Bloodthirsty Liberal

Oh Lord, spare me the liberal claptrap:

In addressing our current fiscal and economic woes, too often we neglect a key ingredient of our nation’s economic future—the human capital produced by our K-12 school system. An improved education system would lead to a dramatically different future for the U.S., because educational outcomes strongly affect economic growth and the distribution of income.

What’s that? It’s not liberal claptrap?

By GEORGE P. SHULTZ AND ERIC A. HANUSHEK

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Mr. Shultz is a former secretary of State and a distinguished senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Mr. Hanushek is a senior fellow at Hoover and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

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Over the past half century, countries with higher math and science skills have grown faster than those with lower-skilled populations. In the chart nearby, we compare GDP-per-capita growth rates between 1960 and 2000 with achievement results on international math assessment tests. The countries include almost all of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries plus a number of developing countries. What stands out is that all the countries follow a nearly straight line that slopes upward—as scores rise, so does economic growth. Peru, South Africa and the Philippines are at the bottom; Singapore and Taiwan, the top.

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Current U.S. students—the future labor force—are no longer competitive with students across the developed world. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings for 2009, the U.S. was 31st in math—indistinguishable from Portugal or Italy. In “advanced” performance on math, 16 countries produced twice as many high achievers per capita than the U.S. did.

If we accept this level of performance, we will surely find ourselves on a low-growth path.

Take our own state of California. Once a leader in education, it is now ranked behind 40 other U.S. states in math achievement, placing it at the level of Greece and foreshadowing a bleak future of ballooning debt and growing income disparity.

But the averages mask the truly sad story in the Latino population, soon to become California’s dominant demographic group. Hispanics attending school in California perform no better than the average student in Mexico, a level comparable to the typical student in Kazakhstan. An alarming 43% of Hispanic students in California did not complete high school between 2005 and 2009, and only 10% attained a college degree.

Anyone worried about income disparity in America should be deeply disturbed. The failure of the K-12 education system for so many students means that issues associated with income distribution—including higher taxes and less freedom in labor and capital markets—will be an ever-present and distressing aspect of our future.

Examples abound of the ability to make sharp improvements in our K-12 system. By not insisting on immediate and widespread reform we are forgoing substantial growth in our standard of living.

Not bad for a couple of conservative Republicans, huh?

Americans are tired of paying taxes (excluding Stephen King, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, of course) not because they’re stingy and mean—quite the opposite. They are tired of seeing their all too limited dollars blown on government waste and fraud, and, just as much, on outdated liberal orthodoxies. Yesterday, we reminded you of the staggering increase in welfare costs over the decades (without any accompanying increase in economic competitiveness); today, it is education.

Note the authors don’t say a thing about spending. That is the liberal approach, from local overrides to Congressional budgets (the authors cite California). Schultz and Hanushek call for reform, immediate and widespread reform. What that means is open for discussion—but I’d offer vouchers and other methods to make public schools compete for the business of a consumer class known as parents. If, after those reforms are put in place, a reasonable argument can be made for more spending than the billions already appropriated every year, we can talk then.

So goes the nation:

Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is in a race against the clock. Two years ago, he declared at a press conference that city finances were sound and would stay that way: “The fact of the matter is this city will never go bankrupt.” Then he hedged a bit, adding, “It will never go bankrupt under my watch.” Villaraigosa’s watch—his second mayoral term, after which the law obliges him to leave office—ends just over a year from now, on July 1, 2013. He may be able to keep his (amended) promise, but perhaps not by much.

Miguel Santana, the city’s top budget officer, has just released a fiscal forecast that confirms what critics of Villaraigosa and the city council have been saying for some time: If Los Angeles continues on its present course, it will go broke. This is not a prediction buried in the charts and footnotes, either. It’s right up front, in a preface titled “A Cautionary Tale: The City of Stockton, California.” Santana notes that Stockton has entered a state-mandated mediation period—in essence, the last chance for the city unions and bondholders to work out a deal—after which it will be officially in default. “Stockton’s story provides a cautionary tale for the City of Los Angeles and other cities struggling to remain solvent,” he says.

