Repost: On the future of education

I'm looking forward to reading DIY U by Anya Kamanetz (the author who brought us Generation Debt), after reading her interview in Salon. The letters section was at times insightful, often rancorous, and sometimes displayed the worst fruits of our current education system. I tried to step in. I figure there are some half-baked ideas in here that might be useful with a bit more time in the oven, so I'm republishing it here.

The broad themes of the letters so far

Techno-utopianism: iTunes U is gonna be great! All Web 3.0, social networked and Twitterfied, with courses straight off YouTube and papers submitted to grades.google.com.

Class warfare: Online classes are just going to be one more way for the elites to screw the working class, the way prestigious universities are now.

My job has value dammit! Mostly from cranky academic types who seem to think very poorly of the students they teach.

Kids these days: with their cell phones and their whining and their stupid, piggish faces.

Adults these days: with their lazy teaching and arbitrary grading and ridiculous salaries for telling me stuff that I could just google if I was actually interested.

Techno-dystopianism: Online classes suck. They started sucking in 1998 and will keep right on sucking until the heat death of the universe, and by the way The University of Phoenix is a perfect vacuum of suck.

It sounds like we have all the stakeholders in the room, but we're just talking past each other. I'm going to try to pull an Obama and solve the problem by throwing money at it^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W set up a common framework for the problem.

Threatened academic types: Your work does have value. But the system you work within is crippled by high costs that make your work inaccessible to many Americans, and -- given the amount of debt racked up in obtaining an education -- downright dangerous to some. We need to find ways to make your knowledge more available and allow your teaching skills to reach more people. I think technology is going to be a big part of the solution.

I doubt that anything can replace the student/teacher interaction, but technology could be used to free up your time, so you can spend it guiding specific students with specific problems.

Until the technology matures, do your students a favor and start looking for free/open source textbooks that are relevant to your classwork. You could save your students a bundle.

Online coursework haters: The online experience is only going to become more and more effective at delivering education. Those who mock the quality of online education today are repeating the mistakes of those who mocked the online shopping experience twelve years ago. Both groups look at the deficiencies of the current experience, and project them into the distant future.

Students: If you expect education to be effortless and entertaining, you're going to be disappointed. The process of rewiring your brain to take advantage of the collective wisdom of ten thousand years of human culture and civilization is an agonizing process. Nor can you expect your degree to magically grant you an exciting, fulfilling job. Life is hard, maybe harder than it ought to be, and moving classes online isn't going to change that.

I believe that 90% of the secret to happiness is learning to manage your own expectations. The other 10% is Super Monkey Ball.

Student haters: Look, we as a society have overpromised and underdelivered the future to the next generation. Grade school teachers have long motivated kids by pretending they were teaching to a room full of future presidents and astronauts. Our consumption-soaked culture has promised everyone a big house, an SUV, and if I'm parsing the subtext of commercials correctly, sex with Beyonce.

That overpromising is especially cruel to people who have drawn the short stick in the great circular firing squad of life. But it keeps people hungry, dissatisfied, and willing to work, and therefore serves our corporate masters well. Okay, starting to ramble back there. The point is, we need to build an education system that can deliver on those promises, and $8500 a semester will not do.

Yes, students need to curb their expectations and be willing to put in hard work. But as educators, you are responsible for ensuring that the education system rewards their best efforts, guides them toward the values and habits that will serve them in their later life, and doesn't cripple them with debt straight out of the gate. Right now, the education system doesn't do any of those things particularly well, and as the people who make education what it is, you need to do some self-reflection.

Class warfarers: I think the diploma-based reputation system of the past will soon be at an end. It was the best we could do with the 18th-century technology at hand. But as The Sacrosanct Sheepskin is replaced with a more nuanced, competency-based reputation system, the value of "prestige" is going to tumble. Who cares about the quality of the instruction a student received, if objective benchmarks show that he can't do what he was taught?

