This is an impor­tant post. I’m email­ing it to every­one I can.

You mean the exis­ten­tial threat to lib­erty isn’t due to too many lazy teach­ers, police, and fire­fight­ers?! Me so con­fused:

ABC News
Jun 12, 2012 6:00am
Would Rom­ney Cut Fire­fight­ers?
By Matt Negrin

Mitt Rom­ney appears to be deny­ing that he would cut fire­fight­ers and teach­ers as pres­i­dent, though com­ments by his cam­paign and sup­port­ers haven’t fully resolved a state­ment the can­di­date made last week about pub­lic workers.

Rom­ney said on Fox News today that Democ­rats’ claim about him want­ing to cut those work­ers is a “very strange accusation.”

Later, as reporters briefly cor­nered him in Orlando, Rom­ney refused to talk about his com­ment about fire­fight­ers and teach­ers. “Oh, I’m not going to talk about that,” he said.

On Mon­day, though, his cam­paign did lit­tle to sug­gest that his recent com­ment about cut­ting back on fire­fight­ers, police offi­cers and teach­ers had been taken out of context.

At first it seemed as if Romney’s state­ment about Pres­i­dent Obama — “He says we need more fire­men, more police­men, more teach­ers. Did he not get the mes­sage in Wis­con­sin? The Amer­i­can peo­ple did. It’s time for us to cut back on gov­ern­ment and help the Amer­i­can peo­ple.” — was an unfor­tu­nate phras­ing or com­bi­na­tion of thoughts.

But the cam­paign didn’t pro­vide any clar­i­fi­ca­tion on the record of what else Rom­ney might have meant to say. Asked repeat­edly for elab­o­ra­tion, Amanda Hen­neberg, a Rom­ney spokes­woman, pro­vided a state­ment about Obama being “out of touch.”

Asked about his com­ment on Fox News, Rom­ney replied: “Of course, teach­ers and fire­men and police­men are hired at the local level and also by states. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment doesn’t pay for teach­ers, fire­fight­ers or police­men. So obvi­ously that is com­pletely absurd, but he’s got a new idea, though, and that is to have another stim­u­lus and to have the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to try and bail out cities and states. It didn’t work the first time. It cer­tainly wouldn’t work the sec­ond time.”

John Sununu, a for­mer New Hamp­shire gov­er­nor who is one of Romney’s most vis­i­ble sup­port­ers in the media, said in a TV inter­view on Mon­day that lay­ing off teach­ers makes sense if fewer kids are in class­rooms and new tech­nol­ogy assists in learning.

“I think this is a real issue, and peo­ple ought to stop jump­ing on it as a gaffe and under­stand there’s wis­dom in the com­ment,” Sununu said.

Brad Wood­house, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor of the Demo­c­ra­tic National Com­mit­tee, responded on a con­fer­ence call shortly after­ward: “I thought John Sununu’s com­ments were a bunch of hooey.”

...

If we don’t fire fire­fight­ers our free­dom will burn to the ground. And it’s not like pri­vate cit­i­zens can’t pur­chase pri­va­tized fire pro­tec­tion. It would be fairer AND cheaper. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.

And you have to agree that John Sununu has a point. If there are fewer kids in school, do we really need more teach­ers. I hope you’re lis­ten­ing kids:

Feb­ru­ary 11, 2009 7:22 PM

Baby Boom ‘Echo’ Hits Schools

Leave it to today’s school kids to trump their baby boomer parents.

A total of 49.6 mil­lion chil­dren attended pub­lic and pri­vate school in 2003, beat­ing the pre­vi­ous high mark of 48.7 mil­lion — set in 1970 when the baby boom gen­er­a­tion was in school.

The growth is largely due to all the chil­dren born in the late 1940s to early 1960s, who have since become par­ents them­selves, the Cen­sus Bureau said Wednes­day. Ris­ing immi­gra­tion played a part, too.

“You could have pre­dicted this back in 1970 when we had all those kids,” said Mark Mather, a demog­ra­pher for the Pop­u­la­tion Ref­er­ence Bureau, which assesses pop­u­la­tion trends. “We knew they were going to have kids of their own. We have this clas­sic echo effect going on.”

Even if it isn’t sur­pris­ing, the record tally of stu­dents in the first 12 grades poses steep chal­lenges for schools: recruit­ing teach­ers, help­ing chil­dren who don’t speak Eng­lish, keep­ing class sizes man­age­able and com­ing up with enough finan­cial aid for col­lege students.

In pop­u­la­tion rings out­side urban areas and in West­ern states such as Nevada and Cal­i­for­nia the growth has been con­cen­trated, increas­ing demands on schools.

“They just really don’t have the fis­cal capac­ity to match this,” said Scott Young, senior pol­icy spe­cial­ist in edu­ca­tion for the National Con­fer­ence of State Legislatures.

...

“These kids are com­ing along at a time when — unlike the baby boomers — their chances of a middle-class life with­out col­lege are almost nil,” Callan said. “It’s going to drive higher edu­ca­tion pol­icy over the next few years. This is a huge challenge.”

The enroll­ment growth is likely to con­tinue through this year, accord­ing to the Cen­sus Bureau report. Enroll­ment is expected to drop slightly through 2010 — due to a decline in births from 1991 to 1997 — but then pick up again, the Cen­sus fig­ures show.

All the esti­mates are based on sur­vey responses from a sam­ple of the pop­u­la­tion in 2003.

...

Ok, well, there may be a record num­ber of stu­dents, but that still doesn’t mean we need more teach­ers! As Mr. Sununu also pointed out, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of tech­no­log­i­cal replace­ments for teach­ers. Isn’ that right Niel?

And when all these kids decide to head off to col­lege, let’s not fall into that trap of “oh, no, now we have to find a way to pay for all these co-eds”. None­sense. What good is it to have all these bil­lion­aire sugar-daddy’s if you can’t tap into their infi­nite founts of wis­dom AND check­books. Just don’t expect any hand­outs you lil’ moochers:

Op-Ed Con­trib­u­tor
The Col­lege Grad­u­ate as Col­lat­eral
By LUIGI ZINGALES
Pub­lished: June 13, 2012

Chicago

ACADEMIC econ­o­mists like to make fun of busi­ness­peo­ple: they want com­pe­ti­tion when they enter a new mar­ket but are quick to lobby for sub­si­dies and bar­ri­ers to com­peti­tors once they get in. Yet schol­ars like me are no bet­ter. We work in the least com­pet­i­tive and most sub­si­dized indus­try of all: higher education.

We crit­i­cize preda­tory loans by mort­gage bro­kers, when stu­dent loans can be just as abu­sive. To avoid the next credit bub­ble and debt cri­sis, we need to elim­i­nate gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies and link tuition financ­ing to the incomes of col­lege graduates.

Nearly eight mil­lion stu­dents received Pell grants in 2010, cost­ing $28 bil­lion. In addi­tion, the fed­eral direct loan pro­gram, which allows non­af­flu­ent stu­dents to get government-guaranteed loans at low inter­est rates, cost tax­pay­ers $13 bil­lion in 2010-11. Total sub­si­dies to uni­ver­sity edu­ca­tion amount to $43 bil­lion a year, includ­ing around $2 bil­lion in Con­gres­sional ear­marks — and that does not even include tax sub­si­dies (for col­lege funds); tax breaks (for uni­ver­sity endow­ments, for exam­ple); and sub­si­dies ded­i­cated to research.