Santana is right, and his report offers some compelling numbers to prove it. Over the next four years, he notes, the average annual growth in the city’s general-fund expenditures is expected to top 3.8 percent. The projected increase in salaries, pensions, and health care is even greater—at least 4.7 percent. But the city expects revenue to increase by only 2.3 percent annually over the same period. This is the picture of a structural deficit, which no economic recovery is likely to erase.

Somewhere, though certainly not in California, Mark Steyn is laughing. He can afford to: when the US sinks into third-world oblivion, he can always slink off to that bastion of conservatism, Canada.

I’ve had so much to tell you while we were down! (Some technical glitch I don’t understand, and which I put down to the machinations of David Axelrod anyway.)

Let me start with this:

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan addressed an estimated 600 students at UC Berkeley last Saturday and told black students not to befriend any Jew without first reading “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” a book that promotes the thesis that Jews were behind the black slave trade. Heck of a way to start up a friendship!

Scholars both black and white have exposed the NOI book as a pack of lies, a modern day calumny which, much like their medieval analogues — “the Jews poisoned the wells,” “the Jews make matzo with the blood of Christian children” — is meant to incite hatred toward Jewish people. Dangerous hatred. The Daily Californian reports that Jewish students were hurt and shocked.

But that’s not even the point of the author. After all, this is Farrakhan and this is Berkeley. What else would one expect?

Perhaps not this:

In 1994, an African Muslim from Mauritania — Mohammed Athie — and I broke the story of a modern-day slave trade in Mauritania and Sudan in The New York Times. We reported that perhaps 300,000 African Muslims were still serving Arab/Berber masters; “Black Africans in Mauritania were converted to Islam more than 100 years ago,” we wrote, “but while the Koran forbids the enslavement of fellow Muslims, in this country race outranks religious doctrine. These people are chattel: used for labor, sex and breeding. They may be exchanged for camels, trucks, guns or money. Their children are the property of the master.”

In Sudan, Africa’s largest country, we reported that slavery was “making a comeback, the result of a 12-year-old war waged by the Muslim north against the black Christian and animist south. Arab militias, armed by the Government, raid villages, mostly those of the Dinka tribe, shoot the men and enslave the women and children. These are kept as personal property or marched north and sold.” We based our reports on government documents, human rights publications and a stunning interview with a UN official.

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PBS’s Tony Brown Show, the most popular black news program at the time, invited Mohammed and me to speak about slavery. Immediately after our appearance, we were verbally attacked by Farrakhan’s spokesman, who denied that blacks served Arab masters in Sudan or — worse from the NOI’s point of view — that black Muslims served Arab Muslim masters in Mauritania. Farrakhan’s “calling,” funded in part by Arab dictator Muammar Gaddafi, was to break the black-Jewish civil rights alliance while teaching American blacks that Islam was their path to freedom. Not in Sudan and Mauritania, it wasn’t!

The NOI was serious about shutting us up. Samuel Cotton, a black reporter for the City Sun, New York’s second-largest black paper, conducted a thorough investigation that resulted in a five-part series. “Arab Masters, Black Slaves” screamed across the front page in New York’s news kiosks. The NOI warned Sam. They followed and menaced him when he spoke in Chicago, not far from their headquarters. Sam’s book “Silent Terror” — which chronicled his experience reporting on the Mauritanian slave trade — has since become an underground classic.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C. in 1996, Farrakhan was asked about reports of slavery in Sudan. According to the New York Times, he challenged them: “If slavery exists, go … to Sudan, and come back and tell the American people what you found.” The Baltimore Sun sent two reporters to Sudan. They found and liberated slaves and published a special four-page insert in the paper’s weekend edition. Farrakhan refused their request for an interview and pretty much went radio silent on slavery issues until fairly recently.