Note: This isn't the first time I've whinged on Salon about education.

"The line of grace now has to be horizontal"

Before Glenn Beck singlehandedly poured gasoline on his career and set it on fire, Van Jones was Obama's Green Jobs Czar.* Now, after being drummed out of the executive branch for the sin of, well, having a past wherein he said and did things, he's moved on. But he gave a very interesting interview to Grist. A couple of paragraphs really jumped out at me:

It used to be, as you went through these stages in your life, you could go to the next town and start over. The only person you were accountable to besides yourself was, if you were a person of faith, God. The line of grace was vertical, between you and your creator. Now, in this age of YouTube and Google, all of us are leaving digital bread crumbs behind of the person we used to be. Anything you do or say, some silly thing you did at a college party if somebody had a cell-phone camera, can be seen by everybody, forever. You can know more than you ever wanted to know about pretty much anybody.

It requires more wisdom of society. The line of grace now has to be horizontal. We have to learn how to forgive each other and extend a certain amount of empathy as we all grow up in front of each other. At some point, there'll be enough people who have had these "gotcha" experiences, and we'll hit a tipping point. We'll have a different level of tolerance. But it's too early. We're still too new to this, we don't have the language, customs, and rituals to be able to handle all this stupid stuff we can learn about each other.

I'm not hopeful about the prospects of developing the language and rituals. When everything you do is etched into ones and zeros, your whole past becomes, well, present. If anyone holds a grudge against another person, they can find plenty of fuel around to feed their discontent. If someone wants to tarnish a reputation, Google will lead them right to whatever they need.

If we cannot forget, are we even capable of forgiving? Maybe forgetting is a critical part of the forgiveness process.

Tired. Need to think on this. Byes.


* Technically a made-up title bestowed on him by the media.

A few health care talking points

Reposted from a Yahoo News comment, in reply to the following:

ATTENTION: Attention, all you progressive, liberal, democrat, "pretend-no-one-has-to-pay-for-anythings!!! Attention all you "the-government-will-make-my-life-better-for-me-so-I-don't-have-to-actually-be-responsible" democrat sheep!!! Try this exercise, PLEASE: STEP 1. Go back to the very beginning of these comments and read each comment and look at the votes on the postings. STEP 2. Do some SIMPLE math (you should not need your congressman to do simple math for you, right?) STEP 3. Realize that THESE very votes here--that are KILLING Obama and progressive comments--are a fore-taste of the votes you will be seeing in the next two election cycles!! RESULT: Bye-bye Democrats!!! Bye Bye One-term President!! READ the numbers and weep--you got SOCIALISM and HEALTH CARE for those who do not work and do not pay into the "system' BUT--and it is a BIG BUT: the government running it will RUIN it very quickly for the POOR and ILLEGALS TOO, AND, best of all, there is no recovery now for GUARANTEEING the dems LOSSES by this vote and government take-over.... Read the votes and WEEP!!!

Here's what I wrote back:

A few points, in no particular order:

* Yahoo is no substitute for a properly sampled, well framed survey of public opinion.

* If any party "pretends no one has to pay for anything", it is the party that A) went to war (twice) without raising the taxes needed to pay for it (twice!), B) passed two mammoth tax cuts without making the spending cuts to match it, and C) passed the highly popular prescription drug benefit without passing any unpopular tax increases to pay for it. A,B,and C were all Republican initiatives.

* Illegal aliens do not qualify for insurance subsidies under Obama's plan.

* In prior years, before Obama stole the idea, the right wing was happy with the idea of having an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Mitt Romney was a fan (and signed an individual mandate into law as governor of Massachusetts. The American Enterprise Institute (also no haven of socialism) also supported the idea.

* Polls have shown that the better people understand the health care plan, the more likely they are to like it. They have also shown that Massachusetts' Obamacare/Romneycare plan is far more popular now than when it was being passed into law.

