Rumor has it that the Governor is going to take another run at vouchers. One aspect to voucher legislation I would like to see is a provision that allows public schools to reject or eject students based on the same criteria available to private schools. I don’t know if that means restricting the ability of private schools that take vouchers or enhancing the ability of public schools. But, if we’re going to pretend vouchers are good because they create competition, the playing field has to be level. That means not leaving public schools as nothing more than a dumping ground for difficult, expensive to educate students.

On the other hand, if we’re going to stick with the “every kid should have an education” policy choice; then we’re going to have to live with the fact that easy-to-educate kids subsidize the hard-to-educate kids. Vouchers – where we pretend that kids are widgets with associated expenses that are fixed and equivalent – disrupt that subsidy.

There had been some discussion around here a week or two ago about State GDP, so I thought I’d post a link to this recent Urbanophile post that discusses some recent numbers with handy maps.

All is not well most places, really, but because we’re occasionally asked to emulate labor practices of the South because that region is supposedly doing better than the rest of the country, I wanted to note that the South doesn’t appear to be doing notably better than other places and, some parts of the South by some measurements are doing worse:

Some of the fast growing Sun Belt states added people at a faster rate than they grew economic output. Georgia in particular is worth noting, because even metro Atlanta has been showing declining real per capita GDP. In fact, Georgia actually declined by more than Michigan did on this metric, so obviously all is not well down there. Texas, despite its vaunted jobs engine, is expanding almost totally horizontally. It is 9th lowest in the US on real per capita GDP growth, with a nearly flat 2% performance over the last decade.

(emphasis added).

You know that old political cliche about how individuals know better how to handle their money than the government does? Well, maybe not. How well government manages your money is certainly open to question, but your average Hoosier isn’t really all that well equipped to make decisions about their money.

The Indianapolis Star has an article discussing a nation-wide report by “The Investor Education Foundation of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority” finding, among other things, that Hoosiers are not, by and large, financially literate. (I think this is a symptom of the larger issue that lots of people are basically innumerate. We need to do a better job of learning our math.)

Results of a nationwide study released Wednesday suggest that residents of Indiana, on the average, are less financially literate than other Americans and that 68 percent of Hoosiers find it hard to pay their bills every month.
. . .
About two-thirds of Hoosiers and most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and don’t have savings for an emergency. A similar number does not bother to comparison shop for the best interest rates and features of credit cards.

And 28 percent of Hoosiers have borrowed money from payday lenders and other high-interest-rate sources in recent years, which is higher than the national average of 24 percent.

The article doesn’t do a very good job of explaining whether some of these factors are a function of people not knowing any better versus not having any other realistic options. But, from personal experience collecting debts, it’s a little amazing how many people just have no clue about the concept of interest. (My standard explanation is that you’d rather have $100 today than $100 in ten years, and interest is designed to compensate you for having to wait.

The study is here. I haven’t looked at it yet.

Mike Kole posted a Reuters chart that ties into my recent post about Social Security not being the problem.

Mike had a different point to make about how we should cut spending; but I think this graph says a lot about how funding of government expenditures has changed over the past 50 years. Note the sharp decrease in the share of federal revenues represented by corporate and estate taxes. Income taxes have dropped some but not in the same proportion as corporate and estate taxes. And those payroll taxes (social security and comparable taxes) have really been asked to pick up the slack. Given that those taxes are only on the first $107,000 or so of income, if there is class warfare in this country, it’s reasonably clear who has been winning in post-World War II America.

Also, keep this post in mind the next time someone uses payment of federal income tax as a sort of stand-in for a person’s overall tax burden while advancing the argument that the rich are over taxed and the non-rich aren’t doing their fair share.

Matt Taibbi makes a point that I made 5 or 6 years ago. (And I’m sure it wasn’t original to me.) Social Security isn’t the problem. Thanks to an increase in the regressive payroll taxes back in the 80s, Social Security has been solvent. The problem has been the raiding of that regressive tax money to pay for things like tax cuts for millionaires and ill-advised wars.

Let’s be clear about what’s going on here. Social Security was never the cause of the nation’s debt problems. This issue dates all the way back to the Eighties, when Ronald Reagan hired Alan Greenspan to chair the National Commission on Social Security Reform, ostensibly to deal with a looming shortfall in the fund. Greenspan’s solution was to hike Social Security tax rates (they went from 9.35% in 1981 to 15.3% in 1990) and build up a “surplus” that could be used to pay Baby Boomers their social security checks 30 years down the road.

They raised the SS taxes all right, but they didn’t save the money for any old Baby Boomers in the 2000s. Instead, Reagan blew that money paying for eight years of deficit spending and tax cuts. Three presidents after him used the same trick. They used about $1.69 trillion in extra Social Security revenue (from the Greenspan hikes) to pay for current-day goodies, with the still-being-debated Bush tax cuts being a great example. This led to the infamous moment during Bush’s presidency when Paul O’Neill announced that the Social Security Trust Fund had no assets.

Well, duh! That is what happens to a fund, when you spend 30 years robbing it to pay for tax cuts for Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. It will tend to get empty. But of course this wasn’t presented to the public as being the consequence of too many handouts to wealthy campaign contributors: this was presented as a problem of those needy goddamned old people wanting to retire too early and being just far too greedy when it came to actually wanting their Social Security benefits paid out.

