should be the spectacle that prompts ministers, educators, entertainers, politicians, aunts, uncles and other family members need to recognize the harm unmarried adults are causing to children.
Life begins at conception. Anything adults do prior to that moment that doesn’t harm a third person is their business. At the moment of life, however, the wants and even the needs of the adults are incidental to those of the child.
These 14 children need a protector.
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On Iraqi elections, Senate vacancies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Last Saturday’s elections for 440 seats on provincial councils in Iraq drew 14,000 candidates. By and large, the elections occurred peacefully. Amazing. Thank Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and the men and women of this country’s armed forces who made this day possible.
If New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch and the Obama administration agreed to a deal to appoint a Republican to succeed U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, the president’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, what principally is different from the deal former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich tried to cut to fill a Senate vacancy? Blago allegedly sought something of value, namely campaign cash. Before stepping down, Gregg extracted something of value —- a pledge not to appoint a Democrat who would diminish Republican influence in the U.S. Senate. Giving money or giving services. Don’t see the big difference.
President Obama thinks $500,000 is pay aplenty for CEOs in bailed-out firms. You take the money, you take the politicians. Pitcher Oliver Perez just signed a three-year contract with the New York Mets worth $36 million. Surely running a big auto company is worth more. But the angry mob is not clamoring for the blood of professional athletes. We really must find a disgraced CEO to do a perp-walk-in-orange across America.
Quote of the week, on turning 90, from Atlanta’s most famous twin, Ruby Crawford: “Ruth [the sister who died three years ago] and I always said when you live in Atlanta, heaven can wait.” The twins were as Atlanta as Rich’s Magnolia Room, “Gone With the Wind” and Peachtree Street.
Real fiscal conservatives would reject the enticement money contained in the pending economic stimulus that invites state and local government to expand programs —- Medicaid for one —- without a permanent funding commitment. Leave enticement money on the table.
Gold Dome Republicans tempted to tie spending to a specific funding source are on a course that marks them as no different than the Democrats they replaced. “Super-speeder” taxes-as-fines tied to trauma funding, or a $10 tax-as-fee on auto tags, as proposed by Reps. Austin Scott (R-Tifton) and Ron Stephens (R-Savannah), cause the kinds of problems that now exist with the Public Defender Standards Council. A tax created in conjunction with a specified service becomes, to claimants, an entitlement. Create programs and levy taxes; never connect one to the other.
Save the headline: “Federal aid helps, hurts insurer AIG.” For “insurer AIG,” substitute the name of any private sector company that gets bailout money.
Let it go, John, just let it go. Congressman Lewis wants Georgia Tech to preserve a building that once housed Lester Maddox’s Pickrick Restaurant. It’s strip-shopping architecture. Tear it down.
End of Course Tests, based on what teachers are expected to teach and students to know, reveal a fact about the education cultures of some local systems. Some give feel-good grades; some have high standards. For most of the eight subjects tested by EOCTs, the number who failed was two to three times the number who failed in class, according to a statistical study done by Chris Clark, an economics professor at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville. In economics, 36 percent failed the statewide test, but only 6 percent failed the class. Some locals inflate grades, presumably to qualify the unqualified for HOPE. Money can’t be determined to be the problem in local systems until you know the competence of its leaders and understand the culture they’ve created.
It’s a tragic story, no doubt. A 93-year-old man froze to death in Michigan after the power company restricted his electricity usage because he’d failed to pay $1,000 in overdue bills. But as is sometimes the case in reports of suffering callously caused by the hard-heartedness of bureaucracies, the account is one fact shy. As is now revealed, the man had assets of $600,000. Still tragic —- but without bad guys. Same is true of the fire at the Forsyth County home of a woman who claimed it was because she had a Barack Obama yard sign. One more fact: Police now suspect her.
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How to create jobs (in China)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Obama Administration’s dangling the goodies in the Democrats’ $900 billion spending proposal, hoping that mayors and state legislators will push their Congressional delegations to quickly pass it into law. Otherwise, says President Obama, an economic “catastrophe” looms.
Administration officials say that for Georgia the legislation would mean a $2,500 tax credit for college for 120,000 families, an extra $100 per month in unemployment benefit for 500,000 jobless and an extra $1,000 for 3.3 million workers. The Administration argues, too, that 113,000 new jobs would be created.
