Month: February 2005

High time for reform

I’ve just finished reading a little book — 896 pages — that contains an absolutely scathing if unintentional send-up of school reform. In it, the government decides that the headmaster of the state school is teaching subversion, and decides to make rules which will bring it in line with governmental expectations. One of these new rules allows the government to appoint suitable candidates to faculty vacancies, and which is how a government approved teacher came to be teaching a government approved age appropriate syllabus. Unfortunately, students were only allowed to read about the topic, rather than practice any of the techniques discussed. Imagine learning to play baseball by reading a book, because after all someone might get hurt; now you’ve got the idea. Oh, and the final exam was to be a lab practical. Before the year was half gone, many changes had occurred. Only clubs and teams that had government approval were allowed. A teacher had been fired. A newspaper published by one student’s father had been banned. Oh, and spring semester only got worse.

Of course, since all of this is the secondary plot, you won’t see it in the review over at Amazon.

And this brings me to the latest news that a coalition of 13 Governors have decided that it is important to bring our high schools up to the high standards that employers and colleges expect. These Governors have called the system broken. They are being urged on by the world’s richest man, former CEO of a Dow Component company that employs 57,000 people. Of course, Bill Gates and his family have for some years been deeply interested in improving the quality of education in the United States. To say that “For decades, our education system has performed exactly as expected: it has identified the top quarter of students and prepared them to serve as leaders in government and business, trained another quarter for jobs requiring skilled labor, and left half of all students relatively unskilled,” is absolutely jaw-droppingly scathing.

Don’t forget, Mr. Gates is concerned both as an American and a major employer who provides thousands of good paying, high-tech jobs.

So these Governors, a bipartisan group, have agreed that there are problems: not enough kids are graduating high school; there is a discrepancy between the performance of rich/poor and white/minority kids; the kids who do actually graduate high school often do not have necessary skills and knowledge. They have further agreed to tackle these problems: they want schools be accountable; they want the curriculum to be tougher (I am unsure how this is supposed to improve the graduation rate); they want “every child to graduate high school with a meaningful diploma in their hands”; they want that diploma to be harder to get (ditto); they want “to match their graduation standards with the expectations of employers and colleges”; they want to bring state standards and testing in line with employer expectations; they want to make all high school students take and pass college preparatory coursework (double ditto).

Allow me to start by saying that yes, we need high school standards, and they need to be good ones. Employers and colleges need to know that a person with a high school diploma knows and can do certain things. That does not mean that every child needs a college preparatory curriculum. I have never once been asked by an employer to recite the first 18 lines of Canterbury Tales, calculate the inverse of a matrix, diagram a Latin sentence, find the force applied to a major league fast ball, explain the logical fallacy of Avis’s “We Try Harder” campaign, or most of the other things I learned to do in college prep classes.

Not everybody wants to go to college. Not everybody needs college. There, I have spoken the heresy.

When Bill Gates implies that American schools fail by teaching half of the students neither sufficient academics for college nor sufficient skills for a trade, he is not saying everybody should go to college. Indeed, the man in a college drop-out himself. There are plenty of jobs in the United States that do not need college education, but rather good old fashioned rational thought, problem solving, math, and the ability to read. I am not talking about sacking groceries. Maybe we can outsource computer programming, but the wiring and plumbing of your house will have to be built and repaired where it is. There are good paying jobs in the building trades. Likewise, food service is a field which runs much deeper than “do you want fries with that.” Nor are these the only places where college degrees don’t matter.

If our aim is truly to prepare young people for life beyond high school, then we must consider vocational education to be part of the solution. If we need multiple grades of high school diploma to accommodate that, so be it.

Minute Missive on Mental Health

Heads they win, tails you lose.

Depending on which Seattle news paper you read, you might have noticed an article that said Thousands of people could lose mental health coverage, or that millions might gain mental health coverage. Strangely enough these really are two sides of one coin.

In Washington State, Medicaid covers mental health. Most private health insurance policies only have the barest of coverage. As a result, people with severe mental health problems can very quickly end up on Medicaid. However, in this age of governmental belt tightening, the state feels they no longer have the money for this coverage.

