What the election has taught us

A hard fought battle between Obama and Romney supporters. What have we learned?

• Radical "Republicanism" is divisive. The party caters to only a very few individuals...those making a tremendous amount of money. Since this small group doesn't have enough collective votes to win any election, Republicans have fostered themselves as the party of Jesus and moral authority. This is interesting, because if you look at the tactics of its most rapid pundits (such as Limbaugh, Coulter, and Beck), they represent the antithesis of morality. The knee-jerk Republican response to defeat, to be "the party of 'no'," is not helpful.
• As a nation, we need to come to grips with ideas that much of the world has already realized:
• Health care is a right, not a privilege. So we need to pay for it.
• Education, based on merit, should not destitute those trying to attain it.
• "Offense in advance" is not necessarily the same thing as "defense."
• This is not a religious nation. For those espousing strict constitutionalism, read your history. The founding fathers were far from religious people
• Tax reform is essential, but nobody has yet embraced the true answer, a flat tax with limited deductions. Also, why are religious institutions that intrude into the political sphere tax exempt?
• Abortion should be available, safe, and rare. A woman's body, and her right to do with it as she pleases, should not be the subject of legislation.
• Evolution is real. Global warming is real. If your religious tenets say otherwise, they are simply wrong.

Taxes vs. Benefits: You Can't Have it Both Ways

This is in response to a Facebook conversation that got too lengthy. Consequently, it might seem disjointed to the casual reader.

While there are many types of pensions, I suspect corporate-financed defined benefit plans are what you consider to be at risk. Actually, retirees and those currently involved in such plans have little to worry about, since those funds, by law, must be put away for the benefactor and only a small fraction of that money can be invested in the parent company. So…the money is already in the bank. In addition, the ERISA Act of 1974 backs this money with a federal guarantee (much easier prior to the Bush tax hacks, since this security represents your tax dollars at work). These companies could all fail now and it would have negligible effect on the current pensioners, with the exception that the investments would no longer earn the returns they once did. Ask any financial manager about defined benefit plans and s/he will tell you they are a dinosaur. Personally, I have a defined contribution plan, where my employer puts money into an account for me now, but cuts me free once I retire. This would not be enough to live on, so I pretty much match these contributions. This is certainly much more common now.

Corporations exist for only one purpose. To make money for their shareholders…and primarily for their largest shareholders, since that's where the governing votes are concentrated. The worker is merely a tool to that end.

The government has only one way to make money, by levying taxes. But what should the government spend that money on? The Constitution is pretty clear. Ignoring the "establish justice," "ensure domestic tranquility," and "secure the blessings of liberty" clauses for now, the two remaining provisions are:

1) "Provide for the common defense…" No argument here. I think that is very important, but I do not agree that a 40 year-old should feel that the government is obligated to support him/her with a pension for life for working in the military for 20 years. This person can't get another job? I've worked for my employer for 20 years. If I went to the HR director and said I was leaving and I wanted her to pay me half my salary for life, I'd get laughed out of the office. You might retort that I am not putting myself in harms way for my country, and there is a different standard in play. During conscription, I might agree…but not with an all volunteer force. Individuals enter knowing what the risks are. I appreciate that there are people willing to take those risks very much, and I am honored by their service, but that is not a blank check. When servicemen and women are injured it is our duty to help them, but my blood boils when someone with a hangnail claims they should be getting disability funds. How do we pay for all this? With all those tax dollars Bush gave away.

2)"Promote the general welfare…" (ah, notice that is says "promote," not "provide,"). So we now have a dilemma: what should we promote, and how should we do it? Again, the primary tools of the government are legislation and the use of revenue to fund that legislation. So what things can be promoted, and what have the legislators considered important in the past. These are the points where the national discussion must be focused. Historically the legislature has been concerned with:

Safety (food and drug, firearms, transportation, child labor, and criminal and family laws, for example);
Fiscal security (minimum wage, consumer protection, and debt relief laws, for example);
Education (Eisenhower, ESA, NCLB, etc.), and
Health (food and drug again, Affordable Care Act, etc.).

All of these are big ticket items. Which of them are sacred rights of citizenship, and which are merely privileges? That is where the debate is focused. Nineteen different polls this year indicate that Americans want higher taxes. They just want someone else to pay them. Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Here's an idea: Let's tax everyone equally. No loopholes, all income is included, and the cutoff is somewhere around $30,000/year for a family of four. About five years ago the CATO Institute found that, at the time, we could do our bushiness at the then current level if we all paid 17%. Sounds pretty good to me.

Charter School Efficacy

From http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf (p. 4)

• The academic success of charter school students was found to be affected by the
contours of the charter policies under which their schools operate.
• States that have limits on the number of charter schools permitted to operate, known as
caps, realize significantly lower academic growth than states without caps, around .03
standard deviations.
• States that empower multiple entities to act as charter school authorizers realize
significantly lower growth in academic learning in their students, on the order of ‐.08
standard deviations. While more research is needed into the causal mechanism, it
appears that charter school operators are able to identify and choose the more
permissive entity to provide them oversight.
• Where state charter legislation provides an avenue for appeals of adverse decisions on
applications or renewals, students realize a small but significant gain in learning, about
.02 standard deviations. 

Google Ngram Viewer

As Google marches forward in its quest to catalog all the world's books this growing repository makes for some fascinating research potential. Google's Ngram Viewer is a new tool that counts and plots keyword references. By charting two keywords at the same time, you can gain an interesting historical perspective. Plotting "creationism" and "intelligent design," for examples gives you an interesting look at the rise in the use of the terms following the 1830s rise of fundamentalism, the emphasis of the conservative Princeton Theology in the mid-1800s to early 1900s, the publishing of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, and the latest massive increase in their use with increased exposure due to televangelism and increasing political actions beginning in the 1970s and 80s.