Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
February 1, 2013
Latest Studies: 50 new items, including Institute for Justice reports on civil forfeiture abuse, and a Mercatus Center evaluation of risk-based capital regulation
Notes on the Week: Tax reform action is in the states, we’re sending too many people to college, new issue of The Insider examines the state of federalism, and more
To Do: Get ready for CPAC
Budget & Taxation
• The Debt Ceiling: Assets Available to Prevent Default – Mercatus Center
• The Effectiveness of Enterprise Zones in Missouri – Show-Me Institute
• North Carolina Tax Reform Options: A Guide to Fair, Simple, Pro-Growth Reform – Tax Foundation
• State and Local Governments Impose Hefty Taxes on Cell Phone Consumers – Tax Foundation
• The Sources of State and Local Tax Revenues – Tax Foundation
• Citizens’ Guide to Spokane’s Proposition 2 – Washington Policy Center
Crime, Justice & the Law
• A Stacked Deck: How Minnesota’s Civil Forfeiture Laws Put Citizen’s Property at Risk – Institute for Justice
• Rotten Reporting in the Peach State – Institute for Justice
Economic Growth
• Confronting the U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Skills Gap – American Enterprise Institute
• A Better Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States – The Heritage Foundation
Education
• New Pathways for Teachers, New Promises for Students: A Vision for Developing Excellent Teachers – American Enterprise Institute
• A Nation Still at Risk: The Continuing Crisis of American Education and Its State Solution – Americans for Prosperity
• Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? – Center for College Affordability and Productivity
• Combating the ‘Culture of Can’t’ – Education Next
• Questioning the Quality of Virtual Schools – Education Next
• School Leaders Matter – Education Next
• The K-12 Implosion – Encounter Books
• Choosing to Succeed – The Heritage Foundation
• Man, Sex, God, and Yale – Hillsdale College
• The Best Teachers in the World – Hoover Institution
• Hands-On Achievement: Why Massachusetts Vocational Technical Schools Have Low Dropout Rates – Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research
• A Primer on Missouri’s Foundation Formula for K-12 Public Education – Show-Me Institute
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Deciphering Iranian Decision Making and Strategy Today – American Enterprise Institute
• The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Doctrine: A Pretext for Disarming Israel – Capital Research Center
• Hagel, Kerry, and Brennan Senate Confirmation Hearings: U.S. Policy on Arctic Security – The Heritage Foundation
• Indo–Pakistani Tension: Pakistan Should Crack Down on Militant Infiltration – The Heritage Foundation
• North Korea Nuclear Test: Time for U.S. and U.N. to Get Serious on Sanctions – The Heritage Foundation
• U.S. Must Enforce Peacekeeping Cap to Lower America’s U.N. Assessment – The Heritage Foundation
Government Reform
• Union Money: 100 Percent Democrat. Really? – Public Interest Institute
Immigration
• Senate Immigration Reform: Another Misguided Call for Comprehensive Legislation – The Heritage Foundation
Labor
• Michigan Becomes the 24th Right-to-Work State – Capital Research Center
• Labor Unions: Declining Membership Shows Labor Laws Need Modernizing – The Heritage Foundation
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• The CFPB in Action: Consumer Bureau Harms Those It Claims to Protect – The Heritage Foundation
• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Its Non-Director: What Now? – The Heritage Foundation
• Risky Business: Insurance Markets and Regulation – Independence Institute
• Evaluating Risk-Based Capital Regulation – Mercatus Center
National Security
• The Measure of a Superpower: A Two Major Regional Contingency Military for the 21st Century – The Heritage Foundation
• To Confront Cyber Threats, We Must Rethink the Law of Armed Conflict – Hoover Institution
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• 2012 Cost Analysis of the New Energy Economy – Competitive Enterprise Institute
• Climate Change: How the U.S. Should Lead – The Heritage Foundation
• Time to Chill Out on Global Warming – Hoover Institution
• The Other Bakken Boom: A Tribe Atop the Nation’s Biggest Oil Play – PERC – The Property and Environment Research Center
Philanthropy
• A Reaganite Entrepreneur’s Flawed Philanthropy: An Engineering Genius Didn’t Design his Foundation to Honor his Donor Intent – Capital Research Center
Regulation & Deregulation
• The Gun Ban Lobby and Its Funders – Capital Research Center
• Wounds That Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide – Encounter Books
• Guild By Association – John Locke Foundation
Retirement/Social Security
• Compulsory Super at 20: ‘Libertarian Paternalism’ Without the Libertarianism – Centre for Independent Studies
• A Comparison of Missouri Pension Plans – Show-Me Institute
The Constitution/Civil Liberties
• The Constitutionality of Traditional Marriage – The Heritage Foundation
Welfare
• The Unfinished Work of Welfare Reform – The Heritage Foundation
Federalism just means states’ rights, right?