Just as sub­si­dies for home­own­er­ship have increased the price of houses, so have edu­ca­tion sub­si­dies con­tributed to the soar­ing price of col­lege. Between 1977 and 2009 the real aver­age cost of uni­ver­sity tuition more than doubled.

These sub­si­dies also dis­tort the credit mar­ket. Since the gov­ern­ment guar­an­tees stu­dent loans, lenders have no incen­tive to lend wisely. All the bur­den of mak­ing the right deci­sion falls on the bor­row­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, 18-year-olds aren’t par­tic­u­larly good at judg­ing the prof­itabil­ity of an invest­ment with­out expert advice, and when they do get such advice, it gen­er­ally coun­sels tak­ing the largest pos­si­ble loan. The stock of stu­dent loans has reached $1 tril­lion, while the per­cent­age of bor­row­ers in default jumped to 8.8 per­cent in 2009 from 6.7 per­cent in 2007.

Last but not least, these sub­si­dized loans keep afloat col­leges that do not add much value for their stu­dents, pre­vent­ing peo­ple from accu­mu­lat­ing use­ful skills.

I do not want to sug­gest that help­ing under­priv­i­leged stu­dents attend col­lege is bad. A true free-market sys­tem equal­izes oppor­tu­ni­ties, if not for fair­ness, at least for effi­ciency: tal­ent should not be wasted.

The best way to fix this inef­fi­ciency is to address the root of the prob­lem: most bright stu­dents do not have any col­lat­eral and can­not eas­ily pledge their future income. Yet the venture-capital indus­try has shown that the pri­vate sec­tor can do a good job at financ­ing new ven­tures with no col­lat­eral. So why can’t they finance bright students?

Investors could finance stu­dents’ edu­ca­tion with equity rather than debt. In exchange for their cap­i­tal, the investors would receive a frac­tion of a student’s future income — or, even bet­ter, a frac­tion of the increase in her income that derives from col­lege atten­dance. (This increase can be eas­ily cal­cu­lated as the dif­fer­ence between the actual income and the aver­age income of high school grad­u­ates in the same area.)

This is not a mod­ern form of inden­tured servi­tude, but a vol­un­tary form of tax­a­tion, one that would make only the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of a col­lege edu­ca­tion — not all tax­pay­ers — pay for the costs of it.

...

Equity con­tracts would diver­sify the risk of fail­ure, with highly com­pen­sated super­stars help­ing to finance the edu­ca­tions of less suc­cess­ful col­lege grad­u­ates. They will also avoid push­ing grad­u­ates into lucra­tive jobs just to pay off debt. Most impor­tant, these con­tracts would pro­vide financiers with an incen­tive to coun­sel stu­dents wisely, as financiers would profit from good edu­ca­tional invest­ments and lose from bad ones. This would cre­ate more informed demand for the schools, exert­ing pres­sure on them to con­tain costs and improve quality.

That’s right, if we to ensure that “tal­ent isn’t wasted”, what we need to get is get all of our tal­ented bet­ters (i.e. folks with lots of money) to start directly “invest­ing” in the next gen­er­a­tion. For a profit, of course. So not only will we be able to pay for all those kid­dies’ col­lege edu­ca­tions, but those bright, aspir­ing stu­dents will get all that wis­dom and guid­ance passed down to them from their “investors”. Granted, some areas of study might suf­fer as as result of this wise guid­ance. But think of all the valu­able “School of Life”-lessons that would be passed down!

Who says aus­ter­ity can’t be expan­sion­ary. I feel my mind expand­ing already just think­ing about this wiser AND cheaper world ahead of us.

The pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. I can envi­sion a ‘penny stock’ seg­ment for this mar­ket, where those who can’t afford to invest in, say, a med­ical stu­dent, can still sub­si­dize a young woman’s beau­ti­cian course or a young man’s car­pen­try instruc­tion and then own a piece of their earn­ings for years out. There is income to be squeezed all around us if you have the eyes to see!

@Dwight:
It looks like Louisiana might be show­ing us one of the future trends in the “squeez­ing prof­its in any way con­ceiv­able from education”-trend. I’m grimly fas­ci­nated to see what Bible-based math looks like. 1 + 1 = Lib­er­als destroy global pros­per­ity, appar­ently:

Louisiana’s bold bid to pri­va­tize schools

By Stephanie Simon

June 1 | Fri Jun 1, 2012 6:04pm EDT

(Reuters) — Louisiana is embark­ing on the nation’s bold­est exper­i­ment in pri­va­tiz­ing pub­lic edu­ca­tion, with the state prepar­ing to shift tens of mil­lions in tax dol­lars out of the pub­lic schools to pay pri­vate indus­try, busi­nesses own­ers and church pas­tors to edu­cate children.

Start­ing this fall, thou­sands of poor and middle-class kids will get vouch­ers cov­er­ing the full cost of tuition at more than 120 pri­vate schools across Louisiana, includ­ing small, Bible-based church schools.

The fol­low­ing year, stu­dents of any income will be eli­gi­ble for mini-vouchers that they can use to pay a range of private-sector ven­dors for classes and appren­tice­ships not offered in tra­di­tional pub­lic schools. The money can go to indus­try trade groups, busi­nesses, online schools and tutors, among others.

Every time a stu­dent receives a voucher of either type, his local pub­lic school will lose a chunk of state funding.

...

BIBLE-BASED MATH BOOKS

The con­cept of open­ing pub­lic schools to com­pe­ti­tion from the pri­vate sec­tor has been widely pro­moted in recent years by well-funded edu­ca­tion reform groups.

Of the plans so far put for­ward, Louisiana’s plan is by far the broad­est. This month, eli­gi­ble fam­i­lies, includ­ing those with incomes near­ing $60,000 a year, are sub­mit­ting appli­ca­tions for vouch­ers to state-approved pri­vate schools.

That list includes some of the most pres­ti­gious schools in the state, which offer a rich menu of advanced place­ment courses, college-style sem­i­nars and lush grounds. The top schools, how­ever, have just a hand­ful of slots open. The Dun­ham School in Baton Rouge, for instance, has said it will accept just four voucher stu­dents, all kinder­gart­ners. As else­where, they will be picked in a lottery.

Far more open­ings are avail­able at smaller, less pres­ti­gious reli­gious schools, includ­ing some that are just a few years old and oth­ers that have strug­gled to attract tuition-paying students.

The school will­ing to accept the most voucher stu­dents — 314 — is New Liv­ing Word in Rus­ton, which has a top-ranked bas­ket­ball team but no library. Stu­dents spend most of the day watch­ing TVs in bare-bones class­rooms. Each les­son con­sists of an instruc­tional DVD that inter­sperses Bib­li­cal verses with sub­jects such chem­istry or composition.

The Upper­room Bible Church Acad­emy in New Orleans, a bunker-like build­ing with no win­dows or play­ground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher stu­dents, worth up to $1.8 mil­lion in state funding.

At Eter­nity Chris­t­ian Acad­emy in West­lake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Car­rier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher stu­dents, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first– through eighth-grade stu­dents sit in cubi­cles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Chris­t­ian work­books, such as a begin­ning sci­ence text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of cre­ation. They are not exposed to the the­ory of evolution.