* Honestly, the differences between Obama's plan and Romney's plan are small. In other words, only a few years ago, it was considered centrist enough that a Republican governor could put his signature to it. Now, a very similar plan is socialist?

* Prior to the passage of the main bill, most polls showed the country split on health care reform, with about a quarter of the people who opposed it being disappointed that it wasn't more "socialist" (e.g., no public option or single payer). Polling also showed that a great many of the individual elements of the plan had 80% or 90% support. So you insult my intelligence when you pretend that the will of the American people has been thwarted.

The R word

Reposted from a Boing Boing comment

The math and the history makes exact figures difficult, but the idea behind reparations is simple: Because of preferential treatment in the past, one group of people has a position of advantage over another today. Therefore, simply ending the practices that led to the advantage isn't enough.

In pre-Civil War American South, blacks were forced to spend their lives building up the wealth of others, rather than wealth for themselves. After the Civil War, well, same thing.

When the federal government gave away the bulk of the Midwest to homesteaders (and think of the amount of wealth that represents), almost no blacks benefited.

Then, when the government gave millions of WWII vets a free education through the GI Bill, black veterans had a difficult time taking advantage of the gift. The military had been desegregated, but the colleges had not.

So even if we could call ourselves a post-racial society today (we can't), some people would be entering the era of equality as unequals. Poverty is very easy to pass onto one's children, easier than wealth in some ways.

Honestly, I don't believe that formal reparations are the answer. But I think that we as a nation make only token efforts to help poor Americans prosper, or to try to include them in society. If that ever changes, I think the calls for reparations would disappear.

Are Health Savings Accounts the answer?

Indiana governor Mitch Daniels brags in the Wall Street Journal about his state's health savings account program. I'm basically undecided on the issue, but given that there were almost zero criticisms of HSAs in the comments, I just had to be the voice of discontent.


My comment:

It seems to me that health savings accounts are just another way for healthier, wealthier, younger people to partly remove themselves from insurance pools, raising premiums for those who remain. Also, I'm completely unconvinced by Daniels' claim that HSA participants aren't generating their savings in part by going without important medical care.

For those of you claiming that Obama is only skeptical of HSAs because "he loves statism," please read a bit of how HSA opponents actually think. Also, congressional testimony of another skeptic.

Numerous studies indicate that, while consumers who bear a greater proportion of their medical costs use less health services, they are almost as likely to pass on medically necessary procedures as they are on wasteful ones. I'm sure a doctor or nurse would make an outstandingly savvy consumer of health services. The rest of us, not so much.

I do have to congratulate WSJ for having an unusually high-quality comments section. Yes, it's 95% free-marketeers, but they're articulate, and seem to be managing their ODS pretty well.

Corporations

"The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace, and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned. An era of corruption will follow, and the money power will endeavor to prolong it's reign by preying upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated into a few hands and the Repubic is destroyed."

- Abraham Lincoln Some guy impersonating Abraham Lincoln

From this we learn 1) that Lincoln was a broody guy, 2) that Republican party today doesn't resemble the Party of Lincoln in the least, and 3) that ours is an endless struggle.


Update: Never mind. The quote is a fraud. I mean, it's a danged good quote, but there is no evidence that it has anything to do with Lincoln.

Notes to Sarah Palin's ghost writer

I wrote a couple of posts replying to Sarah Palin's new Facebook note,
More of the Same, Only More Expensive:

In ten years, "Allowing people to buy insurance across state lines" will effectively mean, "Everybody buys insurance from South Dakota, because they have the weakest regulations on health insurers. It's exactly what happened to the credit card industry, so anyone who thinks this "free market solution" will do anything but make our health care system worse is simply not paying attention.

Second:

You link to a poll showing the current Democratic proposals to be unpopular. But you miss three crucial facts:

1) Many individual elements of the health care bill (employer mandates, ban on pre-existing conditions, the insurance exchange) poll *extremely* well. The public option also polls very well.