Editor’s Note: Assembly Lines, James Madison, and Federalism
In “One Piece at a Time,” Johnny Cash tells the story of an assembly line worker who takes home one automobile part at a time in his lunch box. After a number of years, the worker starts putting together his new car that didn’t cost him a dime. He finds, however, that getting the car to run requires some retrofitting of the parts. When he applies for a title, he must declare: “Well, it’s a ’49, ’50, ’51, ’52, ’53, ’54, ’55, ’56, ’57, ’58, ’59 automobile/ It’s a ’60, ’61, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’68, ’69, ’70 automobile.”
Cash’s man, by necessity, focused on the components of his project and forgot to think about how those components would be arranged. Something similar happens when we talk about federalism. We tend to glorify states, emphasize their rights, and think in terms of balancing federal and state power. But just as a pile of automobile parts won’t run unless put together in the right way, merely having some distribution of powers among the states and the federal government will not yield a regime that knows its limits and respects the rights of citizens.
The kind of federalism you get depends on how the powers are arranged. As Michael Greve explains in our cover story, the federalism we have today is too often a cooperative cartel between the states and the federal government. That set-up drives government growth, blurs accountability, and leaves citizens no escape from bad policy regimes. What we need, says Greve, is to recover James Madison’s idea of federalism as a system of competition between the states.
Of course, states do still compete in a number of policy areas. We see that competition in Michigan’s recent right-to-work reforms. Simply put, the state where the assembly line was invented got tired of losing jobs and people to right-to-work states. No amount of union history could forever prevent the learning of the lessons that competition was teaching. We talk with Joe Lehman of the Mackinac Center about Michigan’s historic switch.
In other articles, Rob Gordon shows how conservatives have a better set of ideas for conservation, Salim Furth identifies the reasons for our slow recovery, and Mark Harris provides some everyday tips for think tank cyber security.
National School Choice Week: How to get parents involved in the fight for school choice: Some tips from parent and school choice activist Virginia Walden Ford:
• Go where the parents are—their neighborhoods, community centers, churches—not to ask them to always come to you.
• Communicate with parents regularly through letters, newsletters, media, churches, civic organizations, etc.
• All parents have something they can add—some make speeches; some pass out flyers; each has his own way of contributing.
• It’s all about the follow up: If you present yourself as helping parents, be prepared to go the extra mile to make sure that parents have you with them as they complete the process of finding educational opportunities for their children.
• Make sure that parent meetings start on time, do not last too long, have childcare, refreshments, and are structured to provide the best information possible in order to empower parents.
• Choose your battles. Don’t get into debates with parents, since debating tends to confuse and frustrate parents who are hungry for solutions to educating their children. They ultimately have to make the final decision for their children and have a right to hear all sides. When you encounter opposition, keep your calm and give parents valuable information that will be helpful to them in their search.
• Make sure you have steps that give parents a vision of where you are going and how they fit into that vision. [“School Choice: An Activists Guide,” by Virginia Walden Ford, in “Choosing to Succeed,” ed. Lindsey Burke, January 28, 2013, The Heritage Foundation]
Maybe higher education should develop a master’s degree in janitorial studies. Forty-eight percent of college graduates have jobs that do not require a four-year college education, finds a new study by Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. They also report: “In 1970, fewer than one percent of taxi drivers and two percent of firefighters had college degrees, while now more than 15 percent do in both jobs.” Vedder, Denhart, and Robe contend the country is churning out too many college graduates, and is wasting resources on higher education that could be better spent elsewhere—not the least of which are the years healthy young adults spend not being productive so that they can spend more time socializing.
But what of the many studies showing that college graduates earn a significant wage premium over high school graduates? The authors point out a number of problems with inferring from those data that college is worth the cost. Most crucially, they contend that the value of a college degree lies in the signal it sends potential employers about a graduate’s fitness for employment rather than in the actual education the candidate has received. And as employers have increasingly relied on that signal to screen job applicants, more people have pursued the credential, causing its value for recent graduates to decline.
As labor market realities make the real value of a degree clearer, we might expect fewer people to choose to go to college, and the problem would fix itself. As Vedder, Denhart, and Robe point out, however, there is a major problem with that scenario: Massive federal loan subsidies already incentivize college attendance, and politicians may be planning to increase the subsidies. President Obama, for example, has stated that the nation’s goal should be to increase the number of people attending a four-year college so that “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” [“Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor Market Realities,” by Richard Veder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe, Center for College Affordability and Productivity, January 2013.]