“We try to stay away from all those things that might con­fuse our chil­dren,” Car­rier said.

Other schools approved for state-funded vouch­ers use social stud­ies texts warn­ing that lib­er­als threaten global pros­per­ity; Bible-based math books that don’t cover mod­ern con­cepts such as set the­ory; and biol­ogy texts built around refut­ing evolution.

...

NO FISCAL ANALYSIS

Offi­cials have not esti­mated the price tag of these pro­grams but expect the state will save money in the long run, because they believe the pri­vate sec­tor can edu­cate kids more cheaply than pub­lic schools.

Whether those sav­ings will mate­ri­al­ize is unclear.

By law, the value of each voucher can’t exceed the sum the state would spend edu­cat­ing that child in pub­lic school — on aver­age, $8,800 a year. Small pri­vate schools often charge as lit­tle as $3,000 to $5,000 a year.

Yet at some pri­vate schools with low tuition, admin­is­tra­tors con­tacted by Reuters said they would also ask the state to cover addi­tional, unspec­i­fied fees, which would bring the cost to tax­pay­ers close to the $8,800 cap. The law requires the state to cover both tuition and fees.

...

Here’s an addi­tional cost sav­ings approach: why bother hav­ing sep­a­rate text books for dif­fer­ent sub­jects when you could just have one text book used for every class in every grade. I’m pretty sure you could get it past the state boards of edu­ca­tion:

NY Times
Texas School Board Set to Vote Text­book Revisions

By MICHAEL BRICK
Pub­lished: May 20, 2010

AUSTIN, Tex. — After fac­ing months of protest, con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers of the Texas Board of Edu­ca­tion were expected Thurs­day night to vote to teach school­child­ren a ver­sion of Amer­i­can his­tory that empha­sizes the roles of cap­i­tal­ist enter­prise, the mil­i­tary, Chris­tian­ity and mod­ern Repub­li­can polit­i­cal figures.

The sched­uled vote was a pre­lim­i­nary tally, with the final vote by the same group planned for Friday.

The deci­sion, expected to fall largely along the party lines — the board has 10 Repub­li­cans and 5 Democ­rats — fol­lowed tens of thou­sands of pub­lic com­ments, a protest rally and a day­long hear­ing where about 200 speak­ers addressed the board.

By sheer force of its pop­u­la­tion size, Texas has long held out­size influ­ence on national text­book pub­lish­ers, some of whom sent cur­ricu­lum writ­ers to take notes in the boardroom.

...

Last year, con­ser­v­a­tives on the board changed the state sci­ence cur­ricu­lum to under­mine the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion, cell for­ma­tion and the Big Bang.

While many of the changes to the sci­ence cur­ricu­lum used coded lan­guage to advance con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples, some addi­tions to the his­tory stan­dards were more overtly polit­i­cal. Board mem­bers planned to add lan­guage requir­ing high school stu­dents of the civil rights move­ment to “describe the role of indi­vid­u­als such as gov­er­nors George Wal­lace, Orval Faubus, and Lester Mad­dox and groups, includ­ing the Con­gres­sional bloc of south­ern Democ­rats, that sought to main­tain the sta­tus quo.”

In another pas­sage, the board would require stu­dents to explain the roles of “Phyl­lis Schlafly, the Con­tract With Amer­ica, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, the Moral Major­ity, and the National Rifle Association.”

By the time of the vote on Thurs­day, con­ser­v­a­tives on the board had already out­lined their inten­tions in broad strokes.

...

Oh well, at least Louisiana’s leg­is­la­tors aren’t entirely clue­less about the dan­gers of reli­gion cloud­ing edu­ca­tional cur­ricu­lums. Con­cepts like bla­tant, over­whelm­ing hypocrisy might still elude them, as well as the oxy­moronic nature of fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gious “edu­ca­tion”, but you can’t say the dan­gers of mix­ing reli­gion and edu­ca­tion are entirely lost on these folks.

Note the over­whelm­ing sup­port in the state leg­is­la­ture for Lousiana’s new edu­ca­tion pri­va­ti­za­tion scheme. Not enough votes? Eh, what­ever:

$3.4B school fund­ing plan gets final pas­sage
Jun 4, 2012 1:23pm

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The Louisiana House gave final leg­isla­tive pas­sage Mon­day to a $3.4 bil­lion ele­men­tary and sec­ondary school spend­ing plan, with­out reach­ing the num­ber of votes usu­ally needed to approve a bill.

House Speaker Chuck Kleck­ley, R-Lake Charles, decided that since the multibillion-dollar spend­ing plans were con­tained in a leg­isla­tive res­o­lu­tion, they didn’t require the 53 votes needed to pass a bill. Instead, Kleck­ley said the mea­sure required sup­port of a major­ity of those House mem­bers present and voting.

With that deci­sion, the House’s 51–49 vote on the last day of the leg­isla­tive ses­sion gave the fund­ing for­mula a final OK. A day ear­lier, the Sen­ate passed the mea­sure in a 24–15 vote, above the num­ber needed to pass a bill.

The for­mula cov­ers state spend­ing for Louisiana’s 70 pub­lic school dis­tricts and for other edu­ca­tional pro­grams involv­ing nearly 700,000 students.

The Jin­dal admin­is­tra­tion urged pas­sage of the spend­ing plans. They will fund the governor’s newly cre­ated statewide voucher pro­gram that fun­nels tax dol­lars toward pri­vate and parochial school tuition for stu­dents who oth­er­wise would attend low-performing pub­lic schools.

...

The voucher spend­ing and a change to char­ter school fund­ing in parishes under fed­eral deseg­re­ga­tion orders were expected to bring court chal­lenges, pos­si­bly along with com­plaints about the vote thresh­old used for pas­sage in the House.

“Know that it’s going to be in court,” said Rep. Joe Har­ri­son, R-Napoleonville, an oppo­nent of the legislation.

The GOP isn’t shep­herd­ing us into fac­sism, they’re merely offer­ing vaguely out­lined “com­pre­hen­sive sys­temic change”. And whether or not the US pub­lic embraces this bold new vision will be heav­ily depen­dent on the fate of the euro­zone. And that will largely be a func­tion of how the pub­lic inteprets and digests all the valu­able lessons encap­su­lated in the col­lapse of the Euro­pean wel­fare state. A vote for Rom­ney is a vote for a rad­i­cal response to the ever more evi­dent lessons of the euro­zone cri­sis that the wel­fare state is an unsus­tain­able lux­ury dur­ing an era of nec­es­sary aus­ter­ity. We neew a replace­ment of the New Deal social con­tract with a new New Deal that places favors risk over secu­rity, effort over com­fort, and inno­va­tion over sta­bil­ity. Secu­rity, com­fort, and sta­bil­ity are just not afford­able in our hi-tech econ­omy (curse you Sci­ence!). This Newer Deal that phases out the safety-net for upcom­ing gen­er­a­tions and pri­va­tizes edu­ca­tion is needed to save the chil­dren. Think of the children!