The spending in the proposed stimulus bill amounts to $10,500 per family in America, according to the Heritage Foundation and would be enough to give every high school junior and senior in the country a private-college education, with $150 billion left over.
By any measure, the numbers are staggering. Beyond the question of whether it provides any meaningful stimulus to the larger issue of whether real jobs will be created in the private sector, it’s necessary to look elsewhere.
Big Labor, pushing its top legislative priority — the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act — took hundreds of unionists and petitions they said contained 1.5 million signatures to Capitol Hill Wednesday. United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard told a rally across from the Capitol that the legislation is needed “to put an end to the illegal firing of workers, to the harassment of workers, to the intimidation of workers” who attempt to unionize companies.
The bill will be a jobs killer — in this country, at least — because it will permit Big Labor to unionize companies without the inconvenience of secret ballots. The alleged “intimidation of workers” will, therefore, shift from the board room to the labor hall. Workers can be coerced into signing union cards, if it passes, because their names and their “votes” are clearly known to union organizers.
Employers obviously object to the proposed legislation. In addition to eliminating the requirement that elections be by secret ballot, it will also force the company and its new union into binding arbitration if they don’t agree on a new contract in 120 days. “I want $70 an hour. You’re offering $10. Let’s go to binding arbitration and split the difference.” (Binding arbitration is a major reason MARTA’s labor costs are uncontrollable.)
During the campaign, President Obama supported the legislation.
An enormous tax burden and a whole set of new business regulations — to combat “global warming,” for example — are on the way that will push up business operating costs. Add the workplace organizations that have been major contributors to the demise of American auto industry, and the future of jobs creation in this country becomes pretty clear:
Build a store-front here, hire private contractors to market and sell a product, but manufacture it overseas. Public policies here create jobs in China.
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No-consequence responsibility
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Janet Reno’s back. The language may be a bit coarser, but just as the former Attorney General took “responsibility” for the debacle at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco where 82 people died in 1993, President Barack Obama declares he is taking responsibility for the failed confirmation of Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer.
Both Daschle, nominated to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Killefer, nominated to be the administration’s chief performance officer, withdrew because of tax troubles.
“I screwed up,” said Obama, using a coarse synonym for “failed” or “mishandled” — an offense prominent people in public life really should avoid when acknowledging error of judgment or omission. “I take responsibility for this mistake.”
As has become customary in public life, taking responsibility is without consequence, as was the case with Reno. It’s a phrase that means nothing more than: “Get this story off the front pages and move on to something that’s either more favorable, or less harmful, to my image.”
In this instance, the failure by Daschle and Killefer to pay income taxes owed drew attention to the business-as-usual world of Washington where prominent politicians like Daschle get rich off their name and political connections. It also drew attention to the administration’s vetting process that failed to uncover the two nominees’ tax problems.
Daschle paid $140,167 in back taxes and interest just last month for deducting more in charitable contributions than he gave, for the personal use of a car and driver and for consulting work. It is interesting about liberals that they insist on heaping the costs of charity onto taxpayers — as they’re now doing in the $900 billion bill they’re deceitfully calling “economic stimulus” — but they weave-and-dodge on their obligation to share the burden. Their notion is that “the rich” — and they’re not, no matter their income — should pay and the designated “poor” should receive.
By now, with a Republican in the White House, the tax scandals surrounding nominees would have been linked as evidence that wealthy supporters and the politically-connected constituted a culture of corruption in Washington. But that was before “change” came to DC and before a courageous man stood before the cameras and said “I take responsibility,” lest the little people in America get the idea that there are “two sets of rules — you know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.” For the record, the President affirms, “there aren’t.”
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Choice would stop state school micromanagement
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After decades of watching one administration after another twiddle and twaddle with education inputs and throughputs, expending vast sums of human energy and intellect on finding precisely the right top-down formula to fix what’s broken, let the truth be known: It’s a 1950s strategy for unending failure.
This year in the Georgia General Assembly, a little partisan spat is likely to develop over school nurses. As part of the general effort to live within available revenues, an admirable and constitutionally necessary undertaking, Gov. Sonny Perdue has recommended eliminating the $30 million that the state spends on school nurses. Available money should go to the classroom, argued the governor’s spokesman.