This is a real shame, because people who are mentally ill have a hard time getting by without treatment. It should not be rocket science to say that if a person has a mental illness, it effects how he or she sees the world, and this has a very direct bearing on someone’s — anyone’s — ability to hold down a job and pay the bills. This is not an issue of pulling ones self up by the bootstraps, because they can’t necessarily tell that there are any boots. By some estimates, 20-25% of the homeless are mentally ill. If you want to solve homelessness, you have to treat mental illness. Although it is difficult to obtain figures for the number of convicted criminals who are mentally ill, there is evidence to support the idea that treating mental health issues among prison and parole populations reduces recidivism, or repeat offenses. Since reducing homelessness and crime are both societal priorities, it should be a no-brainer that mental health is an issue to address.

So, the Washington state legislature finds themselves in the unenviable position of not being able to afford services that would cost substantially less if there were insurance parity. The obvious answer is to mandate insurance coverage of mental illness.

However, before we gloat over having found such an obvious solution, let’s deal with why insurance companies do not already provide this coverage. First of all, it’s expensive. Rates will have to go up to provide this coverage, even if only a small percentage of the covered individuals need it. And since, as the saying goes, things are tough all over, this means that more employers will opt for cheaper, less comprehensive coverage for their employees, or that more employees will decide to take their chances with no coverage. The great irony is that these people might well end up on the new, improved, reduced mental health benefit Medicaid.

The other reason for the lack of coverage is buried decades ago. There was a time when mental health coverage was abused by authority figures, parents, and mental hospitals. A trouble maker could be labeled mentally ill, and taken out of the picture for a while. The hospital was happily compliant, as long as the insurance company paid up. It was the 80s version of boot camps for troubled teens, and it wasn’t a new phenomenon then. Insurance companies decided that it was easier to drop the coverage than to sort out the fraud from the actual necessary care.

Getting medical help to the mentally ill is a good thing, but we must tread lightly in how we provide it.

9 out of 10 Leading Ostrich Scientists

I am more than a little bothered by the current tendency to decry inconvenient science as “unproven theories.”

Whether it’s putting stickers about “evolution” on science textbooks, or disseminating simply false information about contraception, (or even the number of people who still think most overrated dictator of 2003 Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11) there seems to be a more than trivial part of the population that would rather put their heads in the sand than look at reality.

I read recently that the most important scientific breakthroughs often come, not with the words “eureka!” but rather with “that’s funny…” Scientific theories often represent nothing more than our best current understanding of the world. Most of the time, we cannot “prove” these theories, but we can confirm or refute them by obtaining data that is either “consistent” with the theory, or “inconsistent.” The latter tends to indicate a problem with the theory. When a scientist — a real scientist and not just someone who knows a few facts and is willing to parrot the party line — comes across facts that do not fit theory, he looks at those facts and tries to figure out why. Is there a measurement error? Has something gotten into the data that shouldn’t be there? Is this some peculiar exception to the theory? Can the theory be refined to reflect this new data? Or is the theory simply wrong?

At some point, there is enough confirming data that a theory is accepted as more or less right. We don’t need more experiments to tell us that actions have opposite and equal reactions, or that germs cause disease, or that water is made up of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.

Information keeps coming in that suggests that the theory of climate change, or global warming, is coming to pass. The world is definitely getting warmer on the whole, and strange things are happening to our weather as a result. The Pacific Northwest is having an unusually warm, dry winter, so the bulbs are blooming early and summer drought is expected. Las Vegas has had snow two years in a row. Field biologists in Alaska have noticed changes over the course of years. Europe and Japan have had record heat waves. Florida has been pounded with more hurricanes than usual.

How much confirming data do we need?

What is a subject for debate is exactly why the world is getting warmer. Is it the “greenhouse effect” of Carbon Dioxide trapping heat? How does that fit with the fact that the world has been getting less sunlight over the last few decades? Is this just a perfectly normal fluctuation in the temperature that humans are only now able to measure?