Any­ways, that’s a meme get­ting pushed right now:

Op-Ed Colum­nist
What Repub­li­cans Think
By DAVID BROOKS
Pub­lished: June 14, 2012

Democ­rats fre­quently ask me why the Repub­li­cans have become so extreme. As they describe the sit­u­a­tion, they usu­ally fall back on some sort of ill­ness metaphor. Repub­li­cans have a mania. Pres­i­dent Obama has said that Repub­li­cans have a “fever” that he hopes will break if he is re-elected.

I guess I’d say Repub­li­cans don’t have an ill­ness; they have a view­point. Let me describe it this way: In the 1950s, Dwight Eisen­hower rec­on­ciled Repub­li­cans to the 20th-century wel­fare state. Between Ike and George W. Bush, Repub­li­can lead­ers basi­cally accepted that model. Sure, they wanted to cut taxes and devolve power, but, in prac­tice, they sus­tained the sys­tem, often fund­ing it more lav­ishly than the Democrats.

But many Repub­li­cans have now come to the con­clu­sion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes. Yuval Levin expressed the sen­ti­ment per­fectly in a defin­i­tive essay for The Weekly Stan­dard called “Our Age of Anxiety”:

“We have a sense that the eco­nomic order we knew in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tury may not be com­ing back at all — that we have entered a new era for which we have not been well pre­pared. ... We are, rather, on the cusp of the fis­cal and insti­tu­tional col­lapse of our wel­fare state, which threat­ens not only the future of gov­ern­ment finances but also the future of Amer­i­can capitalism.”

To Repub­li­can eyes, the first phase of that col­lapse is play­ing out right now in Greece, Spain and Italy — cos­seted economies, unman­age­able debt, ris­ing unem­ploy­ment, falling liv­ing standards.

America’s eco­nomic stag­na­tion is just more grad­ual. In the decades after World War II, the U.S. econ­omy grew by well over 3 per­cent a year, on aver­age. But, since then, it has failed to keep pace with chang­ing real­i­ties. The aver­age growth was a pal­try 1.7 per­cent annu­ally between 2000 and 2009. It aver­aged 0.6 per­cent growth between 2009 and 2011. Wages have failed to keep up with pro­duc­tiv­ity. Fam­ily net worth is back at the same level it was at 20 years ago.

In Amer­ica as in Europe, Repub­li­cans argue, the wel­fare state is fail­ing to pro­vide either secu­rity or dynamism. The safety net is so expen­sive it won’t be there for future gen­er­a­tions. Mean­while, the cur­rent model shifts resources away from the inno­v­a­tive sec­tors of the econ­omy and into the bloated state-supported ones, like health care and edu­ca­tion. Suc­ces­sive pres­i­dents have lay­ered on reg­u­la­tions and loop­holes, cre­at­ing a form of state cap­i­tal­ism in which big busi­nesses thrive because they have polit­i­cal con­nec­tions and small busi­nesses struggle.

The wel­fare model favors secu­rity over risk, com­fort over effort, sta­bil­ity over inno­va­tion. Money that could go to schools and inno­va­tion must now go to pen­sions and health care. This model, which once offered insur­ance from the dis­as­ters inher­ent in cap­i­tal­ism, has now become a giant machine for redis­trib­ut­ing money from the future to the elderly.

This is the source of Repub­li­can extrem­ism: the con­vic­tion that the gov­ern­ing model is obso­lete. It needs replacing.

Mitt Rom­ney hasn’t put it this way. He wants to keep the focus on Pres­i­dent Obama. But this world­view is implied in his (extremely vague) pro­pos­als. He would struc­turally reform the health care sys­tem, mov­ing toward a more market-based sys­tem. He would sim­plify the tax code. He would reverse 30 years of edu­ca­tion pol­icy, decen­tral­iz­ing power and increas­ing parental choice. The inten­tion is the same, to cre­ate a model that will spark an effi­ciency explo­sion, lay­ing the ground­work for an eco­nomic revival.

...

Obama cham­pi­oned tar­geted sub­si­dies and tax cred­its. Repub­li­cans, mean­while, envi­sion com­pre­hen­sive sys­temic change. The G.O.P. vision is of an entirely dif­fer­ent mag­ni­tude: replace the tax code, replace the health care sys­tem and trans­form entitlements.

This is what this elec­tion is about: Is the 20th-century model obso­lete, or does it just need rebal­anc­ing? Is Obama obliv­i­ous to this his­tor­i­cal moment or are Repub­li­cans overly rad­i­cal, risky and impractical?

Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats have dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions about how much change is needed. I sus­pect the likely col­lapse of the Euro­pean project will pro­foundly influ­ence which per­cep­tion the coun­try buys this Novem­ber.

Krug­man has a post from early 2011 that has some par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant obser­va­tions related to this meme:

NY Times
Jan­u­ary 10, 2011, 12:03 pm
Eco­nom­ics and Morality

Mark Thoma directs me to Eric Schoeneberg, who argues that the right is win­ning eco­nomic debates because peo­ple believe, wrongly, that there’s some­thing inher­ently moral about free-market out­comes. My guess is that this is only part of the story; there’s more than a bit of Ayn Ran­dism on the right, but there’s also the appeal of sim­plic­ity: gold­bug­gism is intel­lec­tu­ally easy, Key­ne­sian­ism is intel­lec­tu­ally hard, as evi­denced by the inabil­ity of many trained econ­o­mists to get it.

Still, Schoeneberg is right about the ten­dency to ascribe moral value to mar­ket val­ues, and the need for a counter-narrative. I’m going to think about that; but right now, let me describe how I see the US income dis­tri­b­u­tion in terms of jus­tice or the lack thereof.

The first thing one should say is that our sys­tem does reward hard work, up to a point. Other things equal, those who put more in will earn more.

But a lot of other things are, in fact, not remotely equal. These days, Amer­ica is the advanced nation with the least social mobil­ity (pdf), except pos­si­bly for Britain. Access to good schools, good health care, and job oppor­tu­ni­ties depends on lot on choos­ing the right parents.

So when you hear con­ser­v­a­tives talk about how our goal should be equal­ity of oppor­tu­nity, not equal­ity of out­comes, your first response should be that if they really believe in equal­ity of oppor­tu­nity, they must be in favor of rad­i­cal changes in Amer­i­can soci­ety. For our soci­ety does not, in fact, pro­duce any­thing like equal oppor­tu­nity (in part because it pro­duces such unequal out­comes). Tell me how you’re going to pro­duce a huge improve­ment in the qual­ity of pub­lic schools, how you’re going to pro­vide uni­ver­sal health care (for par­ents as well as chil­dren, because par­ents in bad health affect chil­drens’ prospects), and then come back to me about the equal chances at the start­ing line thing.

Now, inequal­ity of oppor­tu­nity is only one rea­son for the inequal­ity in out­comes we actu­ally see. But of what remains, how much reflects indi­vid­ual effort, how much reflects tal­ent, and how much sheer luck? No rea­son­able per­son would deny that there’s a lot of luck involved. Wall Street titans are, no doubt, smart guys (although talk­ing to some of them, you have to won­der...), but there are surely equally smart guys who for what­ever rea­son never got a chance to grab the 9-figure brass ring.

So eco­nom­ics is not a moral­ity play; the social and eco­nomic order we have doesn’t rep­re­sent the play­ing out of some kind of deep moral principles.