Solis forgot to police the unions. Hilda Solis resigned as Secretary of Labor on January 22, and her legacy will be giving the unions a pass on the financial reports they’re supposed to fill out so that union members know how their money is being spent. The reports are required under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), which was given teeth by the previous Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao. Solis’s undoing of that progress can be seen in the findings last year of the Office of Inspector General’s review of the Department’s own auditing of union disclosures. As James Sherk and Rudy Takala point out:
[T]he OIG found that 76 percent of the reviewed […] audits missed non-criminal violations of the law. These violations include failing to file and failing to maintain records.
The audits did track criminal violations of the LMRDA. A good thing, too: 16 percent of unions audited—one in six—committed criminal violations of the LMRDA. In all, 92 percent of the unions that were audited violated regulations. The [Office of Labor Management Standards] failed to report 76 percent of those violations because of their flawed reporting standards.
Equally problematic, OLMS has dramatically cut back on its audits. Despite frequently finding criminal violations, the Obama Administration cut the number OLMS audits by almost 40 percent between 2009 and 2011. Union officers abusing their positions are substantially less likely to be audited now than before Solis took office. [The Foundry, January 29]
Think the public school monopoly is more egalitarian than school choice? Think again. Education policy researcher Michael McShane, who once taught English at a historically African-American Catholic school in Montgomery, Alabama, explains how public schools segregate students:
Because the lion’s share of our public schools are residentially assigned, and because our neighborhoods are, by and large, segregated, we see racial and socio-economic stratification in our schools. Houses in neighborhoods zoned for better public schools cost more, and therefore people have to pay “tuition” (in the form of a higher mortgage) to get their children into them.
Look at the breakdown by race of the seven public high schools in Montgomery. The only schools that are less than 80 percent African-American are the three academically-selective magnet schools. This tells us that in Montgomery if you want to attend something other than a hyper-segregated school with a less than 52 percent graduation rate you must qualify for a magnet, move to the suburbs, or pay to attend a private school. That is neither right nor fair. School choice, done right, can offer stronger academic alternatives without sacrificing the public mission of schooling.
Big cuts in income taxes are coming—in the states. The action on tax policy is in the state capitals. Lawmakers in Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, Indiana, and New Mexico, are planning major reductions in tax rates this year, reports the Wall Street Journal. Plus the governors of Nebraska and Louisiana want to eliminate their states’ income taxes while boosting sales taxes; in other words, they want to trade a tax on wealth creation for a tax on consumption. These lawmakers, observes the Journal, seem to have noticed the good results achieved by states with no income taxes:
A new analysis by economist Art Laffer for the American Legislative Exchange Council finds that, from 2002 to 2012, 62% of the three million net new jobs in America were created in the nine states without an income tax, though these states account for only about 20% of the national population. The no-income tax states have had more stable revenue growth, while states like New York, New Jersey and California that depend on the top 1% of earners for nearly half of their income-tax revenue suffer wide and destabilizing swings in their tax collections.
In the case of North Carolina, a new study by the Civitas Institute concludes that a tax reform that shifts more of the burden to consumption from income would increase average annual personal income growth by 0.38% to 0.66%. That’s enormous over time and would lead to much higher state tax revenues. North Carolina’s top income tax rate is 7.75%, which is higher than that of most nearby states that it competes with for investment. Virginia’s top rate is 5.75% while Tennessee has no personal income tax. [Wall Street Journal, January 29]
• This week was National School Choice Week, and if you haven’t done it already you should at least take a moment to find out what school choice programs your state has. Start by checking the handy table reference in the new Heritage Foundation publication, Choosing to Succeed.