2) Polling has also shown that, if you give people straightforward, unbiased information (read: NOT Democratic talking points, just a non-partisan description of what the bill does) then the poll numbers improve dramatically.

3) Much of the opposition to the current bill comes *from the left.* Like me, they want to kick insurers to the curb by either giving America a strong public option or (even better) moving to a pure single-payer system.

Update: Apparently, this is the sort of hate speech that gets you a comment ban from Sarah Palin's people. My comments seem to have been deleted, and I'm no longer able to add comments.

Oh well, more time to practice my dolphin calls.

A short thingy on the merits of cap and trade (repost)

Catnlion said:
Climate change, don't you like how they don't call it global warming anymore, people want to use this to put in Cap and Trade, aka Cap and Tax. On the face C&T makes no sense. The point is to lower CO2. So what are we going to do, say you have to quit producing CO2, unless you pay us? Since taxes are a business expense that are passed along to the final customer the polluter is just going to pay the tax, pass the cost along, and keep putting out CO2. How does this cut the amount of CO2?

------------------------------

You seem to be missing some essential features of cap and trade, so I'll try to explain it as well as I can. To illustrate, we'll go with a simplified form of cap and trade. The United States emits a total of 5.7 gigatons of emissions annually. To begin reducing emissions, say we implement a cap at 5.5 gigatons. Then, the government sells 5.5 billion permits, each one granting the holder the right to emit a ton of CO2. If a coal plant can't buy a permit, then it can't emit any CO2.

Within this system, individual actors can continue doing exactly what they've been doing, so long as they buy a permit from somebody, either the government or some private entity that has already purchased one.

But because there are only a limited number of permits, somebody has to reduce their emissions and sell their permits to those who wish to continue emitting. To reiterate: you have to have a permit to emit a ton of CO2, and not enough permits are available to emit as much as we did the prior year.

The companies which choose to sell permits are the ones who can most cost-effectively reduce their emissions, while those which choose to buy the permits are the ones which would find it very expensive to reduce their emissions.

Cap and trade makes great sense, because it doesn't matter at all which molecule of carbon was emitted where or to what end. All that matters is the aggregate amount. If we have to choose between two plans for stopping a gigaton of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, one which costs a trillion dollars, and one which costs six billion dollars, all else being equal we should go with the latter. Cap and trade sets a goal, and lets the market figure out the most cost-effective approaches to meeting the target.

Now, the cap and trade bill before the Senate is more complex, because it also includes unrelated research funding, but more because it has to deal with real-world issues like verifying emission levels and all the other things needed to keep people from gaming the system. But the overall effect is the same: give the market the ability to internalize the costs of greenhouse emissions.

[Originally from the comments section of David Brin's blog at Salon]

Part 3: Drowning the Government in the Bathtub

The last few days -- because I'm bored -- I've been going over UT-3's (a.k.a. Jason "Hundreds of Billions for Defense, But Not One Penny for Pensioners" Chaffetz) "Contract for the American Dream.

Part 1: Pointed out that, back when the "American Dream" of shared economic prosperity was strongest, the government played a strong role in America.

Part 2: Took issue with both the sincerity of the "debt crisis"-mongers and the slash-and-burn approach they want to take to solving it.

Part 3 (current): Continuing onward, starting with the section entitled "Limited Government":

Further, it is not the government that will create jobs, wealth, or propel the United States of America to reach its fullest potential. It is the American people who will drive America forward.

I don't know which irks me more, the profound disrespect shown to the many positive roles government plays in our civic life, the implication that government employees are separate and distinct from "the American people", or the Trebuchet MS font-face it's written in. I mean, why not just mark it up in Comic Sans and be done with it?

Individuals should have the freedom to succeed or fail in this country. It is not the government's role to stand in the way of either outcome or to choose winners and losers.