That doesn’t mean the order we have should be over­thrown: the pur­suit of Utopia, of per­fect eco­nomic jus­tice, has proved to be the road to hell, while welfare-state cap­i­tal­ism — a mar­ket econ­omy with its rough edges smoothed by a strong safety net — has pro­duced the most decent soci­eties ever known The point, though, is that any­one who claims that trans­fer­ring some income from the most for­tu­nate mem­bers of soci­ety to the least is a vile injus­tice is clos­ing his eyes to the obvi­ous real­ity of how the world works.

Yep, the pro­posed new social con­tract that promises Freeeee­dom! is also a sys­tem pred­i­cated on equal oppor­tu­nity. It’s an own­er­ship soci­ety. It’s so ownership-y that you own all the risk and con­se­quences of your lot in life. Bad lot? Too bad. Safety-nets are so 20th cen­tury. This is the safety of voucher-nomics/Romney-nomics. There isn’t a com­mitt­ment by soci­ety to pro­vide to pro­vide a basic ser­vice. There’s a com­mitt­ment to pro­vide a fixed pay­ment per stu­dent per year to a “service-provider” so we can bal­ance a ledger and declare our aus­tere nature. That’s the grand plan to save the future.

Oh wow, Look, the kids can’t add but at least we man­aged to cut state and local spend­ing dras­ti­cally

This is why we can’t have nice things.

And this.

Con­tin­u­ing desta­bi­liza­tion of Obama by Ger­mans and Romney?

“Ger­man finance min­is­ter pub­licly rebuffs US president”

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/jun2012/scha-j27.shtml

Way to, uh, raise the bar Florida. This just might be the cra­zi­est story com­ing out of Rick Scott’s admin­is­tra­tion we’ve seen so far:

Updated: 6:10 p.m. Sun­day, July 8, 2012 | Posted: 10:52 a.m. Sun­day, July 8, 2012
Worst TB out­break in 20 years kept secret
State rushes clo­sure of its only TB hos­pi­tal in Lantana

By Stacey Singer

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

JACKSONVILLE -

The CDC offi­cer had a seri­ous warn­ing for Florida health offi­cials in April: A tuber­cu­lo­sis out­break in Jack­sonville was one of the worst his group had inves­ti­gated in 20 years. Linked to 13 deaths and 99 ill­nesses, includ­ing six chil­dren, it would require con­certed action to stop.

That report had been penned on April 5, exactly nine days after Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill that shrank the Depart­ment of Health and required the clo­sure of the A.G. Hol­ley State Hos­pi­tal in Lan­tana, where tough tuber­cu­lo­sis cases have been treated for more than 60 years.

As health offi­cials in Tal­la­has­see turned their focus to restruc­tur­ing, Dr. Robert Luo’s 25-page report describ­ing Jacksonville’s out­break — and the mea­sures needed to con­tain it — went unseen by key deci­sion mak­ers around the state. At the health agency, an order went out that the TB hos­pi­tal must be closed six months ahead of schedule.

Had they seen the let­ter, deci­sion mak­ers would have learned that 3,000 peo­ple in the past two years may have had close con­tact with con­ta­gious peo­ple at Jacksonville’s home­less shel­ters, an out­pa­tient men­tal health clinic and area jails. Yet only 253 peo­ple had been found and eval­u­ated for TB infec­tion, mean­ing Florida’s out­break was, and is, far from con­tained.

The pub­lic was not to learn any­thing until early June, even though the same strain was appear­ing in other parts of the state, includ­ing Miami.

...

And here I always thought Skynet or some other man-made ari­tif­i­cal intel­li­gence would destroy human­ity. It turns sim­ple num­bers stored on com­put­ers will do the job. No intel­li­gence is required:

Finan­cial Times
July 11, 2012 12:02 pm
Cur­rent debt cri­sis merely a warm-up act

By Jamil Baz

It is some­times pos­si­ble to believe that suf­fer­ing is worth­while, a way of pay­ing for past sins. In this light, the age of aus­ter­ity in which we sup­pos­edly live has a sort of redemp­tive qual­ity. Grit our teeth and we’ll come out the other side, puri­fied and ready for robust eco­nomic recovery.

How­ever, after five years, we are in a worse place than when we started. One would have thought that the recent delever­ag­ing caused debt ratios to col­lapse. Yet, after the finan­cial mael­strom of the past five years, debt bal­looned to a weighted aver­age of 417 per cent of gross domes­tic prod­uct from 381 per cent in June 2007 in the 11 economies most under the mar­ket micro­scope.

Strik­ingly, in each of Canada, Ger­many, Greece, France, Ire­land, Italy, Japan, Spain, Por­tu­gal, the UK and the US, the ratio of total (pub­lic and pri­vate) debt to gross domes­tic prod­uct is now higher than it was in 2007.

There are vari­a­tions, and it is notable that debt in the US has increased the least, from 332 per cent of GDP five years ago to 340 per cent today — although we shouldn’t draw too much con­so­la­tion from that, as the sta­tis­tics do not include social enti­tle­ments such as Medicare or Social Secu­rity. Add in these off-balance sheet items and the ratios would look much worse.

Delever­ag­ing is prov­ing impos­si­ble to exe­cute. The world is still stag­ger­ing under a moun­tain of debt, the costs of which extin­guish the “ani­mal spir­its” which ought by now to be com­ing to the res­cue. Based on this analy­sis, we can make five predictions.

First, as delever­ag­ing has not even started yet, the cri­sis of the world econ­omy has not begun either. All the per­ceived unpleas­ant­ness of the past few years is merely a warm-up act for the greater cri­sis still to come. The need to get debt lev­els down is as pro­nounced as ever in the euro­zone, par­tic­u­larly in south­ern Europe, but also in the US and Japan.

Sec­ond, it will take a min­i­mum of 15 years or so for the econ­omy to reach escape veloc­ity and attain a level con­sis­tent with healthy growth sce­nar­ios. This is because debt lev­els need to come down by at least 150 per cent of GDP in most coun­tries. His­tory sug­gests you can­not reduce debt by more than 10 per­cent­age points a year with­out unleash­ing major social and polit­i­cal dislocation.

Third, when we do finally start cut­ting our debt, the eco­nomic impact will be mas­sive. Coun­tries such as Japan and the US need to increase their pri­mary bal­ance by more than 10 points of GDP, in order to sta­bilise the ratio of pub­lic debt to GDP to 2007 lev­els: con­sid­er­ing neg­a­tive feed­back loops between deficit cuts and growth, each stands to lose more than 20 per cent of GDP against trend.

...

The fifth point is that there is no magic bul­let. In the past, pol­icy mak­ers had var­i­ous instru­ments to cush­ion the impact of mea­sures taken to sta­bilise debt lev­els: they could cut inter­est rates, for exam­ple, or allow their exchange rates to fall, lead­ing to export-driven recov­ery. But in an era of low or zero inter­est rates, with most coun­tries com­pet­ing to devalue their?currencies,?such pol­icy tools have lost effec­tive­ness, hence the high multiplier.

...

In the words of an old Aus­trian adage, the sit­u­a­tion is hope­less, but not seri­ous. It is not seri­ous, as politi­cians sim­ply fail to acknowl­edge the ele­phant in the room, namely lever­age, intro­duc­ing instead a suc­ces­sion of pol­icy gim­micks. It is hope­less, in that virtue is not likely to be rewarded for a generation.

