Author Archives: eehines

So Much for Bipartisanship

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In a Wall Street Journal piece on the difficulties of a slim Republican House majority, even with president-elect Donald Trump (R) in the White House, the news writer ended with this warning from Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D, WA):

Democrats will be united for a block and tackle, and let them [Republicans] figure out how they’re going to run[.]

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party continuing its refusal to work seriously on legislation, focusing only on knee-jerk obstruction of anything Republican, overlain with knee-jerk obstruction of anything Trumpian. This is Party refusing to be part of a two-party government.

Just one more reason to break with history and expand the number of Republicans in the House (and in the Senate, come to that) during the midterms in a couple of years.

Ending Racial Disparities in Education

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) has big plans for America’s education system, including expanding school choice opportunities and eliminating the Department of Education.

Good riddance to the DoEd, I say; it has fatally poisoned itself in two ways, either of which alone is fatal. One is with its emphasis on DEI claptrap at the expense of actual education. The other is with its moves to end due process regarding student sex offense allegations, insisting instead that the girl should be believed on the face of her allegations, attempting to deny the boy legal representation in what at bottom is an accusation of a crime, attempting to deny the boy the opportunity to bring his own witnesses and to cross examine the girl’s witnesses and the girl.

I strongly urge, should the effort to abolish DoEd succeed, that all DoEd personnel (that’s 100% of them for those following along at home) be returned to the private sector rather than reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government. Yes, yes, one proposal being considered is simply to consolidate DoEd with the Department of the Interior. This is unnecessary, and as a sidelight, would continue the bloat in the Federal Civil Service ranks. If it’s reasonable that Interior can do DoEd’s erstwhile job, it has plenty of otherwise excess personnel who can be repurposed to the function. There is no need to import from DoEd.

That’s at the top of our education system. The real progress, the real improvements, will come from addressing racial disparities from the bottom up—pre-school on up through the 12th grade. Those disparities range from excusing misbehaving minority students because students who happen to be white or Asian heritage misbehave at lower rates to grading minority students more leniently than their counterparts on the basis of “culture.”

Throwing money at teachers union-run public schools while maintaining their monopoly in some jurisdictions and near-monopoly in others has been an utter failure. It’s those schools that have the greatest racial disparity in education outcomes. Public schools do not provide the same quality education across the spread of the variety of majority and minority students; the economically poorer students are consigned to the poorer schools.

School choice programs, generally centered on committing public moneys to students rather than to the schools they attend, and getting bureaucracy out of the way of putting charter and voucher schools into operation, would allow those economically poorer students (who are primarily but not exclusively minority students) to be able to afford to leave the public school system in favor of one of those alternatives or to home schooling milieus. Each of these three have shown themselves to be, on the whole, superior in educational outcome to the public schools in their districts. That competition, too, has improved the outcomes at the public schools; although so far, that outcome improvement is only just measurable, it’s not as great as the improvements provided by those alternatives.

Too, discipline is stronger in the alternatives, and that discipline contributes to the improvements in student education: the misbehaving students either stop misbehaving and so do better academically or they are more easily suspended or expelled. Beyond that, the misbehavers don’t disrupt the other students’ learning opportunities and so their performance also improves.

Maybe Not the Best Choice

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) has chosen Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY) to be his Ambassador to the UN.

This is a mistake; although it’s no knock on Stefanik to say so. My problems with her selection are these.

With the Republicans retaining their House majority still up in the air a week after the election, even if they succeed, it’ll be a slim majority. Her departure from the House would trigger a special election, and while it’s unlikely that another Republican would lose that seat, that’s a non-zero probability.

More importantly, she’s too badly needed in the House, especially with the ability in this narrow majority environment of the Republicans’ Chaos Caucus to continue their foolishnesses. Stefanik is a skilled Congresswoman who could continue to tamp down (if not entirely successfully in the last Congress) those foolishesses.

Stefanik’s replacement is unlikely to be as effective as she has been as a Congresswoman, and especially neither that replacement nor an existing Congressman will be as successful as she has been in the House’s Republican caucus hierarchy or on her committee assignments.