Had he written that "corporations should have the freedom to succeed or fail," I might be inclined to agree. But that's not what he writes. He's saying government shouldn't help individuals who find themselves on the losing end of life. To describe government as "standing in the way" of a losing outcome is to imply that the outcome is earned, and that there is something morally suspect about preventing the suffering that accompanies losing. He's preaching Social Darwinism, the message that perpetrates so much of the misery and suffering that happens around our country: there is no such thing as systemic injustice, the world is fair, and anyone who is having a rough time of things has -- one way or another -- brought the misery upon him or herself.

Fortunately, not all Americans are as indifferent to suffering as Rep. Chaffetz. We decided, as a nation, to tackle the enormous problem of elderly poverty, by starting a program called Social Security to deliver the same. It has some kinks to work out, and yes, it's expensive. But you can't expect to lift millions of elderly Americans out of poverty on the cheap. The same goes for Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, welfare payments, and a whole host of other problems. As a tax-paying citizen, I'm glad that these programs are there to help people who need it. I want them to be run as efficiently as possible, and I'm eager to see any clever proposals for making them better.

The Contract says that it is in our nature as Americans not to sit around and wait for government to solve our problems. There is some truth to that. But neither is it in our nature to turn a blind eye to the needy and the suffering. I don't believe these two instincts need to be at war, but clearly Mr. Chaffetz wants us all to think that they are.

Jason, if you believe that Americans are a hard-working, ingenious people, ready to tackle challenges, then you should have faith that they can apply that problem-solving ingenuity in the realm of improving government. Instead, you propose that we throw in the towel; declare defeat, pare the entire thing down to the bone, sell big chunks of it off to private enterprises that literally cannot represent the best interests of the American people, and hope that somehow, somewhere, prosperity emerges.

More specifics!

• Repeal TARP and commit to no more "stimulus" bills that are merely a ruse to grow government.

TARP was mismanaged from the get-go, like pretty much everything else Bush did. Obama at least came in and made it more transparent and increased oversight. Now the money is mostly being repaid, Obama is proposing a tax on the biggest banks to make sure we get the rest of it, and the Democrats are hard at work trying to craft regulations to make sure the financial industry can't wreck the country quite so badly next time. Not surprisingly, Republicans are stonewalling the effort, because despite Alan Greenspan's mea culpa, they can't imagine that the free market was capable of footbulleting itself the way it did.

In the mind of the free marketeers, the economic collapse was caused by the Feds forcing banks to give homes to black people. Or something.

The stimulus was separate legislation, though Republicans benefit greatly from public confusion between the stimulus bill (ARRA) and the bank bailout (TARP). My main complaint about the bill was that it was too small, and focused too heavily on tax cuts.

Now that we're through the worst of it, and we're pretty sure the economy is no longer going to tip over if someone exhales, the Republicans can yammer about how the money spent fixing Bush's mess was ill-spent. I'm glad things are going well enough that they have that luxury.

Meanwhile, they're in lockstep opposition to a jobs bill to help put Americans back to work. It was your own fault for losing your jobs, stupid unemployed people.

• Appoint a bi-partisan "Sunset Commission" to identify at least 100 federal departments or programs recommended for elimination by December 31, 2011.

I'm all in favor of getting rid of programs that are ineffective or harmful. But when you throw out an arbitrary number to be decommissioned by an arbitrary date, you're just grandstanding.

My alternative would be, every three years each program and each department would create a report that basically justified their existence, and outlined any roadblocks they faced in fulfilling their purpose. The reports wouldn't give us all the answers, but it would give everyone in the federal government a chance to hash out which expenditures were important and why.

• Reduce the corporate income tax to a flat 10%. This will eliminate the wide array of corporate loopholes, incentivize business in the U.S.A., and simplify the tax code.

Fewer taxes for megacorps, less spending on the education, health, and welfare of Americans. I'm starting to sense a theme. At least

• Reject the "Cap & Trade" scheme and repeal all EPA funding related to carbon policy.

