Monthly Archives: December 2014

Colleges, Again

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Frank Mussano and Robert Iosue opened their op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with this claim:

College tuition rates are ridiculously out of hand.

They’re right, too. College costs, and not just their tuition costs, are way out of whack with the value received. One evidence of that (eliding interest costs) is the extreme difficulty too many college graduates have paying back their student loans out the salaries their degrees get them.

They continued:

[T]uition has surged more than 1,000%, while the consumer-price index has risen only 240%. The percentage of annual household income required to pay the average private four-year tuition reached 36% in 2010, up from 16% in 1970.

They spent much of their piece describing where a college’s money goes, a number of a college’s cost drivers, and the way in which much of the money is outright misallocated, and they’re not far wrong.

Mussano and Iosue then suggested that one way of getting costs back under control would be to do a business model-type financial audit of the schools.

However, they missed one important driver of cost: demand. I’ve written before about the lack of any universal need for a college education.

We as a society need to de-stigmatize the lack of a four-year degree. College isn’t for everyone. Not everyone is cut out for college, especially right out of high school; colleges don’t always teach what the student wants, or needs, on a practical level; and where they do, they’re not cost competitive with other sources of that knowledge and training.

Trade schools, office skills training, and the practical, hands-on here’s-how-you-do-this-stuff-to-make-a-living-at-it training available at junior colleges (two-year colleges that are nearly always cheaper than two years at a four-year college) are excellent places to learn to earn a living.

The trades are critical skills, too. Who can build a house or an office building—or live or work in one—without a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter? Who can build a road or an internet or telephone network without heavy equipment operators, electricians, someone who understands networks at the construction level?

Skills like these don’t need a four-year degree, especially in women’s studies, or anthropology, or English, or even STEM. Yet without those skills, our country would come to a screeching halt. There’s a crying need for STEM graduates, even for English and anthro majors. But there’s a bawling need for the trades. We can’t use the STEMs or English and anthro types without them.

Oh, and demand: with the commensurately lowered demand for college, watch tuition and other college costs come down.

Voter Suppression

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Critics of voter ID laws always cry, “Voter suppression!” and they especially cry, “Black voter suppression!”

Here are some actual facts from North Carolina’s 2014 mid-term elections—an especially stern test since voter turnout typically is lower than in Presidential elections:

  • the percentage of age-eligible, non-Hispanic black residents who turned out to vote in North Carolina rose to 41.1% in November 2014 from 38.5% in November 2010
  • [t]he percentage of black registrants voting increased to 42.2% from 40.3% in the same period
  • the black share of votes cast increased to 21.4% from 20.1%
  • [t]he absolute number of black voters increased 16%, to 628,004 from 539,646

And in another state, according to Census Bureau surveys

  • turnout among blacks of voting age in Tennessee in 2012 remained stable within the margin of error
  • [turnout] was around 4% higher than white turnout
  • [t]urnout among Hispanic voters rose.

With suppression like this, who needs get out the vote programs?

Cutting Federal Spending

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Retired Federal judge and ex-US Senator (D, NY) James Buckley has an idea on this.

dismantle[] the more than 1,100 grants-in-aid programs that spend one-sixth of the federal budget on matters that are the exclusive business of state and local governments.
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Those programs, which provide funding for Medicaid as well as everything from road and bridge construction to rural housing, job training and fighting childhood obesity—now touch virtually every activity in which state and local governments are engaged. Their direct cost has grown, according to the federal budget, to an estimated $640.8 billion in 2015 from $24.1 billion in 1970.

I’ve advocated elsewhere weaning the States off their Federal Medicaid grant addiction. The remaining 1,109 handouts to the States certainly should be eliminated, also. Those $641 billion compare to 2014’s Federal deficit of $483 billion. That surplus could be used to pay down (a little) our enormous Federal debt and to reverse its skyrocketing increase—a real bending of the curve.

That’s just the pecuniary fiscal cost of those programs and of the States’ addiction to them.

Because the grants come with detailed federal directives, they deprive state and local officials of the flexibility to meet their own responsibilities in the most effective ways, and undermine their citizens’ ability to ensure that their taxes will be used to meet their priorities rather than those of distant federal regulators.

Getting rid of these programs also would be a giant step toward restoring the Federalism that was, and can be again, the bedrock of our nation’s exceptionalism and greatness.

At Last, Shovel Ready Jobs

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And President Barack Obama only had to break the law (and the Constitution) to find them.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency is looking to hire 1,000 new employees to process applications pertaining to President Barack Obama’s new executive action on immigration, the New York Times is reporting.

Never mind that existing immigration law makes his Executive “Action” mandating protection from deportation of illegal entrants into the US illegal. Never mind that his Constitutional mandate, and his oath of office to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, make his Executive “Action” illegal.

Because, jobs. And best of all,

The new positions have salaries that range up to $157,000 a year.

That’s better than road building—and they’re indoors, too. Can’t beat that with a…stick.

Tax Reform

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…with a Republican Congress and a Democrat President.

[W]ith Barack Obama in the White House and enough Democrats in the Senate to uphold a filibuster, Republican lawmakers are quietly playing down any hope of comprehensive tax reform and instead have set their sights on just the corporate portion of the tax code.

The GOP favors a simplified tax code with a lower, but broader, tax base.

That proposal is a nonstarter with Democrats because while it would reduce taxes overall, it would draw tax revenue from more people on the lower end of the income spectrum.

Never mind that with skin in the game, “people on the lower end of the income spectrum” would take their political responsibilities more seriously, which, far from leaving them their current Democrat rubber stamps, would work to the good of the nation.

The tax cut deal Congress passed “doesn’t have the shelf life of a carton of eggs,” [Senator Ron, D-OR] Wyden lamented before the Senate adjourned.

Wyden is right to lament this, though perhaps not for the reason he thinks: temporary fiscal measures do not have any effect on businesses or the economy other than suppressing both as the businesses await the uncertain outcome of the end of temporary measures.

Congressional Republicans have come to realize that even though they will control both the House and Senate in 2015, they won’t get far on tax reform unless they do so in concert with the president.

In other words, the GOP isn’t planning on passing its own bill for Obama to reject.

Said one top GOP aide close to the Senate talks, “There is only so much that can be done without the White House involved.”

Simply giving up, though, would be a mistake, and it would play into the hands of critics who say the Republican Party has gotten too used to losing and no longer knows how to win in Congress. “Needing” the President’s cooperation and that of enough Democrats to pass a cloture vote, though, actually is good for Republicans: it would help them emphasize the differences between them and Democrats, and it (re)identify the Republican Party as the party of low taxes and the Democratic Party as the party of big spending, the party of you can’t have anything if I can’t have my big taxes, the party of No.

“Only so much that can be done” is true, and passing lesser reform is a fine fallback. However, Republicans need to force votes—even if they’re failed cloture votes in the Senate—on full, wide-ranging, complete tax reform in order to put the Democrats, individually and collectively, on the voting record: either those Democrat Senators are for reform, or they’re for the Party of No. Either Obama signs, or he vetoes as a leading member of the Party of No.

In fine: pass the broad reform bills, anyway: force the votes, and if it gets far enough, force Obama to veto. Then bring the failed bills up again the next year, and force and force the votes and the veto again—in an election year. Some Republican staffers worry that this year is it because in an election year, too many politicians will be worrying about their election campaigns. These staffers corroborate the criticism regarding not knowing how to win. Election years, especially the one coming up, is when the Republicans will have the most leverage—if they can find the courage to apply the pressure.