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Why has Farrakhan decided in recent days that he can safely replay his “Jews were the slavers” card? I believe that the anti-Israel/anti-Semitic climate on California’s campuses emboldened him to regurgitate the attack. UC President Mark Yudof condemned Farrakhan’s message but defended his rights to free speech. I wonder what Mr. Yudof would do if a Ku Klux Klan speaker asked for the same rights and a platform on his free-speech campus.

Meanwhile, I encourage the student body to visit our website at www.iabolish.org to learn about the plight of modern day slaves, especially those in Sudan and Mauritania, where political correctness and fear have blocked human rights activists — who should be the slaves’ most vociferous champions — from taking moral action to set them free.

I’m glad the African American students in the video clip above took the message of self-reliance and empowerment from Reverend Farrakhan, and ignored (judging from their comments) his nastier insinuations. After all, Hitler delivered pretty much the same message to the Germans, and they were nowhere near as discerning.

BTW, forget the Klan speaking at Berkeley. Would Mark Steyn be invited? Alan Dershowitz? Caroline Glick? Clarence Thomas? Don’t bother packing your parka, Rev. Farrakhan; Hell would freeze over first.

PS: I knew California was bankrupt, but I didn’t realize that extended to morality as well.

What can be done?

The state controller has estimated that the state will run out of money sometime this month. California will need to find $3 billion in cuts or revenues to keep the state in the black through the rest of this fiscal year.

And next year looks even worse. California’s Legislative Analyst Office projects that, even with billions in one-time revenues from Facebook’s impending IPO, Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget will run a $6.5 billion deficit.

Democrats in state government are desperate for cash. And they are beginning to cannibalize their local government brethren for revenues to make up the difference. The state’s more than 400 redevelopment agencies have become one of the first targets.

Created in the 1940s, RDAs empower a city or county to identify almost any parcel of land as a “redevelopment area.” When that is done, state property tax revenues from that area are frozen and any subsequent increase in property tax revenue beyond the frozen level goes directly to the RDAs.

What a nifty trick! So, the state can take the taxes from Your Town, CA, intended for the roads and schools, and instead waste them on a new Volt plant?

Intended for “economic development,” RDAs quickly became the bread-and-butter of almost every pay-to-play construction project in the state. Developers would give money to local politicians, and those politicians would use the RDAs, and their powers of eminent domain, to obtain land for their campaign contributors on the cheap.

Developers then made millions building upscale shopping malls like Victoria Gardens in Rancho Cucamonga. Everybody won … except the free market and taxpayers.

In 2010, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to close his multi-billion dollar budget gap by raiding the RDA. Developers didn’t like that. They fought back with Proposition 22, which passed in November 2010. The measure forbids the state from siphoning off RDA money.

Fast forward to 2011, when Brown hatched a new plan to get that $5 billion. Being a Democrat, he had no philosophical problem with governments picking winners and losers through crony capitalism. But he did want, to steal a phrase from the Godfather, to wet his beak a little.

So Brown passed two laws. The first outlawed the RDAs entirely. That was the stick. The second allowed the RDAs to exist, but only if they gave a certain percentage of revenues to the state every year. That was the carrot.

Well, go to the link for the rest. I’ve seen too much sausage being made for a beautiful Monday morning.

- Aggie

Lots of votes in California

The latest authoritative warning came last week from the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group, which called the program “an immense financial risk” for the state and refused to recommend that the state legislature sell $2.7 billion in bonds to start a 130-mile initial stretch of the system.

Thanks to federal policy, if California does not start work on the rail line by Sept. 30, it will lose an additional $3.3 billion in federal money — possibly dooming the system.