If you read this blog -- and I know both of you do -- then you know that this proposal should generate three or four blog posts in its own right. I'll just start it off by asking, does Mr. Chaffetz propose this because he doesn't believe CO2 emissions are a problem, or because he believes that free markets have the problem well in hand?

I'm guessing the former. Global warming is a textbook case of a serious problem that cannot be addressed by purely free market mechanisms. No wonder the drown government in a bathtub crowd has to keep telling itself that it's a giant hoax; if it's real, it's like the whole planet is telling them that their ideology is crap.

• Sell back to private ownership the three million acres of federal land identified under the Clinton Administration as having no federal purpose.

I'd need more detail on this one. Just for reference, three million acres is about four times the size of Rhode Island. I would be surprised if Chaffetz were interested in getting maximum value from the sale, even though it would go a long way in getting us out of this manufactured "debt crisis."

I know that I've come across as a staunch defender of all things governmenty these last few posts. I'm really not. I was all over government's case back when Bush was in office, pointing out the litany of bad things government causes. I'm a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald, who is no friend to the Washington establishment.

I'd like to put my government boosterism into context. I think of government and the corporate world as two separate spheres of power with competing goals. Government at its best can act as a check on corporate power and temper capitalism with the bit of humanity it needs to avoid a violent revolution of the proletariat. But in order to do so, it has to be allied with the interests of the people, not the corporations, and it has to have the size and scope to make an actual difference. You lose the first principle, you get fascism. You lose the second, you get Somalia.

I'm on the pro-government bandwagon right now, because the current flare-up of anti-government rhetoric is so blindly, willfully stupid. Just one example: the health care bill represents a grand compromise, bringing insurance to millions of Americans while intruding minimally into our unique employer-based system, and putting us on equal footing with every other industrialized nation (who somehow manage to provide universal coverage at relatively low cost). But if you listened to the tea partiers, they sound like Obama called for the immediate government takeover of the health care industry, then started rounding people up and forcing them through medical school at gunpoint.

Government needs serious reform, but the Tea Party -- and the politicians who court them -- are indiscriminate in their outrage. In their narrow, unthinking view, all government programs are useless (except defense, which we should continue to fund at rates comparable to the spending of the whole rest of the world), all recipients of government aid are unworthy, and all the government ever does is keep free enterprise from solving our problems. That breeds cynicism of the worst sort, which discourages bright and talented people from joining public service, which eventually gives us the crappy, ineffectual government Republicans -- and their corporate masters -- want us to have.

Contract for the American Dream, part 2: The Nightmare Begins

In part 1, I argued that during the period most closely linked with "The American Dream," (the 1950s), government action was key to the broad-based prosperity of that era. This was in response to Jason Chaffetz' statement called The Contract for the American Dream, which calls for taking the wrecking ball to vast swaths of government.

In part 2, I'd like to take a closer look at some of the problems he lays out in his contract, and the -- and here I really, really have to use quotation marks -- "solutions" he proposes for them.

The American dream wasn't built on higher taxes, Czars, "Cash for Clunkers," or corporate bailouts. And it wasn’t built on a limitless government credit card.

Wow, there is a lot to unpack in that bizarre statement. As I mentioned in part 1, our current taxes are actually fairly low by historical standards, especially for the wealthiest Americans. I can't find a coherent explanation of why I should be outraged over "czars", much less why I should be outraged over Obama's czars and not the dozens that Bush had. Cash for Clunkers was actually a pretty reasonable program.

But the last point, about the limitless government credit card, makes no sense from a historical standard. Let me just quickly point out that, in the aforelinked chart, Republican presidents have overseen the vast majority of the increase in debt to GDP. But the more important point is, looking at it from a historical context, we've been far worse off. America has always had an unlimited credit card. We charged World War II to it, so it's not exactly easy to max it out.

