Lies, Damn Lies, and Tax Cut Statistics

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It’s a frustrating exercise constantly correcting liberals and far-left media types about tax rate cuts. One would think that, in a field where an exhaustive search for the facts should be the rule, not the exception, media figures would be interested in what the data on tax rate cuts says. Sadly, many are not only unconcerned with what the data says, but have created an entirely new line of reasoning based on nonexistent data.

The media, as evidenced by its pitiful performance in the last GOP presidential debate, is either ignorant of the tax rate cut data or is willfully misleading Americans, insisting that cutting taxes has caused exploding government deficits due to decreases in tax revenue. This is grossly inaccurate and it’s disappointing that the people who propagate these lies do so with little concern for the economic future and health of the country.

In response I’m going to issue this challenge to any media figure, liberal, politician, or anyone else interested. I’m going to post some FACTS-yes, facts-about the J.F.K, Reagan, and G.W. Bush tax cuts, and I’m challenging you to disprove the below data and show us what you’ve got.

Here is one caveat. By posting these tax-rate cut figures I am not making any statements about the causes of the tax revenue increases after tax rate cuts. As many of you remember from your high school and college statistics courses, there is a world of difference between correlation and causation. Causation states that “A” led to “B.” While correlation implies that A and B are related but that a third variable may have been involved.

To read more, click here.

Zombie Pension paid to Dead Man for 20 years by Andrew Walden

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Millions worth of taxpayer dollars have been shelled out in the form of payments and benefits to people who aren’t even alive, and few agencies are taking advantage of a low-to-no-cost system that could stop those over-payments sooner.

From pensions to property tax exemptions, even parking placards, payments and benefits that should stop when someone passes away are often passing on to the living….

the state retirement system has been crosschecking state death records monthly since December 2014, with the help of the Department of Health’s vital statistics branch Office of Health Status Monitoring through something they call “death matching.”

We asked what the DOH found when matching up deceased records with the ERS recipient list.

“Initially we found a lot of deaths that we had (still receiving checks),” said state registrar Alvin Onaka, “but on average now we’re finding 10 deaths per month.”

That’s 10 per month that weren’t previously reported to the pension fund by the family or survivors, out of the 1,400 or so retirees who pass away in Hawaii each year. ERS pegs about 150 cases that add up to the half-million overpaid.

“It could be anywhere between a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars,” Machida said….

Last year, the FBI and state Labor Department, using a different approach, caught and prosecuted two people who for years collected hundreds of thousands of their dead parents’ payments: Lynsie Katherine Williams for more than $400,000 of her dad’s workers’ compensation payments, and Steven Splater for more than $200,000 of his mom’s disability checks. They both did time in federal prison.

The Department of Health ran its death match of the state’s retiree health system or “EUTF” and flagged a name that had passed 20 years ago and was still getting benefits. The state attorney general’s office says they have no active criminal case for that one….

In the past couple of years, two were found guilty of theft after state prosecutions for taking thousands of dollars’ worth of dead people’s continuing pension payments: Cynthia Namaka for more than $3,000, and Harold Robertson for more than $5,000. They each had to pay restitution and do community service for punishment….

Sometimes it’s not money out, but too little money being billed to taxpayers who owe, that’s costing the government.

“We worked with real property tax. We started with City and County of Honolulu, and I think on our first run of those who were claiming 65-year-old-and-over exemptions, we found 4,000 of their enrollees had expired.”

”One of our early adopters was the people who issue the (disabled parking) placards,” Onaka added. “They submitted a list and we were able to provide them with those who should not be using those placards because they were dead (and the relatives didn’t turn them back in).”

PDF: ERS pension overpayments to the deceased

Read … State matching program that could catch payments to the dead rarely used

Government Is Why the Rent Is Too Damn High by Randal OToole

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Rising home prices and apartment rents have been in the news lately, but almost no one is looking at the real causes behind these problems.