It is not possible to run experiments on something as large as the world’s climate, and even if it were possible it would be extremely irresponsible; if something went wrong it could have absolutely devastating consequences, like the death of all life on the planet. However, just because we can’t experiment doesn’t mean we can’t look for things that happened at the same time. We do know that as the world has been getting warmer, humans have been putting out progressively more pollution. Our power plants and car engines put out more carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide our cows fart more methane, and our trees are being cut down more than at any point in the past. We can’t prove that these things cause global warming, but we can’t rule it out either. And in any event, pollution isn’t good for us, either.

That is why people are getting involved. Shareholders are holding corporations responsible for pollution. That is why the Kyoto Agreement went into effect this week, and why some states and municipalities are trying to comply with it even if the United States won’t. Kyoto won’t cure the world on it’s own because too many countries are exempt. This is a real shame, because the underdeveloped nations that are exempt had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the developed world. If they seized the chance to install clean technology the first time, they could skip the environmental and health consequences that we face here.

Kyoto is not perfect, but it’s better than anything else on the table. Unless of course you are one of the huge polluters.

In closing, I don’t like Hillary Clinton, but I do like this idea: make Election Day a national holiday, mandate receipts for voting, and require all the new rules to be in place by the 2006 elections. Remember, this isn’t about partisanship, it is about making sure your vote counts. As many really close elections as they have been in the last five years, that’s really important. Thanks to Pandagon for pointing out this item.

Will Work For Food… And Affordable Housing

Those of us who have not been living in exclusive gated communities are probably aware that all is not wine and roses in America. Sure, the official unemployment rate is low –kept artificially so by the narrow definition of “unemployment” — but homeless shelters and food banks are working at capacity.

How can this be?

Well according to the experts cited in this article, it has to do with the high price of housing. When a family spends “too much” on housing, they don’t have enough money for food. And why is housing so expensive?

Among the concerns listed by HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson were slow permitting procedures and complex environmental regulations that can significantly increase the length and cost of home building review and approval processes.

That’s right. The official government stance is that this is the fault of states and local governments that want to make sure that new housing meets certain standards. Burdensome standards, like that they meet building codes. That a housing development won’t overwhelm local road and utility capacities. That developers don’t pave over a wetland and create a perennial flooding problem for miles around.

Mr. Jackson’s office calls many of these standards onerous and “archaic.”

Now, one thing that Mr. Jackson is right about is that affordable housing is necessary if we are to have people in our neighborhoods like teachers and nurses and firefighters. I will not dispute him on that point. But he is wrong that the same regulations which ensue safe, stable communities prevent these people from having affordable housing. Nor does Mr. Jackson address the issue of poverty, despite the fact that affordable housing is an even bigger problem to the poor than to the not-highly-paid professionals he speaks of. This is no surprise, since Mr. Jackson is on record as saying, more or less, that he doesn’t believe in systemic poverty.

But back to the issue of affordable housing. Why does this housing have to be owned? What is wrong with making sure there is adequate stock of “safe,” affordable, well-managed apartment housing? And why does this report not address other issues which undeniably drive up housing prices, such as rent controls (which artificially guts the supply of rental housing and thereby drives up the cost of owned housing)?

I will be utterly shocked if the HUD solution to the problem of affordable housing supply does not include “deregulation,” by which they will mean taking away the abilities of local governments to control local construction in any way shape or form. In the meantime, they will do everything possible to avoid looking for the real reasons real estate is experiencing double digit increases. Las Vegas house prices rose 47% last year. It had little to do with regulation, a lot to do with the fact that the city is gaining thousands of residents every month, and even more to do with the fact that the Las Vegas valley has a finite amount of buildable land.

In closing, Questions and Answers on Social Security and dispelling Social Security Myths. Seriously, it boils down to one question: if the problem is that Social Security will not have enough money, how is giving it less money going to help? Speaking of questions nobody will ask, what is more relevant, the percentage of kids who get a high school diploma, or the percentage of those kids who actually have the knowledge and skills to function in the job market? Oh, and here’s the latest in universal health care.

License and Registration, Please

Depending on what your news source is, you may have read that there are new guidelines for driver’s licenses, or you may have read that immigration laws have been tweaked. Believe it or not, this is the same bit of legislation. You can read the bill here.