I'll agree that the national debt is a very real problem, and we have to have a long term strategy for getting it down to zero. But most Republicans didn't utter a peep back when they were the ones holding the credit card, then started screaming their fool heads off when they had to turn it over to The Kenyan Crusader. And even with the existential debt crisis, Chaffetz still believes that it is in America's most vital national interest to continue spending nearly as much as the entire rest of the world on national defense. So it's hard to believe that he's serious about tackling the debt problem, rather than using it as an excuse to jettison the chunks of the government that don't fit his ideological whims.

Rather, the best hope for the United States of America is to return to the core principles of fiscal discipline, limited government, accountability, and a strong national defense.

Adherence to these core principles will result in more jobs, more opportunity, more freedom, and consequently a better quality of life now and for future generations.

Since limiting the size and scope of government is supposed to create all these bounties for a country's citizens, I have a challenge for the good representative. Imagine that you have to leave the Socialist United States for parts unknown, and you cannot take any significant wealth with you. That is, you have to live in some other country, as one of the lower or middle class.

Now, make a list of the ten countries you could see yourself spending the rest of your life in. Now cross-reference that list with this one, showing government expenditures as a percentage of GDP. With the possible exceptions of Hong Kong and Singapore, every country you would think of as "industrialized" or as "having a health care system I would willingly subject my dog to" spends a higher fraction of their national wealth on government services. Brazil might be fun to live in for a few years, but not for reasons that have anything to do with "jobs, opportunities, and freedom."

Of course, plenty of hellholes on the list also have high shares of government spending. But consider this: France and Moldova[1] have about the same share of government spending, and France is clearly the better place to live. The Republican assumption that government spending has a powerful negative effect on the quality of life of its country is really hard to justify.

We pay approximately $600 million per day in interest payments.

That does sound like a really big number. Probably because it is. But a bit of perspective is called for. The national GDP is about $13 trillion dollars. $600M a day comes out to about $200 billion dollars, or about 1.5% of the national budget. We have a debt problem, not a debt crisis. The Republicans want it to be a crisis so that they can unravel the social safety net, as Chaffetz' statement of principles makes abundantly clear.

Imagine a federal government that treats the national treasure with respect and responsibility by living within its means-where every American pays a fair share.

Yeah, that does sound good. Unfortunately, as we delve into the specifics of his proposals, we find that "every American pays a fair share" means "tax cuts for the rich," while "living within its means" translates to "tax cuts for the rich, then balance the budget on the backs of the poor."

The specifics begin.... NOW!

• Reduce total federal payroll and workforce by 10%, except for military. This action will force all federal departments to identify and eliminate waste.

That's your plan for getting the economy back on track and getting people back to work? Throw 400,000 workers out of their jobs, and jack up unemployment another half percent? It has a certain audacity to it, I'll grant you that.

He's half right. If everyone loses 10% of their workforce, federal programs will have to eliminate something. But that's the problem with the whole notion of equating "small government" to "good government." If the government is so inherently corrupt that cutting its budget can only be a good thing, then the processes by which the government decides to cut back its services in response to that pressure is going to be corrupt as well.

I'm saying that the two premises are contradictory. "Cutting their budgets will make them more efficient" assumes that the government bodies in question are able to see where their money is being wasted and that they are motivated to deliver the best services they can. "Cutting their budgets has to be a good thing" assumes that the same bodies are hopelessly incompetent and corrupt, with no interest in delivering those same services.

Of course, the whole idea that a smaller budget and staff leads to a more efficient workplace is a crock. Let me offer an anecdote from my workplace. When I first got hired on, my goal was to set up an online order system. It should have taken a few months. If I'd been able to spend all my time on it, it probably would have. But most of my time was actually spent doing the day-to-day business of the organization, because the place was hectic, because we didn't have online ordering, so it actually took well over a year.

