Tag Archives: responsibilities

How to Handle Federal Lands

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Terry Anderson, of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has some thoughts on how best to handle Federal lands, a unaggregated expanse of some 640 million acres, 28% of US land. In their essence, his ideas are to handle those lands in a business-like manner.

…three options: raise the price of goods and services (timber, minerals, visits to national parks), reduce labor costs and liquidate money losers.

He’s right, but those are the second steps that need to be taken, not the first step.

Twenty-eight percent is far too much of American land to be retained by the Federal government. The necessary first step is the transfer of those lands to their respective States.

Anderson’s ideas, fleshed out some in the fulness of his op-ed, does recommend [t]urn[ing] ownership of some federal lands over to the states, but that’s wholly inadequate. The vast majority of those lands should be turned over.

The amount that might be retained by the Federal government, to suggest a percentage for opening discussion, would be less than 5%, and the retention purposes might be limited to protecting some historical and scenic areas for public park use, to finishing cleaning up Superfund sites of their contamination—following which those sites should be returned to the States—to maintaining (and I say expanding) our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to siting military installations, and to setting up, or finishing, nuclear waste storage sites.

The Federal government has no legitimate interest in withholding from State and private use so huge an expanse of our land. Selling it to the States and to private citizens would raise funds for paying down our national debt, too. The modern equivalent of a dollar an acre comes to mind for a suitable sale price—that original one dollar price wasn’t so much for raising money—though it did for that then small Federal budget—than to transfer the land to owners who, by paying for it, would have some incentive to make economic-based use of it.

The retained land then should be managed IAW business principles.

Blame Ducking

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It’s not blame shifting or blame casting, even though it might seem so. Those are just tools, though, employed in the cause of ducking blame. Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Josh Shapiro, has provided the latest version.

Electricity rates are spiking in the State over which he rules. PJM Interconnection, the State’s largest power provider, has approved 38 GW of new generation, but the generators are not being built: high interest rates and inflation, not Shapiro’s fault but demonstratively that of his party’s actions at the Federal level, have made the building too costly, even with the plethora of green subsidies.

Shapiro has, though,

pitched an energy plan to fast-track the construction of renewables and a cap-and-trade program that would effectively subsidize them by punishing fossil fuels. Such policies would likely lead to the retirement of more base-load fossil fuel generators….

And that restriction on energy supply can only further drive up energy prices for Pennsylvanians. This sort of thing already has done so, in fact, hence the present spike for the State’s citizens.

Now Shapiro is blaming PJM for those rising prices while ducking away from his own green policies, and his party’s national-level policies, that are the actual cause of the straits in which Pennsylvania’s citizens find themselves.

This is the Progressive-Democrat mantra: it’s not their fault; it’s never their policies. It’s always and everywhere someone else’s fault.

Eliminating DoEd, or Not

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As part of the ongoing…discussions…regarding the elimination or broad curtailment of the Department of Education, even news writers are getting in on the gaslighting. One such example:

It [the Department of Education] has released guidance saying it would evaluate claims of sex discrimination based on the “objective immutable characteristic of being born male or female” as opposed to gender identity. This effectively ended Biden-era protections for gay and transgender people in education.

Of course, it ended no such thing. What the guidance did—all that it did—was restore protections for boys and young men and for girls and young women, especially the latter, in spaces that must be reserved for girls and young women: restrooms, locker rooms, girls and women athletics. The Biden-era actions actively attacked with intent to destroy precisely these protections for girls and young women.

Protections for gay and transgender students remain in place where moves against discrimination matter: the selection or non-selection based on sexual orientation in the classroom, in discipline, in in- or after-school job opportunities, and on and on.

Progressive-Democrat Obstructionism

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The Trump administration, this time in the form of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, has extended an 8-month buyout offer to the CIA. Typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s insistence on Federal government power, Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA) had this objection:

There’s no statutory authority that I can see for the president making this offer[.]

That’s the Party position on government: nothing is permitted unless Government explicitly permits it. Of course, that’s not how our government works in the structure laid out by our Constitution. Quite the opposite, in fact: the lack of explicit statutory authority is no bar at all against the President—or the CIA Director in the present case—making such an offer.

For Kaine’s benefit, though like his Party cronies, it’s doubtful he’ll read it, here are the 9th and 10th Amendments to our Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

And

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Of course, Trump, and Ratcliffe, would need statutory authority to require those folks to take the buyout offers, but no such requirement exists—only the offer. Which is a better severance package than most any private sector organization has ever offered. The CIA personnel, and those other Federal civilian personnel, under the offer even get to keep their current insurance benefits; they won’t even be forced onto the horribly expensive COBRA plans for the eight months.

Students’ Decline

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American students—pupils, really—continue to decline in reading skills, and their math skills remain far too low.

The 67% of eighth-graders who scored at a basic or better reading level in 2024 was the lowest share since testing began in 1992, results from a closely watched federal exam show. Only 60% of fourth-graders hit that benchmark, nearing record lows.

And

In math, fourth-grade scores ticked up, while those for the eighth grade were flat. Math scores in both grades remained substantially below prepandemic benchmarks….

There is considerable angst regarding methods for teaching reading.

The results come in the midst of a wave of attention on how to teach students to read. Many school districts and states have emphasized phonics-based instruction, known as the science of reading, and shed other reading methods that focused more on using context to deduce the meaning of words.
Federal officials and researchers say there are no definitive explanations for the latest scores.

The angst is misguided. There’s no reason, for instance, why phonics and context can’t be taught together. They were, in fact, taught if not together then closely sequentially—phonics in first grade, context in second and third grade when I was in grade school. Nor is the Wuhan Virus Situation, often offered as an excuse for these failures, actually involved. The decline in reading and math skills has been going on since long before the virus appeared.

There’s also this bit of gaslighting, from the Denver school system honcho:

Denver Public Schools overhauled its reading curriculum in 2022. Simone Wright, the district’s chief of academics, said the move is making a difference. Denver’s reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress increased in both grades, though the gains weren’t considered statistically significant.

“Not statistically significant” has a very clear meaning to anyone who can do his sums. That meaning is that it’s not possible to tell whether there were any gains at all, or even whether there was actual decline. Or, maybe not gaslighting so much as she’s as arithmetically illiterate as the pupils in her district.

I offer one definitive solution to the failure—which is a teaching failure, not a student failure (they’re pupils at that age because they’re so young; they remain pupils as they go up the grade ladder because teachers don’t teach them how to be students): stop passing the pupils up the grade ladder until they can read and do math.

This business of social promotion, which itself isn’t entirely on the teachers—parents play a role in “not letting Johnny and Susan fall behind”—is destructive, abusive of the children, and actually accelerates and deepens Johnny’s and Susan’s lag.

Here’s a sample of a high school graduation test from the end of the 19th century. Not only are today’s high schoolers wholly unprepared for such a thing, they have no hope of getting prepared without the basic teachings of reading and math from pre-school on up, and the discipline that comes from teachers (and parents) insisting on actual performance rather than social promotions.

Update: [Sigh]. Added the missing link to the test.