Instead, they are proposing band-aid solutions that will do little to help most people afford housing but will greatly benefit special interest groups.

According to the news, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Portland, San Francisco–Oakland, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, DC, among other major urban areas, are all suffering from housing crises. Economists who have studied these regions know why their housing is becoming less affordable.

First, urban-growth boundaries and other land-use regulations in most of these regions have limited the amount of land available for new housing. Urban planners say these regulations are needed to control the externalities caused by urban sprawl.

However, as New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister recently noted in a speech about a similar housing crisis in Auckland, urban planning itself “has become the externality” that is making housing the most expensive.

Second, in many of these regions — specifically, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco-Oakland, San Jose, and Washington — rent control has only made housing less affordable for everyone not lucky enough to live in a rent-controlled apartment.

Even though some of these cities exempt new developments from rent-control rules, developers know that such exemptions could be eliminated at any time and are wary of investing in new housing.

Many of these and other cities have also passed “inclusionary zoning ordinances” that force developers to sell or rent 10 to 20 percent of the new housing units they build at below-market rates, which both discourages new development and increases the cost of the market-rate units that are built.

Although these problems are obvious to anyone who understands the rudiments of supply and demand, they are almost completely ignored by politicians, housing officials, and low-income housing advocates.

Instead, the almost exclusive focus is on building government-subsidized (or, in the case of inclusionary zoning, developer-subsidized) housing. Yet this does nothing to solve the problem for the vast majority of homebuyers and renters.

California has the nation’s second-least affordable housing (after Hawaii), and probably has some of the most aggressive subsidized housing programs. Yet a recent report from the state legislative analyst’s office found that these programs have produced only about 7,000 subsidized housing units per year, or about 5 percent of new housing.

In a state that has nearly 14 million homes and apartments, adding 7,000 subsidized units per year will have no measurable influence on overall prices, especially in the face of growth boundaries and other factors that make housing expensive.

So why is so much emphasis placed on a policy that won’t work while a policy of deregulating land markets is ignored? The answer is that long-standing federal subsidies to housing have created an affordable-housing-industrial complex that thrives on subsidies in unaffordable housing markets and whose reason for existence would be severely diminished if those markets were deregulated.

Take, for example, Enterprise Community Partners (ECP), whose mission (as described on its IRS Form 990) is “to create opportunities for low and moderate-income people through affordable housing.”

ECP is heavily funded by your tax dollars to promote affordable housing, getting much of its tax support through Section 4 of the HUD Demonstration Act of 1993, which specifically designates ECP as a grant recipient.

Enterprise Community Partners has certainly found the business of promoting a few units of affordable housing, as opposed to making all housing more affordable, to be quite lucrative, at least for many of its staff.

According to its tax form, only a quarter of the organization’s $58 million annual expenses went to grants aimed at making more affordable housing, while 62 percent went for salaries, benefits, and professional service contracts. (The rest went for things like conferences, travel, rent, and office expenses.)

More than two dozen of its staff members earned more than $200,000 in salaries and benefits in 2013. The United States of America gets along with just one vice president; ECP has sixteen of them, half of whom make more than the $230,700 per year taxpayers pay to Joe Biden.

The organization’s tax form also admits that it spent nearly $600,000 on lobbying in 2013. Thus, groups like ECP that focus on creating a few units of affordable housing, while they ignore the real problem, become self-perpetuating. They use taxpayer dollars lobby to continue their tinkering at the edges of affordability while they and the people who listen to them do nothing about the overall affordability problem in regions with strict land-use regulation and rent control.

This post first appeared at Cato @ Liberty.

Randal OToole
Randal OToole

Randal O’Toole is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow working on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the FairTax by Rep. Dave Brat (VA-7)

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Adam Smith, the father of economics, published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations nearly 240 years ago[i]. Soon after, an extraordinary flourishing of innovation and human well-being took off and transformed the globe. According to economist Deirdre McCloskey, the average American today is roughly 30 to 100 times better off than our ancestors in 1800[ii], the point when humanity began to escape crushing poverty. Notwithstanding modern prosperity, however, human nature hasn’t changed much. Smith’s insights remain relevant.