During this discussion, I will overlook the fundamental difference between a “drivers license,” whose purpose is to show that one is a competent driver, and an “identification card,” whose purpose is to verify the identity of the bearer. Many if not most people use a drivers license as an identification card, but that does not make them synonymous. There are many people who, for whatever reason, need to be identifiable and yet do not drive.

Now, I don’t think anyone would disagree that an identification card should include certain basic bits of information: name, date-of-birth, address, a picture. Since it will be used to verify identity, it makes perfect sense to verify that the applicant is who he says he is. It is also, frankly, in everyone’s interest to make identity documents difficult to forge or falsify. This bill goes beyond that.

This bill wants your state DMV to check your Social Security number against SSA files, digitize your picture, put a scanned image of your birth certificate and immigration papers and social security card and who knows what other information in a digitized database forever, and make your complete driving record available to every other DMV in the country. Your state has the option of refusing to comply with these standards, but if they do not only will your state lose all it’s interstate highway funds; you and every citizen of your state will not be able to use your “non-compliant” drivers license for federal identification purposes, including boarding an airplane.

Rather inconvenient.

But wait, there’s more. The stated purpose of this bill is to close the loopholes under which the 9/11 boys were able to get “legitimate” identification. This here is an anti-terrorism bill, and it’s unAmerican to be against anti-terrorism. And since we all know that all terrorists are foreigners — except for McVeigh, and the Unabomber, and Krar, and let’s just not talk about the Earth Liberation Front or the cornucopia of other homegrown radical violent groups — this bill deals harshly on immigration issues. Illegal immigrants will not be able to get compliant identification at all (no problem, they shouldn’t be here). There will be new rules on amnesty and political asylum: “Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said the bill ‘targets legitimate victims of persecution – innocent people under threat of torture or death for their religious beliefs’ and ‘unconstitutionally forbids federal judges from hearing asylum cases involving real threats of torture.'”

But wait! There’s a special bonus in section 102. “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section…. Notwithstanding any other provision of law (statutory or nonstatutory), no court shall have jurisdiction to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security pursuant to paragraph (1); or to order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision.”

Maybe my legalese is rusty, but that sounds like it can be reduced to “The DHS has the right to do whatever it wants, and the courts have no authority to stop them or even charge them a fine.” DHS wants to fill the Rio Grande with acid? Fine. DHS wants to erect a giant replica of the Berlin Wall on the border with Canada? Great. DHS wants to clear-cut a forest so illegal aliens can’t use the trees for cover? Alrighty then.

As long as you are planning to write your Senator, you might want to read this set of articles: How to owe $40K by doing nothing, and Tighter Bankruptcy Law Favored, 2005 dance mix.

Budget Whoa!

Today, after much posturing and theorizing, the 2006 Federal Budget has been released. You can get your very own copy! Isn’t the internet great?

Now, don’t get to thinking this budget is set in stone. It’s as malleable as a Word document at this point. The Congress still has to wrangle over each line item, alternately decrying what is there and demanding what is not there. The President’s proposal is described as “a tough sell.” Although the 2006 fiscal year starts on October 1, recent history tells us not to expect the final version to pass until next January. It must really be nice to be able to let financial decisions slide for three months; it’s certainly not anything most people can get away with.

Now, the numbers we are talking about are big, big numbers, and most people kind of fuzz over numbers than end in “illion,” so go ahead and start thinking of “a billion” as “a thousand million.” “A trillion” becomes “a million million.” This should help add perspective as you read information about this budget. The overall budget is two and a half million million dollars. That is nevertheless several hundred thousand million less than expected tax revenues.

This budget includes a facade of fiscal conservatism. President Bush’s stated goal is to reduce the budget deficit by half as compared to GDP, a sufficiently vague figure that allows economists plenty of room to argue. Oh, and that figure, estimated at a 2009 deficit of $230 thousand million, “do not take into account some big-ticket items: the military costs incurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, the price of making Bush’s first term tax cuts permanent, or the transition costs for his No. 1 domestic priority, overhauling Social Security.” That’s like writing your household budget without accounting for electricity and the credit card bills.

