Monthly Archives: January 2014

Income Inequality and Education

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Senators Lamar Alexander (R, TN) and Tim Scott (R, SC) are proposing legislation that would address income inequality (while acknowledging that income inequality by itself is not, of necessity, bad) by addressing a critical aspect of opportunity equality (or inequality): education.

While I disagree with the details of the plans, the two Senators most assuredly are on the right track.

Alexander’s proposed bill, the Scholarships for Kids Act, would transfer Federal dollars to States, and each State then would determine how parents could apply the funding.  Scott’s proposed bill, the CHOICE Act, would use Federal transfers to States to facilitate each State’s ability to supplement existing scholarship programs for “military families, those with children facing physical challenges, and students in impoverished areas.”

I remain adamantly opposed to using our Federal tax code for social engineering; that simply distorts the market being engineered.  Such Federal transfers have two additional seriously negative aspects: they maintain State addiction to Federal handouts, and they transfer citizens’ Federal tax dollars from, for instance, those of bankrupt Illinois to those of more flush Iowa.

It is encouraging, though, to see Alexander and Scott acknowledging the need for each State to be responsible for its own education spending (albeit with OPM) and for identifying and addressing its unique education needs.  We just need to eliminate Federal involvement (and resulting Federal diktats) from the equation.

For all that, the proposed legislations are steps in the right direction, and I don’t oppose them outright—but we need to take care in the next Congressional session to move these programs, and other programs involving Federal transfers, in the direction of eliminating the transfers altogether by eliminating the taxes that produce the funds being transferred.  Those funds should not be taken out of the pocketbooks of those who earned them.

Equality of opportunity will inevitably lead to unequal incomes (and to unequal outcomes, generally), but that opportunity will allow everyone to prosper to the extent each one is willing to work and has the talent to do so.  Education is one of a very few critical aspects of that opportunity.

The Cynicism of the Obama Savings Plan

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President Barack Obama in his SOTU speech offered a new “investment” plan for all those workers who don’t have access to a company sponsored 401(k).  His MyRA (My Retirement Account.  How cute.) would be available to anyone who has a job.  Sort of like traditional and Roth IRAs.

With those other IRAs, the owner can choose from a plethora of investment vehicles: stocks; mutual funds; bonds; even Treasury Bills, Notes, and Bonds.  And a bunch of other items, as well, but you get the idea.  The choice of investment, the choice of risk level, every choice of interest to an investor or a retirement saver, is that of the IRA owner.

MyRAs, on the other hand, have a single—count ’em—investment option: Treasury Bonds of the same type that Federal employees get if they enroll in the government’s Thrift Savings Plan Government Securities Investment Fund.  These bonds had an annual rate of return of 1.47% as recently as 2012, and a 10-year rate of 3.61%.  Talk about your wonderful employee discount deal down at the car dealership…..  At least the investor would be relieved of the burden of all those choices, though.

No, the truth of this wonderful Obama boon is that it’s just another way to con people into lending money to a spendthrift Federal government, this time with special emphasis on the targeted young and poor.

A Tiny Step

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But sufficient for the moment.  Recall this in the next Congress, though, and address it more firmly then.

What is this?  It’s the food stamp compromise just reached between the Democrat-controlled Senate and the people’s House of Representatives.  The compromise keeps food stamp benefits for most Americans while cutting them overall by $800 million per year—a 1% cut.

That’s a step in the right direction, albeit chump change, but serious revamping isn’t possible so long as the Democrats control the Senate.  First things, first, and that means here, as with most items to come up this year, Republicans and Conservatives have to stay focused—and they have to develop a unified message with concrete solutions beyond just saying “No” to the Democrats (“No” is the Progressives’ knee-jerk answer to real reform) on which to focus—on the failures of President Barack Obama and the Reid/Schumer/Durbin Senate and on Republican/Conservative solutions to those failures.

With that, they can increase their hold on the House and gain control of the Senate and thereby start, in the next Congress, making real progress toward redressing the damage done by the Progressive policies of the last five (six, by this fall) years.  Building on that, they can also win the White House in 2016 and then truly start repairing the damage done.

Improvements in Police Technology

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Criminals may not have a chance in 2025, when the cop of the future will be an imposing crime-fighting machine, able to see around corners in urban environments, identify suspects at a glance, safely pursue stolen cars and effortlessly bring unruly crowds under control.

And

Police departments around the country are already testing technologies like Google Glass, lapel cameras and tracking devices that allow safer pursuit of fleeing suspects.  But this is merely a glimpse of what’s to come, according to experts contacted by FoxNews.com.  They said increasing reliance on data mining, predictive analysis and all manner of gadgets will make getting away with crime harder than ever.

These technologies are ripe for misuse, too, by arms of the government, like police departments.  Does that mean we should work to deny these technologies to the police?  Absolutely not.  We expect them to put their lives on the line in order to “protect and serve” us; we have a moral obligation, if nothing else, to equip them with the tools and training needed to do that most efficaciously.

No, what we need to be vigilant about is this: our government cannot be permitted to deny us ordinary citizens those same technologies.

Think 2nd Amendment and the efforts of nefarious governments to disarm the citizenry, with the deleterious outcomes of those efforts.  Technology qua technology can be a weapon, too.  And, as gun statistic after gun statistic demonstrates, weapons widely in the hands of us ordinary citizens actually leads to reduced crime rates.

Climate Change, Again

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A couple of graphs are highly illustrative, from an article titled, appropriately enough, When Did Global Warming Begin? at Watts Up With That?. 

This graph, generated from ice core data collected at two sites in Antarctica, shows temperature changes over the last 450,000 years.  It’s interesting that there have been four sharp rises in temperature prior to the latest one, and each of them has been at least as sharp as the latest one.  The latest one also appears to have flattened out at roughly the same levels as, or a bit lower than, those four.

Now see this graph, generated from ice core data collected in Greenland.

The graph axes are a bit hard to read: on the upper graph, the left axis is Air Temperature (oC) at the Summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the right axis is Approximate Global Temperature Anomaly (oC); on the lower graph, the left axis is Atmosphere CO2 (ppm—parts per million), the X-axis for both graphs is Years before Now.

In spite of the CO2 panic-mongering, it’s pretty clear that a CO2 rise has been occurring for the last 7,000 years, and that rise is completely unrelated to the warming/cooling spates that have been occurring over the same interval (and the preceding decrease in CO2 levels is similarly unrelated to temperature in that preceding period).  In fact, since the temperature peak some 3,500 years ago, successive temperature peaks have been decreasing, even while atmospheric CO2 continues to rise.  Some pollutant.

It doesn’t appear very much like humans are impacting Earth’s climate in any significant way, even though we can impact our ecology quite significantly (see the expansion of the Sahara, apparently due to overgrazing, for instance).  But climate mongering is an enormous money machine for the climate panickers, far more so than ecology ever has been.