The Wealth of Nations considers taxation in Book V, Chapter 2: “Of the Sources of the General or Public Revenue of the Society.” In the prior chapter, “Of the Expenses of the Sovereign or Commonwealth,” he describes the primary functions of the national government. Some—like defense—need to be paid for by general revenue, while others—like transportation infrastructure—can be built and maintained with fees paid by users.

Revenue policy should fund the necessary expenses of the government. Not to benefit this or that industry. Not to advance social objectives. Certainly not to suppress political speech.

Smith set out four goals for evaluating tax options. First, tax contributions should be proportionate to abilities. Second, the rules should be certain and not arbitrary. Third, taxes should be levied when and how its payment is most convenient. Fourth, collection should minimize administrative overhead.

He then evaluated possible tax bases using those principles: rents of land and houses, profits, wealth, wages, head taxes, and consumption. He concluded that the ideal tax bases are residential property and consumption, particularly on luxury goods.

What does Adam Smith have to do with the FairTax? Everything. Setting aside property taxes—a state and local issue—consider how his principles relate to a consumption tax like the FairTax.

Is it proportionate to abilities? Yes. Those who earn more also consume more, thus contributing proportionately more to the general revenue. Savings—which our current tax system discourages but the FairTax would not—provide no current consumption benefits. They are deferred consumption, which in the meantime enables others to borrow to finance education, infrastructure, factories, and much more while also reducing the trade deficit.

Is the FairTax certain and not arbitrary? Yes. Everyone pays the same, known rate on consumption.

Is it convenient to pay? Yes. Merchants include the tax in the prices of final goods and services, which consumers pay all at once. Businesses simply remit the revenue to the government from time to time.

The FairTax also minimizes administrative overhead. The U.S. has around six million businesses.[iii] Not all would collect revenue under the FairTax, since many don’t sell directly to consumers. Current tax law requires the processing of six million business returns, 150 million individual and household tax returns[iv] (some overlap), and various trust, foundation, and other returns that are processed today, all under a complex, burdensome, and unFairTax code.

A broad-based consumption tax like the FairTax has other benefits. It eliminates the bureaucratic discretion that enabled the illegal and corrupt targeting of political speech, as the Richmond Tea Party experienced first-hand. Less taxation on productive activities yields greater physical and human capital investment by businesses and individuals, which makes workers more productive, boosting their compensation and standards of living while also increasing returns to saving.

It eliminates a major source of favor trading between Congress and big businesses. The concentrated interests of businesses associations create enormous pressure for Congress to provide tax preferences. The FairTax dramatically reduces the ability of political insiders to manipulate the tax system.

After nearly a decade of poor economic performance, we need comprehensive, pro-growth, simplifying tax reform like the FairTax. That’s why I’m a proud cosponsor of H.R. 25. To fully restore the American Dream, however, we must also pursue major regulatory and spending reforms.

We can have even more of the market-tested innovations that improve our lives and that would have astounded Adam Smith and our ancestors. Smart policy reforms—like the FairTax—can clear the path.

[i] http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html

[ii] https://www.aei.org/publication/perhaps-the-most-powerful-defense-of-market-capitalism-you-will-ever-read/

[iii] http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/econ/g12-susb.pdf, Appendix Table 1, pp. 7.

[iv] https://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats—Individual-Statistical-Tables-by-Size-of-Adjusted-Gross-Income, “All Returns: Selected Income and Tax Items: 2013”

ABOUT CONGRESSMAN DAVE BRAT

Congressman Dave Brat represents Virginia’s 7th congressional district, serving since 2014 when he won a special election. Brat is a member of the House Budget Committee, Education and the Workforce Committee, and Small Business Committee. He has a Ph.D. in economics, formerly was a professor of economics and chairman of the economics department at Randolph Macon College, and previously worked for the World Bank and Arthur Andersen.