Sorry kids, the world is going to suck even more than usual for the next gen­er­a­tion or so. We’re doing this for your own good. We may have cre­ated money, but now it now rules us and we have no choice. Sorry about that. We can’t sim­ply print more and give it away. There are these lit­tle magic dig­its sit­ting in com­put­ers some­where and they need to be bal­anced and we’re told that the only way to pos­si­bly bal­ance them is to dras­ti­cally cut spend­ing on things like your edu­ca­tion and future. Oth­er­wise the world will explode or some­thing. We hope you understand.

Aus­ter­ity.

Rom­ney­nomics for the 100%: A pre­view in pic­tures. A pre­view in prose. A pre­view in prepa­ra­tions. And, last, but cer­tainly not least, a pre­view in Paul.

It’s mourn­ing morn­ing in Amer­ica and it’s look­ing like it’s going to be a bright shiny day.

Wow: pri­vate prison com­pa­nies using gangs like the Aryan Knights to keep the rest of the pris­on­ers in con­trol in order to achieve an ide­o­log­i­cal goal (of mak­ing more money no mat­ter what the costs)...that kind of sounds a bit like ter­ror­ism. State-sanctioned pri­va­tized ter­ror­ism:

APNews­Break: Idaho inmates claim gangs run prison
By REBECCA BOONE, Asso­ci­ated Press

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A gang war that appears to have taken over parts of an Idaho pri­vate prison is spilling into the fed­eral courts, with some inmates con­tend­ing prison offi­cials are ced­ing con­trol to gang lead­ers in an effort to save money on staffing.

Eight inmates at the Idaho Cor­rec­tional Cen­ter are suing the Cor­rec­tions Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica, con­tend­ing the com­pany is work­ing with a few pow­er­ful prison gangs to con­trol the facil­ity south of Boise.

The law­suit, filed Fri­day in Boise’s U.S. Dis­trict Court, paints the prison as a place where cor­rec­tional offi­cers work in fear of anger­ing inmate gang mem­bers and where hous­ing super­vi­sors ask per­mis­sion from gang lead­ers before mov­ing any­one new into an empty cell. The inmates also con­tend that CCA offi­cials use gang vio­lence and the threat of gang vio­lence as an “inex­pen­sive device to gain con­trol over the inmate pop­u­la­tion,” accord­ing to the law­suit, and that hous­ing gang mem­bers together allows the com­pany to use fewer guards, reduc­ing pay­roll costs.

“The com­plaint alleges that CCA fos­ters and devel­ops crim­i­nal gangs,” attor­ney Wyatt John­son, who along with T.J. Angst­man rep­re­sents the inmates, said in a state­ment. “Ide­ally, the law­suit should force this to come to an end.”

The inmates point to inves­tiga­tive reports from the Idaho Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tion that sug­gest gangs like the Aryan Knights and the Severely Vio­lent Crim­i­nals were able to wrest con­trol from staff mem­bers after prison offi­cials began hous­ing mem­bers of the same gangs together in some cell­blocks to reduce vio­lent clashes.

The power shift meant a prison staffer had to nego­ti­ate the place­ment of new inmates with gang lead­ers, accord­ing to the depart­ment reports, and that prison guards were afraid to enforce cer­tain rules.

Cor­rec­tions Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica, the nation’s largest pri­vate prison com­pany, says its top pri­or­ity is the safety and secu­rity of its pris­ons, employ­ees and inmates.

...

One won­ders how this bold form of cost sav­ings works when it’s applied out­side of a prison set­ting. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Some­thing to con­sider while the US law­mak­ers engage in a dis­cus­sion over what to do about expir­ing Bush tax-cuts on the wealthy and how many cuts should be made in the enti­tle­ments: The US Com­merce Depart­ment just reported record prof­its for US cor­po­ra­tions in the third quar­ter. How unex­pected.

And speak­ing of unex­pected devel­op­ments...this isn’t one of them.

It’s sort of beat­ing a dead horse at this point to note that the GOP is intent on destroy­ing the econ­omy for ide­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, but when you’re deal­ing with a dead horse of the ‘zom­bie’ vari­ety, you don’t really have a choice:

TPM
Editor’s Blog
Destroy­ing The Vil­lage Just Because

Brian Beut­ler Jan­u­ary 4, 2013, 10:25 AM

Basi­cally good-if-not great news through­out today’s pay­roll report from the Depart­ment of Labor. My basic break­down is here. But I also want to empha­size that it, and basi­cally all recent eco­nomic data, under­scores the folly of a new debt limit fight.

Obvi­ously I’m not say­ing that play­ing games with the debt ceil­ing would be legit­i­mate way for Repub­li­cans to extract polit­i­cal con­ces­sions if the econ­omy weren’t recov­er­ing, or if it were recov­er­ing more slowly. But at least they’d have a pre­tense to argue that the coun­try required imme­di­ate pol­icy changes to address an exist­ing eco­nomic crisis.

The fact that we’re actu­ally recov­er­ing from an eco­nomic cri­sis gives the lie to the whole debt limit hostage-taking project. It’s not about res­cu­ing the econ­omy from poli­cies that are inhibit­ing growth right now. It’s about a nihilis­tic will­ing­ness to destroy actual growth in order to make progress on longer-term ide­o­log­i­cal goals.

Like their human zom­bie coun­ter­parts, zom­bie horses have an insa­tiable appetite for brains. The crav­ing are thought to be related to their lack of a func­tion­ing one and, on some level, they real­ize this and it hurts their zom­bie sen­si­bil­i­ties. Poor dears. Zom­bies, you see, have exis­ten­tial crises too.

It looks like the GOP is finally real­iz­ing that a party “rebrand­ing” as a kinder, gen­tler GOP might be in order. Appar­ently, it no longer sells to be the socioe­co­nomic sui­cide bombers for austerity-obsessed bil­lion­aires:

Analy­sis: Even brief spend­ing cuts could hit U.S. econ­omy hard

By Jason Lange

WASHINGTON | Wed Feb 6, 2013 6:53pm EST

(Reuters) — The U.S. econ­omy could take a big hit from auto­matic gov­ern­ment spend­ing cuts even if Con­gress only leaves them in place for a month or two.

The cuts were meant to be so painful that they would force Con­gress to find a more thought­ful way to tighten the bud­get.

But many ana­lysts assume they will take effect as sched­uled, forc­ing fed­eral offices to fur­lough some of their 2.8 mil­lion work­ers and trim spend­ing on every­thing from paper clips to missiles.

It is anyone’s guess, how­ever, how long law­mak­ers will be able to stom­ach the eco­nomic pain. The dura­tion of the aus­ter­ity mea­sures will deter­mine the force of the blow to the econ­omy. Some ana­lysts think hav­ing the cuts in place for more than a few months could trig­ger a brief recession.

...

Pen­ta­gon offi­cials have said up to 800,000 of the military’s civil­ian employ­ees would work one less day a week because of the cuts.

The Air Force said it would have to cur­tail orders for Lock­heed Mar­tin Corp’s F-35 fighter jet and delay a new ver­sion of the MQ-9 Reaper drone being built by pri­vately held Gen­eral Atomics.