• Did you know clouds cannot form precipitation without the presence of living microbes? There’s a whole ecosystem up there in the sky, and scientists are still trying to figure out how it works. But the impact of clouds on the climate is nearly absent from the climate models predicting future warming. Another wrench in the consensus: The Medieval Warm Period appears to be about 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than today, despite having a lot less carbon. [“Time to Chill Out on Global Warming,” by Charles Hooper, Defining Ideas, January 17]
• Why, exactly, do we need one big bill that tries to solve all our immigration policy problems at once? Why, for example, does securing the border or streamlining the visa program require also having a plan to deal with those immigrants who are currently in the United States illegally? [“Senate Immigration Reform: Another Misguided Call for Comprehensive Legislation,” by Jessica Zuckerman, The Heritage Foundation, January 30]
• Wikipedia is 12 already! Is it, as some of its fans think, the grandest example of diverse people collaborating peacefully? Not exactly: “Wikipedia is certainly an impressive success story. It’s collaborative, diverse, and peaceful—and people increasingly rely on Wikipedia to acquire information. It is worth celebrating. But it is not humanity’s greatest collaborative effort, nor our greatest source of useful information. Those come from the direct and indirect benefits of the peaceful, voluntary arrangements referred to in shorthand as ‘market interactions.’ Yet while we laud Wikipedia for what it provides, we should also remember that the benefits of voluntary association in the market are under attack on many fronts. Giving markets the kind of respect Wikipedia currently enjoys would be a major step forward for humanity.” [“If You Like Wikipedia, You Should Love Markets,” by Gary M. Galles, The Freeman, January 30]
• Critics of “enhanced interrogation techniques” seem to want to reduce the issue to the question of whether those techniques actually worked. Wouldn’t it be convenient if our moral instincts never had a cost? But three of the people who ran the Central Intelligence Agency’s detainee interrogation program told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute that the program did produce valuable information. They also revealed some ways the program didn’t work as the critics imagine. Interrogators were not so naïve, for example, as to think detainees wouldn’t lie in order to avoid suffering. The purpose of “enhanced interrogation” was to break the detainee’s will to resist. “Once you got through the enhanced interrogation process, then the real interrogation began,” explained one official. [“The Case for Torture,” by William Saletan, Slate, January 30]
• Fifty-two percent of Pennsylvania public teachers say union leaders do not represent their views. [FreetoTeach.org, January 2013]
• Lisa Jackson is the worst head of the worst regulatory agency ever, says Henry Miller, who points out the problem wasn’t just that Jackson’s Environmental Protection Agency ignored science and failed to balance costs and benefits in pursuit of regulatory power. The agency also exceeded its authority under law (and was regularly rebuked by the courts); treated its grant programs as slush funds to buy support from non-profit allies (the Government Accountability Office found a systematic failure to award grants based on merit); and has used the legal subterfuge of finding friendly activist organization willing to sue the agency in order to justify harsher regulations. Gosh, what could be in those “Richard Windsor” e-mails we haven’t yet seen? [“The EPA’s Lisa Jackson: The Worst Head of the Worst Regulatory Agency, Ever,” by Henry I. Miller, Forbes, January 30]
• Among the tools you might find handy in case a gunman comes looking for targets, says the Department of Homeland Security: scissors! This advice on how to protect yourself during what the agency calls an “active shooter situation,” comes from a video the agency recently produced. The video also recommends crouching, hiding, and running—all to be preferred, no doubt, over doing nothing. But, for some reason we can’t think of, the folks at DHS overlooked something. So we’ll fix the oversight: Another tool you might find helpful in case someone with a gun tries to kill you would be a gun. You’re welcome, DHS.
• The Cato Institute is the house that Ed Crane built. “‘In the long run, the ideology of freedom will win,’ [Charles] Murray said at the Cato Club 200 retreat in September. ‘And when the history is written of how it is that, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the flickering flame of freedom became strong enough to withstand the winds, Ed Crane’s name will figure very largely.’” [“The Legacy of Edward H. Crane,” Cato Policy Report, January/February 2013]
• Thanks to ObamaCare, health insurers are no longer guaranteeing initial rates for a year at a time. Put it down to the actuarial uncertainty that happens when so many new regulations come at once. [“The Most Ominous Sign Yet Health Insurance Premiums Will Explode,” by Merrill Matthews, Forbes January 30]
• Write a speech or make a video for the Conservative Political Action Conference. Are you student who wants to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference for free? Winning the “Why I Am a Conservative,” essay contest will get you a 3-day VIP pass (value: $1,000) and an opportunity to address the CPAC convention. Mail your submissions (no more than 700 words), to CPAC@conservative.org by February 7, 2013. You can also enter the CPAC YouTube Video contest with a video that addresses the topic: The Future of the Conservative Movement: Timeless Principles, New Challenges. You could win $750 and have your video showcased at CPAC. Make sure you include “CPAC 2013 in the title and submit the video and link by February 28. 2013 to CPAC@conservative.org. Both contests are open to students.
• Hear Sen. Rand Paul talk about how to restore the Founder’s vision of foreign policy. The senator will speak at The Heritage foundation at 11 a.m. on February 6.
• Get an update on the new legal challenges to ObamaCare. The Cato Institute will host a panel discussion featuring the lead attorneys in two different cases. The event begins at 4 p.m. on February 7.
• Help honor Israel Kirzner for his contributions to market process theory and entrepreneurship studies. The Mercatus Center, the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Order, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and the Liberty Fund will host a panel discussion on Prof. Kirzner’s work. A reception will follow. The event begins at 4 p.m. on February 7, and will be held at the Mason Inn in Fairfax, Virginia.
• If you are a pro-liberty student, then you should attend the 2013 International Students for Liberty Conference. It’s the largest such gathering in the world, and will help you engage in the battle for liberty on your campus. The event, organized by Students for Liberty, will be held February 15 – 17 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C.
(And check out our conservative calendar for more things to do.)
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