But the Catch-22 is that, if California does start building without securing future funding, it could end up with a $6 billion track to nowhere. As the Peer Review Group (PRG) explains, that’s because, for economic-stimulus reasons, Washington insisted that California build the initial stretch between two outposts in the lightly populated San Joaquin Valley.
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“[M]oving ahead .?.?. without credible sources of adequate funding, without a definitive business model, without a strategy to maximize the independent utility and value to the State, and without the appropriate management resources, represents an immense financial risk on the part of the State of California,” concluded the PRG, an independent body established by the 2008 referendum that authorized $9 billion in high-speed rail bonds.

The PRG’s caution seems amply justified, given that the project’s costs are already mounting far beyond what voters were originally told. The 2008 referendum assumed a $33 billion price tag for a system stretching from Sacramento to San Diego. But more recent estimates have reached $98 billion.

If they build it they will come, I suppose? Let’s assume that they will fight about this over the summer and break ground just in time for Obama to spend the money and campaign on all the jobs he’s creating in California. The project could be disrupted a week after he gets re-elected. No harm done.

- Aggie

Even profitable companies are fleeing.

Democratic reaction to the news that Waste Connections, a $3.6-billion company and major Sacramento-area employer, is headed to Houston to seek a friendlier business climate tells other businesses all they need to know about the attitudes of those who run California’s government.

State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, gave these clueless and snarky remarks in response to the news: “In this instance you have a company that is, in fact, profitable, making significant revenue gains in 2011 and 2010. That doesn’t speak to a bad business climate here in California when a good company is able to thrive in that way. So whatever Mr. Middelstaedt’s (company CEO) reasons are to leave the great state of California, I know I’m pushing back.”

Steinberg claims to have worked on improving the state’s business climate, but from what we see in Sacramento, Steinberg and the party he helps lead have been pushing hard mainly for additional regulations and much higher taxes. The California Democratic Party’s attitude long has been that businesses are basically trying to rip off the public, and the source of all wealth and advancement can be found in the public sector, When businesses leave. Steinberg and Co. show little sympathy.

Go to the link for the rest of it. My comment is: Good for Waste Connections! I think that states that are hostile to businesses should suffer the realistic consequences. Businesses should set up in states that want them there.

- Aggie

Yeeesh…don’t ask!

“At Van Nuys High School,” reports the paper, “complaints about the food were so widespread that Principal Judith Vanderbok wrote to [food services director Dennis] Barrett with the plea: ‘Please help! Bring back better food!’”

Readers might wonder how, with all of the challenges in reading, writing and arithmetic, school administrators decided that reducing fat and sodium at the cafeteria was a top priority for L.A. schools. And it turns out that the city’s decision to ban chocolate milk and chicken nuggets in favor of quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles has created a full-blown crisis.

“Many of the meals are being rejected en masse. Participation in the school lunch program has dropped by thousands of students,” reports the Times. “Students are ditching lunch, and some say they’re suffering from headaches, stomach pains and even anemia. At many campuses, an underground market for chips, candy, fast-food burgers and other taboo fare is thriving.”

So the healthy food is so bad that kids are literally starving themselves rather than tucking into vegetarian curries, or else engaging in a black market. Apparently even an art teacher has been among those caught selling illicit candy, chips and instant noodles. Andre Jahchan, a high-school sophomore, tells the Times, “No matter how healthy it is, if it’s not appetizing, people won’t eat it.”

As dispiriting as the creeping nannification of the state is, I take comfort in the independent nature of the kids. We’re not North Koreans. When our government tells us how much to eat of what, we respond with a black market in Doritos. We’re expecting these people to teach our kids when they don’t even remember Prohibition? When Michelle Obama asks, “Who wants a tempeh burger?”, we shout back, “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame bun!”

But not for the first time I have to ask why we’re feeding kids as many as three times a day at school, when food stamp use is at a record high? How can those things both be true? Mrs. O? Finish chewing that mouthful of Big Kahuna burger and let us know.

So goes Greece:

Gov. Jerry Brown said Tuesday that California needs to make about $1 billion in midyear cuts to schools and social services, as the state’s revenues fell about $2.2 billion below the rosy assumptions included in the budget he signed last summer.