The UN Ambassadorship’s role itself isn’t as important as her role in the House. Our UN Ambassador’s role, because the majority of the UN nations hate us or our allies and friends or both, is limited to calling out those nations’ misbehaviors and to vetoing their initiatives on the Security Council. There are a number of folks besides Stefanik who could fill that role.

Stop Treating These in Isolation

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Richard Rubin thinks he has an approach to Republicans’ desire to cut taxes:

To pass a bill without Democrats, GOP lawmakers seek agreement on the deficit number

That’s the subheadline for his article. He then opens his piece with this:

As Republicans prepare the party-line tax bill at the core of their 2025 agenda, the key to everything is, simply, “The Number.”
The Number is the maximum budget deficit increase that Republicans are willing to tolerate as they extend tax cuts scheduled to expire after 2025 and advance the rest of President-elect Donald Trump’s plans. To unlock the gate to the legislative fast track that lets them sidestep Democratic objections, Republicans must agree, with virtually no defections, on The Number.

But that’s only part of the matter, and as long as Republicans—either party, come to that—insist on treating taxes in isolation, they’ll continue to fail. The plain fact is that Republicans don’t have to agree on any deficit Number; what they need to agree on instead is a Number that represents any value in the interval from zero to budget surplus.

That, of course, also would require them to agree on spending cuts that bring that overall spending down to within the expected (dynamically projected) revenues realized from the tax cuts.

There are two ways those revenues will grow on net from the from this sort of budget move. One is the well-known increase in overall economic activity that results simply from tax rate cuts. These leave more money in the hands of private economy players—individuals, households, and the businesses they own and operate. It’s been repeatedly demonstrated that those players allocate their spending far more efficiently than anything a government can achieve.

The other way revenues increase, though, is less frequently discussed, even as it’s closely related to tax cuts. This is that, with less government spending, there is less competition for the resources—labor, raw materials, finished and semi-finished products—that private enterprises need for their own operation. With that resource competition from Government greatly reduced, the prices for those resources come down, and private businesses can more easily and cheaply acquire what they need. Private enterprise competition then increases and overall economic activity increases, overlaying the increase from simply reducing taxes, and a positive feedback loop develops among increasing production, lowering prices, increasing private demand, increasing employment, and increasing innovation. And net increasing revenues to Government.

Those two outcomes achieve one other item of critical economic, and political, and security importance. It provides an opportunity to commit those budget surpluses to paying down our national debt.

Of course, the Progressive-Democratic Party is going to quibble over any spending cut and tax cut, all the while objecting to either altogether, so to get these done even temporarily, Republicans will have to do them through legislative reconciliation.

That, in turn—both the taxing and the spending reductions—will require the Republicans’ Chaos Caucus to leave off their ego-driven their-way-or-nothing-at-all obstructionism and agree to compromises that move things in their direction, even if not everything all at once.

And get Republicans like Senator James Lankford (R, OK) to shape up or at least stay out of the way. According to him:

We’re not going to have something that’s going to have zero deficit impact. That’s not going to happen[.]

On that score, the Chaos Caucus is right. There need to be spending cuts to achieve outright deficit elimination and actual surplus.

Duplicity

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) on ending the filibuster:

Over the coming weeks, the Senate will once again consider how to perfect this union and confront the historic challenges facing our democracy. We hope our Republican colleagues change course and work with us. But if they do not, the Senate will debate and consider changes to Senate rules [eliminating the filibuster]….

And

In a session with reporters at the Democratic National Convention, Schumer (D-NY) suggested that—should Democrats win the White House, Senate, and House in November—he would seek to end the filibuster for purposes of passing voting rights and abortion legislation.

These are deliberate moves to pass legislation unilaterally, in complete absence even of any pretense of bipartisanship.

Soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) today:

The only way to get things done in the Senate is through bipartisan legislation while maintaining our principles—and the next two years will be no different.

Only because, despite Schumer’s efforts, the filibuster remains intact. Nevertheless, his meaning is plain. He’ll have his caucus being just as knee-jerk obstructionist of any Republican initiative as he always has had, now with the added fillip of knee-jerk obstructionism regarding anything Trumpian, just as he had done during the prior Trump administration.

Assuming the Republicans are able to retain their majority in the House, he’ll also have able functional allies—if unintended—in the Republicans’ Chaos Caucus.