Con­gress has been scram­bling to find a way to post­pone the bud­get cuts, but has shown lit­tle sign of progress.

...

Most Wall Street banks expect the cuts, known as the “sequester” in Wash­ing­ton par­lance, to take effect at least briefly.

...

Uh oh, the GOP’s insis­tence on deep spend­ing cuts might tank the econ­omy. Let’s see what type of new slo­gan the party might be pon­der­ing to counter this neg­a­tive image:

TPM
Tom Cole: GOP Prefers Deep Defense Cuts To Any Revenue

Sahil Kapur Feb­ru­ary 5, 2013, 4:48 PM

There’s no way in the world House Repub­li­cans would agree to raise any new rev­enue in order to avoid the upcom­ing auto­matic spend­ing cuts known as the sequester, a senior GOP law­maker said Tues­day afternoon.

“I’m all against rais­ing any addi­tional rev­enue on this. Look, these are writ­ten into law,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), a deputy major­ity whip, told TPM between votes. Cole said there are other, prefer­able ways to make the sequester cuts that he is open to, but new rev­enue will not be part of the equation.

“We just had addi­tional rev­enue for the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, so I don’t see any way in the world the sequester won’t hap­pen either as writ­ten or rene­go­ti­ated or real­lo­cated cuts. But I don’t see any rev­enue com­ing in the picture.”

His com­ments, which echo the hard­line posi­tion artic­u­lated by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) recently, came shortly after Pres­i­dent Obama’s tele­vised remarks Tues­day after­noon call­ing on Con­gress to “delay the eco­nom­i­cally dam­ag­ing effects of the sequester for a few more months” if it can­not agree to a com­pre­hen­sive solu­tion by the March 1 dead­line.

The seques­tra­tion cuts, passed in the 2011 debt limit law, slash domes­tic and defense spend­ing pro­grams across the board by roughly $1 tril­lion over 10 years. Con­gress delayed them until March in the fis­cal cliff agree­ment. Now Repub­li­cans, appar­ently hav­ing reached their limit on new rev­enues, are deter­mined to stonewall Democ­rats’ efforts to replace the sequester cuts with a mix of rev­enue via clos­ing tax loop­holes and tar­geted spend­ing cuts.

The GOP’s nego­ti­at­ing stance is a dra­matic shift from their posi­tion just months ago, when party lead­ers char­ac­ter­ized the defense cuts as unac­cept­able and deeply dam­ag­ing to the mil­i­tary. Back in Octo­ber, Cole him­self warned that “the mil­i­tary will face dev­as­tat­ing spend­ing cuts accom­pa­nied by mas­sive lay-offs to the defense indus­try” if the sequester is not averted. The turn­around came last month as Repub­li­cans began fold­ing on bat­tles involv­ing the fis­cal cliff and debt limit, at which point Boehner told the Wall Street Jour­nal that the sequester is “as much lever­age as we’re going to get” in forc­ing Democ­rats to accept sub­stan­tial domes­tic spend­ing cuts.

...

Cole said Repub­li­cans are con­cerned about the sequester and noted that the House passed a GOP bill last year to replace it — with deep cuts to domes­tic pro­grams that largely ben­e­fit low-income Amer­i­cans. He likened the sit­u­a­tion to the fis­cal cliff predica­ment, but with Repub­li­cans hold­ing the lever­age this time.

...

Hmmm...so the new “kinder, gen­tler” GOP is going to demand on no tax likes for bil­lion­aires but they’d cer­tainly be open to gut­ting defense spend­ing or deep cuts in pro­grams that help the poor. The Party of Peace and Poverty does kind of have a ring to it. Per­haps “The Party of Prin­ci­pled Flex­i­bil­ity” might res­onate more. Yes, they’re still the party of, by, and for bil­lion­aires because, you know, a party’s got to have prin­ci­pals prin­ci­ples, but it’s not like they’re only into cut­ting pro­grams for the poor. This might work, but they’re going to have to show a lit­tle more flex­i­bil­ity if they really want to win back waver­ing vot­ers. Some­times, suc­cess­ful rebrand­ings require a clas­sic:

Wash­ing­ton Post
U.S. should sell assets like gold to get out of debt, con­ser­v­a­tive econ­o­mists say

By Joel Achen­bach, Pub­lished: May 15, 2011

With the United States poised to slam into its debt limit Mon­day, con­ser­v­a­tive econ­o­mists are eye­balling all that gold in Fort Knox. There’s about 147 mil­lion ounces of gold parked in the leg­endary vault. Gold is sell­ing at nearly $1,500 an ounce. That’s many bil­lions of dol­lars in bullion.

“It’s just sort of sit­ting there,” said Ron Utt, a senior fel­low at the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. “Given the high price it is now, and the tremen­dous debt prob­lem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.”

But that’s cocka­mamie, declares the Obama admin­is­tra­tion. Mary J. Miller, Treasury’s assis­tant sec­re­tary for finan­cial mar­kets, said the U.S. should sell assets in an orderly, “well-telegraphed” man­ner, not in a “fire sale” atmos­phere with a debt limit dead­line accel­er­at­ing the process.

“It would be bad for the tax­pay­ers. It would be bad for the mar­kets,” Miller said.

Another senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial, not autho­rized to speak for attri­bu­tion, described the sit­u­a­tion more bluntly: “Sell­ing off the gold is just one level of crazy away from sell­ing Mount Rushmore.”

The United States may have run up a huge debt, but it is not a poor coun­try by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment owns roughly 650 mil­lion acres of land, close to a third of the nation’s total land mass. Plus a mil­lion build­ings. Plus elec­tri­cal util­i­ties like the Ten­nessee Val­ley Author­ity. And an inter­state high­way system.

Econ­o­mists of a con­ser­v­a­tive or lib­er­tar­ian bent have long argued that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment needs to get out of cer­tain busi­nesses, unload unneeded assets, and pri­va­tize such func­tions as pas­sen­ger rail ser­vice and air traf­fic con­trol. No one advo­cates sell­ing Yel­low­stone, but why, some econ­o­mists ask, should the fed­eral gov­ern­ment be in the elec­tric­ity business?

Econ­o­mist Kevin Has­sett of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute said the fed­eral gov­ern­ment should con­sider the sale of inter­state high­ways. Motorists would have to pay tolls to the pri­vate own­ers, he said, but the roads would likely be in bet­ter shape. Fed­eral, state and local gov­ern­ments could raise hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars through high­way pri­va­ti­za­tion, he said.

“Many of the world’s roads were orig­i­nally built as toll roads, so it would hardly be rev­o­lu­tion­ary to return to that model,” Has­sett said. “If it can work for the River Styx, why not the Beltway?”

The Her­itage Foun­da­tion on Tues­day released a plan for bal­anc­ing the bud­get that did not include tax increases, but did include a pro­posal to sell $260 bil­lion in fed­eral assets over 15 years. The plan does not spec­ify the assets. It refers to “par­tial sales of fed­eral prop­er­ties, real estate, min­eral rights, the elec­tro­mag­netic spec­trum, and energy-generation facilities.”

“We’re not going to say we’re going to sell off the Smith­son­ian and the Capi­tol. We would not pro­pose that any­way. There’s no spe­cific build­ing that we would point to,” said Ali­son Fraser, head of the Eco­nomic Pol­icy Stud­ies depart­ment at Heritage.

