A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Lee Hamilton has a column in the Evansville Courier Press entitled Battles over bills can go on for years. The former Congressman discusses how passage of major legislation is only the beginning. After that, you have the less transparent business of the rule making process and the courts.

The devil is in the details; and all too frequently, federal legislation does not go that far into the details. Rather, they give a framework and it’s up to the regulatory agencies to adopt rules that flesh out that frame. One problem is that Congress, relatively speaking, operates in the open and under the spotlight; whereas regulatory agencies are much easier to ignore. (There is the old schoolyard put down, “you’re mama’s so broke, she can’t even pay attention!) Even if the the agencies do their business openly, only those with a pretty significant stake in the game have the time and resources to pay attention.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz once famously said, “Nothing ever gets settled in this town.” That is why, as you follow the course of health reform or financial industry reform or any other high-stakes law, it pays to remember that it can take years before it’s really possible to gauge the impact of legislation.

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I remember hearing a saying that “freedom of the press belongs to those who are rich enough to own one.” That quote always comes to mind when I hear discussion of a Journalist Shield law or Reporter’s Privilege law.

Of course, now things are a lot murkier than they once were. A lot of citizens are in the reporting business and a lot of reporters are in the entertainment business. So, I’m not sure Indiana’s Journalist Privilege law (linked above) makes much sense in terms of its scope. It applies to:

(1) any person connected with, or any person who has been connected with or employed by (A) a newspaper or other periodical issued at regular intervals and having a general circulation; or (B) a recognized press association or wire service; as a bona fide owner, editorial or reportorial employee, who receives or has received income from legitimate gathering, writing, editing and interpretation of news; and

(2) any person connected with a licensed radio or television station as owner, official, or as an editorial or reportorial employee who receives or has received income from legitimate gathering, writing, editing, interpreting, announcing or broadcasting of news.

Whether the reporter gets paid for what he or she does really doesn’t say much about the value of what’s reported and whether such reporting needs to be protected.

For similar reasons, I can’t get especially riled up just because a Justice Department subpoena happened to be directed at Associated Press records. Either such subpoena power is good policy when directed at any citizen or not. Paid journalists aren’t special little snowflakes.

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Dave Bangert, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier has a good column entitled An ISTEP rebellion brewing? West Lafayette superintendent contends it’s just a matter of time.

He talks about West Lafayette School Corporation superintendent, Rocky Killion’s criticism of ISTEP testing at a program the other day. We spend a ton of money on ISTEP and don’t get much bang for our buck.

Can you imagine, he asked, what could be done if the state poured testing money into a program along the lines of Read to Succeed?

Can you imagine, he asked, going with an easier way to figure out whether a kid can read by third grade: “How about we ask the teacher?”

But, of course, there is money and political capital to be made by distrusting teachers. Marketing requires that you identify a problem of which the consumers were unaware and sell them a solution. So, the schools are failing – let us sell you some testing and private schools

My school is good, and my kid is doing fine. And, yet, my school and my kid had to waste time on these tests. Furthermore, as a champion test taker, I can tell you that standardized tests aren’t great at capturing what kids need to succeed. I was good at those kind of tests, but I was fundamentally lazy. My sisters were far better at excelling in the day-to-day grind of the class room. I never got the 4.0s they got, but I crushed the tests. Thing is, life is a day-to-day grind. The skills you need to excel in a classroom are far more valuable than those you need for test taking. Now that I’m out of school, about all those testing skills do for me is make me kind of a trash talker when I’m playing bar trivia at BW-3.

Meanwhile, my kid has to waste a good chunk of several school days taking (and an unknown amount of time preparing for) a test that tells me what I already know — he’s pretty sharp and he’s learning a lot in school. I suspect other parents and teachers have a pretty good idea of where their kids stand educationally as well.

But, trusting teachers to tell us the truth is unappealing and there is money to be made by mistrusting them, so we’ll continue to spend our resources on a bunch of tests instead of on education.

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Erik Loomis has a brief blog post at Lawyers, Guns & Money on Ag-Gag legislation in other states. Readers may recall that an Ag Gag bill stalled in the Indiana General Assembly this session. It would have, among other things, penalized the surreptitious recording of agricultural operations.

Loomis says:

The agricultural industry and its political hacks in state legislatures have pushed for these laws around the country in response to videos and other reports of massive and disturbing animal cruelty taking place in our food system, both in terms of the general cruelty of the animals’ living conditions, but also terrible acts of individual cruelty against animals.