The Journal & Courier is reporting that Sen. Joe Harrison died on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010 at the age of 79. (h/t Tipsy Teetotaler). (Longer article here.) At 40 years in 2006 when he retired, Harrison was Indiana’s longest serving state Senator. My understanding is that he was part of a group of four state senators who dominated that chamber for a good long time – him, Morris Mills, Bob Garton, and Larry Borst.

He headed up the Senate’s labor committee where labor laws passed by the House usually went to die. He was also the Senator who offered the most resistance to the in-house printing project at Legislative Services back in the late 90s when I was there. (He was reluctant to take printing of the bills out of the hands of the private contractor who had been doing the work.) He was also tied into the Harrison Steel company in Attica.

That’s most of what I know about Sen. Harrison. There is no doubt that he was a major force in Indiana politics over most of the last half century. Rest in Peace, Senator.

We’re hot on the heels of the 150th anniversary of the secession of South “First in Treason” Carolina: December 20, 1860. You’ll hear a lot of apologists try to pretend that the Civil War was not about slavery. It was about federalism and limited government. This is demonstrably false. South Carolina was kind enough to follow the lead of Thomas Jefferson and state the reasons for taking up arms against the United States of America.

South Carolina was upset that the Northern States had been less than faithful in executing the Fugitive Slave Act – the law that said non-slave states had to help recover slaves who ran away. Got it? South Carolina was upset that states weren’t submitting to federal law. No state’s rights there. No limited government. They were upset that non-slave states weren’t helping them to preserve slavery.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia.

Secession was absolutely about slavery and anyone who says otherwise is lying or willfully ignorant.

Liberal media, my ass. Here is the AP framing the story of the tax cut vote incorrectly. Bush and the Congress at the time passed taxed cut legislation in 2001 that expires this January. That’s the law. It’s going to expire. Nobody has to do anything. If new legislation is not passed, those cuts will expire. That’s how the law was designed due to deficit concerns.

The House and most Senate Democrats voted for legislation that would enact new tax cuts that would replace the expiring ones beginning in 2011 for everybody to the extent of their first $250,000 of income or so. A minority of Republicans and a few Democrats has filibustered the majority to prevent those new tax cuts from being enacted.

Now, look at how the AP frames it. The headline says: “Republicans block Democratic tax plan on upper incomes.” Sounds like the Democrats are trying to impose a tax on upper incomes, right? Well, no. That’s the effect of the prior legislation, designed to expire not the new plan.

The first sentence says:

Senate Republicans blocked legislation Saturday to let upper-income tax cuts expire on Jan. 1, a showdown scripted by Democrats eager to showcase GOP lawmakers as defenders of millionaires.

Again, no. Legislation to let those tax cuts expire on January 1st, 2011 was passed ten years ago. Mainly by Republicans. If they didn’t want to raise taxes, they should have made the tax cuts permanent 10 years ago. But, they didn’t want to come clean at the time about the huge hole the tax cut plan put in the budget. Now they’re willing to go to the wall blocking tax cuts for everybody’s first $250k in an effort to get concessions for those few Americans who have income in excess of that amount. Incidentally, that concern about the deficit seems to have disappeared – as it does whenever military expenditures or farm subsidies come up.

(With apologies to Lord Tennyson for the title.)

The Indiana School Superintendent sent out a memo indicating that no state funding cuts are expected for K-12 education in 2011 as compared to 2010. Mikel Livingston, reporting for the Lafayette Journal & Courier reported on that memo, along with a story discussing how financial problems have hit Tippecanoe School Corporation especially hard.

Because of last year’s state cuts and its own budget problems, TSC has increased class size – by about 37% in the class cited by the article; and has cut art and music instructional time in half.

When I read about our struggle to maintain funding for something as basic as education, it’s hard not to worry that we are a society in decline. Cutting education is like eating your seed corn; you just don’t do it unless there aren’t any other options. In the past, we, as a society, were able to be productive enough to have the resources to educate our children at a certain level. It seems to me like our ability to fund schools has been stagnant or in decline for at least a decade; and it does not appear that any return to vigor in that area is likely in the near future.

Of course, it could be that we are still productive enough, but the fruits of that productivity are accumulating elsewhere. But, I’ve been advised, that suggesting such things is class warfare and irresponsible.

George Will (h/t Paul Roales) has a brief history of the “coarsening” of kids’ culture in the 20th century. He attempts to pin that particular tail on “progressives,” but that part of his undertaking is clumsy and doesn’t much work.

What it does show is that efforts to censor popular culture because it’s corrupting the children comes off looking pretty stupid in retrospect: comic books and Elvis, oh my!

I’ve mentioned this before — I’ve been doing this for six years, there is going to be some repetition — but generation after generation seems to think that the next generation is lazier, dumber, and has worse taste in popular culture than they did. Unless you subscribe to the notion that humanity has been in steady decline since it was kicked out of Eden, this is at least a little ridiculous. We’ve come a long way since we were competing with Neanderthals for supremacy. Somewhere in there, a generation or two must have had better music than its predecessor.

Whenever I see an article or column in the “kids these days” genre, it gets me to rolling my eyes.