...

That’s right, the GOP could just roll out one of its ideas of yes­ter­year: turn the coun­try into a giant fire sale! Every­one likes a sale, right? Espe­cially if they’ve seen their incomes stag­nate for decades. But one thing the GOP def­i­nitely doesn’t want to do if it pur­sues the pri­va­ti­za­tion path: don’t hold our national fire sale in secret, oth­er­wise what’s the point? In other words, don’t do what Florida does. That’s gen­er­ally good advice:

Mother Jones
Florida Repub­li­cans’ Plan to Block Out the Sunshine

—By Adam Wein­stein
| Sat Jan. 21, 2012 3:00 AM PST

In their long­stand­ing fight to pri­va­tize the state’s prison system—and a lot of other pub­lic services—Republican law­mak­ers in Florida are try­ing a new angle: doing it in secret.

Pro­posed Com­mit­tee Bill 7170, intro­duced Tues­day in the GOP-dominated state leg­is­la­ture, aims to pre­vent “infor­ma­tion relat­ing to the out­sourc­ing or pri­va­ti­za­tion of an agency func­tion” from being reported to the vot­ing pub­lic “until after the con­tract for such func­tions is exe­cuted.” In other words, tax­pay­ers wouldn’t get to know about gov­ern­ment work turned over to a con­trac­tor until after the con­tract has been signed. The bill is expected to come to a floor vote later in the recently con­vened spring ses­sion; with Repub­li­cans hold­ing super­ma­jori­ties in both cham­bers of the leg­is­la­ture and Rick Scott sit­ting in the governor’s office, it could become law by this summer.

...

Actu­ally, given that mass pri­va­ti­za­tions won’t really help aver­age Amer­i­cans avoid plung­ing fur­ther into per­sonal debt, there is one instance where the GOP may want to fol­low the Florida exam­ple. Clearly, there are no easy answers. Good luck with your rebrand­ing GOP!

Stu­pid? Evil? How about both?

That Paul Ryan seems like such a nice young man:

Slate
Will Paul Ryan Cut Spend­ing on the Elderly?

By Matthew Yglesias

Posted Tues­day, March 5, 2013, at 11:43 AM

It looks like the Repub­li­can lead­er­ship is start­ing to wres­tle with the prob­lems inher­ent in their promise to find a way to bal­ance the bud­get over ten years with all spend­ing cuts. In par­tic­u­lar, it turns out that they might need to cut spend­ing on pro­grams that ben­e­fit peo­ple who are old right now.

Here’s the basic dilemma. Nor­mally when Repub­li­cans want to cut spend­ing they want to cut it right away. Seques­tra­tion reduces the amount of money avail­able to pro­vide healthy food to low-income preg­nant women and their new­born chil­dren right now. And that’s the part of seques­tra­tion Repub­li­cans like. They want to replace the part that cuts spend­ing on the mil­i­tary with imme­di­ate reduc­tions in other spend­ing designed to boost the liv­ing stan­dards of poor peo­ple. But the government’s biggest domes­tic programs—Social Secu­rity and Medicare—are tar­geted at the elderly, and since older cohorts are whiter and more intol­er­ant of gays and les­bians the core of the GOP elec­toral coali­tion is older Amer­i­cans.

Con­se­quently their recent bud­gets have included impor­tant excep­tions to the prin­ci­ple of spend­ing cuts right away. Their promise is that if you’re get­ting Social Secu­rity or Medicare today, your ben­e­fits will never be reduced by one red cent. In fact, your ben­e­fits will never be cut as long as you’re lucky enough to have been born before 1958. The idea is that some­one who’s 57 today can vote Repub­li­can, see Paul Ryan’s bud­get pass, and then be relax­ing thirty years from now at the age of 87 still enjoy­ing full Social Secu­rity and Medicare ben­e­fits.

It’s a sweet deal, but it means that the cuts to the parts of the bud­get that aren’t Social Secu­rity and Medicare would have be really extreme to bal­ance the bud­get within ten years. Look­ing it over, Ryan is report­edly com­ing to the con­clu­sion that he might need to trim the scope of that exemp­tion from cuts and make peo­ple born in the mid-fifties bear some pain. This is—rightly—making Repub­li­cans from more mar­ginal House seats ner­vous. The pol­i­tics of present-day con­ser­v­a­tive bud­get­ing hinge entirely on per­suad­ing old peo­ple that dra­con­ian cuts to pro­grams for old peo­ple can be imple­mented with­out tak­ing any­thing away from the peo­ple who are already old. Any­thing that calls that into ques­tion is very dan­ger­ous.

LOL, Paul Ryan was rolling out the details for his ‘new’ 10 year bud­get pro­posal this morn­ing. He had a bit of a ver­bal acci­dent, though. He acci­den­tally told the truth:

The Hill
Ryan: ‘We are not going to give up on destroy­ing the health­care sys­tem’
By Adele Hamp­ton — 03/12/13 01:36 PM ET

Dur­ing the unveil­ing of his new bud­get pro­posal, House Bud­get Com­mit­tee Chair­man Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) made a slip of the tongue while rail­ing against Pres­i­dent Obama’s health­care law.

“This is some­thing we will not give up on because we are not going to give up on destroy­ing the health­care sys­tem for the Amer­i­can peo­ple,” Ryan acci­den­tally said.

Some who were watch­ing his speech were quick to pounce on the gaffe, tak­ing to Twit­ter to point out Ryan’s “Freudian slip,” accord­ing to media reports.

Ryan’s new bud­get pro­posal would cut spend­ing by $5.7 tril­lion, reduce the top tax rate to 25 per­cent, and bal­ance the bud­get within 10 years.

The plan would make pro­found changes to gov­ern­ment, bring­ing spend­ing down from 22.2 per­cent of the econ­omy to 19.1 per­cent by 2023. It dou­bles down on many of the pro­pos­als Ryan advanced as his party’s vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in 2012.

Fans of Russ­ian Roulette will love the spe­cial “DC” rules. It’s WAY more deadly, but its deadly for other peo­ple so it’s fun. Here’s how you play:
1. Replace the revolver with a how­itzer.
2. Point the how­itzer at a large mass of peo­ple. It doesn’t mat­ter what their age it, just lots and lots of peo­ple. The more the bet­ter.
3. Now invite a crazed lunatic into the game. Make him an offer...he can either open fire on the crowd now OR he can come back later after you’ve replaced the how­itzer with an even BIGGER gun. Nukes are accept­able, but it sort of ruins the game if you jump to them right away.
4. If the crazed lunatic opens fire, well, game’s over. If the crazed lunatic takes a pass then find a big­ger gun and repeat.
5. The game ends when a bloody mas­sacre occurs.
6. Optional rule: Instead of end­ing the game when the bloody mas­sacre occurs, just wait for new peo­ple to wan­der into the play­ing field and play again

It’s so excit­ing! Look, we have this how­itzer all set up and here comes a crazed lunatic...what’ll it be? “Fire” or “Bigger”?

Woohoo, “Big­ger” it is!

Best. Game. Ever.

Ok, it may not be the BEST game ever. THAT title goes to the “Starve a poor fam­ily and blame it on their kids” game. But it’s still pretty sweet.