Last summer: aka three months ago.

The budget passed by Democrats and signed by Brown included automatic midyear spending reductions — known as “trigger cuts” — if revenue projections don’t pan out. Brown has said the move was necessary to prevent the state’s credit rating from deteriorating further.

The cuts include up to $100 million each to the University of California, California State University, developmental services and in-home support for seniors and the disabled. Community college fees would increase $10 per unit, and reductions would be made for child care assistance, library grants and prisons, among other programs.

School advocates warned that an estimated 1 million students — many of them with special needs or from low-income and rural areas — will be affected by the loss of $248 million in home-to-school transportation funding. In addition, school districts will lose another $79.6 million under the trigger cuts.

I know these decisions sound harsh, but don’t people realize the money isn’t there? They’re not really cuts, because you can’t cut what doesn’t exist.

I love seniors and disabled kids and libraries and cons—but they were sold a bill of goods. California can’t pay for you, nobody can. Greece can’t—or I should say Germany. Certainly don’t look at me.

And this fraudulent budget was passed without Republican support, which tells you two things, one good, one bad. The bad is that that state is so lopsided with Democrats that they don’t need to involve the other party. The good is that the other party might offer a credible alternative to this jive.

Louisiana is hopping mad—with good reason, it seems to me.

We count illegal aliens in the census, and that is a good thing because we need to know just how many people are here illegally. But we should not count them for the purposes of apportioning Congressional districts. Because the federal government did just that, several states including Louisiana lost seats in the House. This week, Louisiana’s Attorney General Buddy Caldwell filed suit in the Supreme Court to get that seat back.

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The result of these disparities, Louisiana said, is that the votes of its citizens are worth less “in terms of electoral power” than in a state like California, with a large population of undocumented aliens. Here is how that comes about, according to Louisiana’s lawsuit: a state with a small population of illegal aliens winds up with a greater proportion of eligible voters per district, because fewer of its residents are deducted from the voting population. The state illustrated the point with these figures: 748,160 voting-age individuals in Louisiana will elect a Representative in each district in the state, while only 656,452 Californians are needed to elect a member of the House in each district in that state. That is a nearly 14 percent decrease in Louisiana’s electoral power, the state said.

I am happy to sacrifice one of Massachusetts’ legislative seats—but not to illegal aliens in California! I would drive one of our loser Democratic congressmen (take your pick) down to Louisiana myself, as long as Bobby Jindal is governor—but the very idea that some of California’s legislative might comes from counting people who are here illegally is a travesty of democracy.

So many electoral votes, so few clues:

The recent announcement that California’s unemployment again nudged up to 12 percent—second worst in the nation behind its evil twin, Nevada—should have come as a surprise but frankly did not. From the beginning of the recession, the Golden State has been stuck bringing up a humbled nation’s rear and seems mired in that less-than-illustrious position.

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California’s dominant ruling class—consisting of public-employee unions, green jihadis, and Democratic machine politicians—has no real use for science as Coit saw it: as a way to create prosperity for its citizens. Instead, the prevailing credo of the state has been how to do everything possible to return to its pre-settlement condition, with little regard for what that means to the average Californian.

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The supposed solution to this—Gov. Jerry Brown’s promise of 500,000 “green jobs”—is being shown for what it really is, the kind of fantasy you tell young children so they will go to sleep.

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Magazine cover stories and movies cannot obscure the fact that entrepreneurial growth—the state’s most critical economic asset—has now stalled. In fact, according to a study by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., last year the Golden State ranked 50th among the states in creating new businesses.

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Until the current regime is toppled, California’s decline—in moral as well as economic terms—will continue, to the consternation of those of us who embraced it as our home for so many years.

At least California stands as a model for the rest of us—and we in Massachusetts are following it to the letter.

Meanwhile, Bloodthirstan is open for business!