Just about everything but military spending is supposed to be cut if not eliminated. Farm subsidies top the list, a controversial measure long demanded by the international community, but one must wonder if this is being done in a manner which helps family farms, or whether this is another favor to agribusiness. More cuts will occur in the Department of Education, despite the fact that states and school districts are already screaming about unfunded federal mandates and the expenses associated with No Child Left Behind. Other Big Big Cuts include public health and housing for the poor. Just think how much money this nation can save by making sure there are plenty of chronically ill homeless people. Why, that just makes me want to read some Dickens novels!

Oh but wait, America’s big cities aren’t going to be happy with that arrangement. We both know that the States and cities will not have much choice but to suck up expenses the Feds won’t pay for. Governors on both sides of the political spectrum are not happy. Most of them must balance their budgets every year by law, most of them have cut everything they can, and some of them have raised taxes as high as they dare. Even radical conservatives like The Heritage Foundation say it’s time for the Feds to be honest about their budgetary obligations.

And you know what we haven’t even talked about yet? The cost of President Bush’s Social Security plans. Over the weekend, Cyborg Vice President Dick Cheney admitted that the Bush plan would cost $754 thousand million over the next 10 years, and unknown millions of millions after that. He claims this is still better than the alternatives. Or is it? The money Mr. Cheney is talking about appears to be more than the cost to shore up the current Social Security System. It would be more intellectually honest to say they would like to shut down the Social Security Administration altogether. Supply Siders would have to grudgingly accept this as a good thing because it would have the net effect of a 12% tax cut to most Americans and the businesses that pay them. Fiscal conservatives would have to grudgingly accept this as a good thing because it would allow the government to retire $1.6 million million in federal debt. Many Baby Boomers and younger Americans would grudgingly accept it because it’s at least honest, and many of them never expected to see a dime anyway.

Of course it would really suck for the millions of Americans who need that money to pay the rent. You remember, the ones for whom the Safety Net was built in the first place?

Form 1040, lines 28 and 31

This morning I read an article entitled “GOP taking aim at health insurance paid by employers.” Let me save you some time, it’s another Ownership Society bit of propaganda, stating “they want to erect a system in which workers, instead of looking to employers for health insurance, would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible “catastrophic” insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I feel that traditional health insurance drives up costs by, among other things, directly short-circuiting market forces. Most people have no idea what their health insurance costs, because it is paid for by their employer. There is no ability, let alone incentive, to try and get a better deal. This GOP proposal largely addresses that problem, although I must admit some amusement that the party of the Supply Siders is proposing a Demand Side solution to the problem. The benefits of this idea are not only that people would be in control of their own medical and health insurance expenses, but also that it would limit the medical expenses that have to be funneled through the overhead (read: unnecessary added expenses) of the insurance company, and that Doctors would actually get what they bill in a timely fashion. Win-Win, so far.

However, there is a bit of this puzzle that is missing, and it can be fixed with a little change of wording on the 1040. Scoll down to the instructions for lines 28 and 31. You can probably get them on one screen together. Line 28 allows you to deduct personal contributions to a Health Savings Account, unless your employer contributed. Oh, yeah, and you need another form. Line 31 allows the self-employed to deduct health insurance premiums.

Change that line so health insurance premiums are deductible, period, without having to itemize, and we might just have a plan to rein in costs.

Of course, this still doesn’t do a darn thing for 45 million Americans who don’t have health insurance at all, mainly because they can’t afford it. They won’t be able to afford this proposal either.

In closing, by the time I finished watching this video clip of Jon Stewart commenting on a Good Morning America interview with the CEO of WalMart, an interesting question came to mind. Why does the CEO of one of the biggest companies in America so rarely appear on America’s number one business news channel, CNBC? (Apparently he was on January 13, but strictly to talk about how they will counteract perceptions, probably to say the exact same things he said on GMA. I can’t tell because I run an “unsupported operating system.”) Maybe because Mark Haines wouldn’t be as nice as Charlie Gibson.