The recent Planet of the Apes movie (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) shows us that it’s in our own best interest to guard against individual cruelty against animals. Remember, that one zoo keeper was torturing apes to impress the ladies (I guess he couldn’t afford a cool car with a loud muffler) — Caesar gets pissed and storms the Golden Gate Bridge. Now, I’m sure that proponents of these measures would be just fine with an ape-ridden San Francisco because Nancy Pelosi, but Idaho and Utah aren’t really that far away, and before too long, the enraged-intelligent simians will make illegal Mexicans seem like a fond dream.

And those are our cousins from the monkey family. Imagine being under the jack-booted hooves of confined fed cow overlords. As Troy McClure noted in the Meat Council documentary, `Meat and You: Partners in
Freedom’, “Don’t kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he’d eat you and everyone you care about!”

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Getting ready for work this morning, I caught the last 10 minutes or so of an Andy Griffith episode. I hadn’t realized what kind of leftist hellscape Mayberry was. The part of the show I caught had to do with two would-be job creators (one of whom, if I’m not mistaken, was Staff Sgt. Charlie Hacker who would go on to be Sam the Butcher), who wanted to sell their goods by the side of the road.

Andy and Barney wanted to impose statist red tape on these honest farmers for the crime of not having their papers in order. Though they had been run off once, undaunted, these entrepreneurs set up shop again. Barney and Andy determine that they will continue their oppression. During the discussion, Barney asks Andy if he is going to take a gun. Refusing to admit that guns equal freedom, Andy says that, no he isn’t going to take his gun. Instead, he is going to rely on his badge, which represents the law of the collective and that should be enough.

No guns.
Government = The People.
Hostility toward commerce and imposition of statist red tape.

Andy Taylor was clearly no Sheriff Mack.

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I recall when we were debating health care reform on this blog, the Singapore model was brought up by opponents of universal health care as a successful model featuring private health insurance.

Aaron Carroll has a blog post up that discusses some details of Singapore’s model. It doesn’t sound like something that opponents of Obamacare would embrace:

Singapore’s system is a lot like universal, mid-range deductible Medicare with a mandatory health savings account (HSA) plus Medicaid for the poor. By the way, in Singapore, the government dictates what health services you can and cannot use your HSA funds for.

Joe Flower suggested a couple of reasons why free market competition wasn’t really viable for health care:

Medical demand is wildly random but tends to be absolute. There is little way to predict who, specifically, will need most kinds of medical care. But, when you do need it, you have to have it or you’ll die.

Medicine is usually beyond the layman’s understanding. Consequently, the buyer has to rely on the doctor’s (who is also the seller) representation of what the buyer needs. “So the seller is agent for the buyer, the seller is rewarded for doing more and punished for doing less, and neither the buyer nor the seller can easily tell the difference between what is really necessary and what is optional.”

The pre-Obamacare system was dysfunctional. I don’t expect Obamacare to be great, but I expect it to be somewhat better than what we had. The political costs of change in this market being what they are; we’ll have to make due with this half a loaf solution the best we can.

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This is the kind of news that makes a local guy happy. The Associated Press is announcing:

Subaru said Wednesday it is investing $400 million to expand its Indiana factory and will add 900 workers to build the Impreza small car there in 2016.
. . .

Subaru, also known as Fuji Heavy Industries, said it will boost capacity at one of two assembly lines at the plant — the one that is now being used to build the Camry — from 100,000 vehicles to 200,000 vehicles.

It had already announced it would boost production capacity at the other line from the current 170,000 vehicles to 200,000.

Behind Purdue, I would say Subaru is the second most important employer to Tippecanoe County. This kind of investment can’t do anything but help the economic health of the community. Comparing the current state of my county to the lot of most other counties in the state reminds me of the quote from Matthew 13:12:

For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.

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Doc Bowen, governor of Indiana from 1973 – 1981, died on Saturday. Tom Davies, writing for the Associated Press has a good write up. His tenure was before my time, so I don’t have much to say about his tenure. According to his Wikipedia entry, he got his undergrad degree from IU in 1939 and his medical degree in 1942. He started his medical career with the Army during WWII and then practiced in Bremen until 1972. He served in the Indiana House of Representatives from 1956 – 1972 with a hiatus from 1958-1960. He lost a run for Governor in 1968 but won in 1972 and 1976. The 1976 win followed a change in the Indiana Constitution which permitted consecutive terms. He also served as the Secretary of Health and Human Services from 1985 – 1989.

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