Georgia is one of the few states that specifically fund school nurses, but Democrats, sensing a mom-and-apple-pie issue, are in high dudgeon.
Think about this. Year after year there’s some little minicrisis like this in education, where a single dollar less means that Georgia’s children will live in ignorance and poor health. Why medical care is yet another of those family responsibilities heaped on public education is a mystery.
Admittedly, there may exist some schools in some neighborhoods for some periods of time where it makes sense to position a nurse or nurse practitioner. But that’s why we have — or should have — local control. And with local control should come flexibility to spend money as needed, whether for tutors, classroom assistants, extended-day programs or nurses.
Two recent occurrences in public education are reason to hope that one day the state will move beyond constant churning of education inputs. The first is the contract a bold superintendent and school board in Gwinnett County signed promising results for greater control over where and how to direct state funding. The quid pro quo is that they deliver and the state backs out of their business, measuring them by results, not by the stuff that brings legions of education lobbyists to Atlanta to push for more money.
The other noteworthy occurrence is a bill introduced Monday by state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) that would provide vouchers to the parents of any child in Georgia seeking an alternative to the available public school.
The vouchers, expected to average about $5,000 each, would represent just the state dollars that go to local systems to buy a decent education for the children in their charge. The local systems would get to keep the local and federal dollars, meaning that they profit from every child who leaves to find an alternative. When the child leaves, the local system is freed of the obligation to provide teachers and classrooms while keeping the cash that the child’s presence justified. Win-win.
Johnson’s bill would address a concern raised last year by Clayton County’s loss of accreditation. At the time, surrounding systems feared that their schools would be overwhelmed by an influx of children seeking better schools. As proposed by Johnson, children could go to another district, or to another school within their home district, but the choice on whether to take them is with the receiving school and district.
Another requirement is that parents would be required to sign a contract agreeing to participate in the child’s education progress and to respond to discipline problems. The union that represents hordes of public school employees has gone nuts, sending a flier to school teachers and staff statewide rallying opposition. “The Public Schools Need Protecting … Will YOU fight for them?” the flier screams.
This is to be the fight. Any governor or legislator who proposes any alternative to this constant inputs/throughputs wrangling over this or that funding formula knows that any threat to the status quo invites the entrenched alphabet-soup organizations and unions — like the Georgia Association of Educators (GAE) — to the barricades.
We really do have to invent an alternative to this process. Ultimately, the state should decide how much to pay for a decent education — and then allow parents of school-age children to buy those services from any willing provider. Most would choose the local system.
The General Assembly really shouldn’t be debating issues like school nurses.
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Would you buy?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The U.S. Senate votes today on whether to pass out a $900 billion spending bill that is alleged to be economic stimulus. New York Democrat Chuck Schumer thinks it’ll get 60 votes.
The interesting player in this entire process is President Barack Obama, who last week took the Wall Street securities industry to task for awarding $18.4 billion in bonuses in 2008. He thought that shameful and declared that”there will be time for them to rake in profits and bonuses later in the economic cycle. But now is not that time.”
And yet, he’s found nothing shameful or excessive about a bill that passes off massive new spending for social programs as stimulus. His reaction, instead, was to urge Republicans to hold the politics to a minimum. Easy to say when the underlying document is politics to the max.
Schumer said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation that Democrats are open to some proposals, including one advanced by U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) for a $15,000 tax credit for new home buyers. “That’s something we look favorably upon,” he said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is arguing for 4 percent fixed mortgages backed by taxpayers “to any credit-worthy borrower,” which he said will reduce the average family’s monthly mortgage by $466 a month, or $167,760 over the l30-year life of the mortgage.
Some version of the tax credits and cheap mortgages are likely to make it in the final bill, which his growing from the $819 billion porker passed last week by the House.
The housing measures suggested by Isakson and McConnell would certainly stimulate the real estate industry, especially if there’s no income or first-home requirements. (I don’t need a house, but with the tax credit and cheap mortgage, even I could be tempted to buy.)
This bill is some of this and some of that. For the most part it’s not stimulus. And while Obama is quick to moralize about excesses in the financial sector, he’s strangely quiet on the outrage about excesses in the public.