Had there been more "waste" in the budget, in the form of people to handle a larger share of the office work, I would have been able to "waste" more of my time doing something that would only pay off in the long run. This isn't to knock my employer, but to illustrate that not every organization can be made more efficient by giving it a 10% haircut.[2] Some government programs need to be cut, sure. But others are already dangerously underfunded.

By proposing a 10% across the board cut, Chaffetz is feeding the overarching Republican narrative: the government serves no important purpose, so decimating[3] its workforce without regard for the work they do couldn't cause any damage, right?

If you are one of the millions of people who keep our borders secure, our food supply and workplaces safe, our laws enforced, our skies Osama-free, our radio transmissions clear, and our youth productively engaged, you should be deeply offended by this proposal. Because you choose to put your time and talents to use in the service of your country, you are a leech in the eyes of the Republican party.

• Support a balanced budget amendment.


• Require 2/3 majority vote for any tax increase.

Yeah, because it worked so well for California.

• Cut non-defense discretionary spending by inflation minus 3% across the board.

Another brilliant across-the-board cut. I don't want to fall into the nasty habit of comparing the government budget to a household budget, but in this case, I'll make an exception. If a family were sitting down to their bills and seeing a 3% shortfall, they would not respond by spending 3% less on food, 3% less on clothing, 3% less on swimming lessons, 3% less on cable, 3% less on their mortgage, etc. They would cut from their budget in proportion to the value the spending was bringing to them. One family might cut the entire cable bill. Another might stop spending money on clothes, but plan to increase their vacation budget.

Across-the-board cuts make about as much sense as having a CEO fire twenty people at random, and nobody who seriously proposes such a course of action can claim to have any respect for the work the employees are doing.

• Impose a moratorium on all appropriations earmarks until the process is reformed legislatively. Work to maximize openness and transparency with filters, to ensure only expenditures with a federal nexus, and prohibit allocations to for-profit companies.

I've never understood Chaffetz' obsession with earmarks. They come out to something like 2% of the federal budget, so even banning them outright isn't going to get our financial house in order. They do seem to make people cynical about government[4], so I agree that they should be reformed. But anyone who says earmark reform is a key issue is grandstanding.

• Reduce the capital gains rate to 10%. This will lead to increased receipts to the federal treasury and will also increase investment in the USA.

This is nothing but a tax cut for the rich. Fewer than one in seven taxpayers pay any capital gains at all, and the wealthiest 3% of the population (minimum income: $200,000/year) paid 83% of all capital gains [source]. It is already the case that money earned by sitting on your ass and watching other people turn your money into more money is taxed at a far lower rate than money earned by busting your ass to turn other peoples money into more money.

Now the Republican signatories to this travesty want to make it even more lucrative to play the sort of financial roulette that busted our economy in the first place. Remember this when you vote in November.

Oh, and one last thing: Tax. Cuts. Don't. Increase. Revenues.

• Engage in entitlement reform.

If this were being said by a Democrat, it would have very different implications. It would mean ferreting out actual waste, fraud, and abuse. It would mean cutting costs, including making the sort of long-term investments that would lead to cost savings down the road. It would mean slowing the growth of Medicare by emphasizing preventative care and building programs that would find out which treatments were most cost-effective. It would mean, well, doing the sort of things that are in the health care reform bill.

From the mouth of Jason Chaffetz, it means pay for the aforementioned tax cuts for the wealthy by cutting off assistance to the poor.

Remember, the Republicans have no serious plans for containing the cost of health care. Their plan boils down to, "Keep the government out of it, and let the free market do its magic." Which is what we've been doing lo these last hundred years, and to ill effect.

Wow. All that, and I'm still only through the first set of bullet points. I suppose a part 3 will have to be written. Representative Chaffetz, if you could refrain from saying stupid things, it would save me a lot of time, and drastically improve my quality of life.


Notes:

[1] Moldova has been cited in happiness-related studies as the single most depressing place on Earth.

[2] Except the military. We must always except the military.

[3] Literally.

[4] Which if anything is good for Republicans.