EDITORS NOTE: To learn more about the FairTax please click here.

No, the GI Bill Does Not Prove “Free” College Is a Good Deal by Neal McCluskey

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As I’ve written before, the case for “free” college is decrepit, and Bernie Sanders’s op-ed in the Washington Post does nothing to bolster it. It sounds wonderful to say “everyone, go get a free education!” but of course it wouldn’t be free — taxpayers would have to foot the bill — and more importantly, it would spur even more wasteful over-consumption of higher ed than we have now.

Because I’ve rehearsed the broad argument against free college quite often, I’m not going to go over it again.

But Sen. Sanders’ op-ed does furnish some “evidence” worth looking at: the notion that the post-World War II GI Bill was a huge economic catalyst. Writes Sanders:

After World War II, the GI Bill gave free education to more than 2 million veterans, many of whom would otherwise never have been able to go to college. This benefited them, and it was good for the economy and the country, too.

In fact, scholars say that this investment was a major reason for the high productivity and economic growth our nation enjoyed during the postwar years.

I’ve seen this sort of argument before, as I’ve seen for government provision of education generally, and have always found it wanting, especially since we have good evidence that people will seek out the education they need in the absence of government provision, and will get it more efficiently. Since Sanders links to two sources that presumably support his GI Bill assertion, however, I figured I’d better give them a look.

Surprisingly, not only does neither illustrate that the GI Bill spurred economic growth, neither even contends it did. They say it spurred some collegeenrollment growth, and one says veterans ended up being better students than some high-profile college presidents expected them to be, but neither makes the Sanders’ growth claim.

Indeed, in line with what we’ve seen broadly in education, one says that at least 80 percent of veterans who went to college on the Bill would likely have gone anyway, and in seemingly direct opposition to what Sanders would like to see, the other notes that the Bill disproportionately helped the well-to-do, not the working class.

As the Stanley study says right in its abstract: “The impacts of both programs [the World War II and Korean War GI Bills] on college attainment were apparently concentrated among veterans from families in the upper half of the distribution of socioeconomic status.”

If we really want to do what’s best for the nation — not just what sounds or feels best — we need to ground our policies in reality. In education, as in Sanders’ op-ed, that often doesn’t happen.

This post first appeared at Cato @ Liberty.

Neal McCluskey

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) Votes for the Boehner-Obama Budget Busting Deal

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Florida District 16 U.S. Representative Vern Buchanan was one of 79 Republicans to vote for the Boehner-Obama budget busting deal. It is now the Buchanan-Boehner-Obama budget.

When Vern Buchanan first ran for Congress he vowed to reduce the federal budget deficits and called for a Constitutional balanced budget amendment. In a June 2015 press release Rep. Buchanan called balancing the budget “an urgent priority”. Buchanan stated:

“[T]he United States can no longer afford to ignore its out-of-control spending problem…We’re going broke, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, unless we change what we’re doing. We need a standard and I think that standard is a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment– Florida balances the budget every year, we make the tough choices…

It’s immoral what we’re passing on to our kids and grandkids. I have a granddaughter and a grandson on the way and I feel horrible about what’s taking place up here. “

[Emphasis added]

Given all of his rhetoric he still voted, in his own words “immorally” and against the best interests of his children grandchildren and ours, for Obama’s budget.

Melissa Quinn from the Daily Signal reports:

Despite overwhelming opposition from the majority of Republicans, the House of Representatives voted to pass a two-year budget deal today that raises spending caps by $80 billion and suspends the debt limit through March 2017.

The deal passed, 266-167, with support from moderate Republicans and all but one of the Democrats. Just 79 Republicans supported it, and all of those opposing the fiscal agreement were Republicans.

[Emphasis added]

To find out how your Congressman voted on this budget deal click here.

Stephen Moore, in his op-ed column titled “This Is the Worst Budget Deal GOP Has Negotiated Since George H.W. Bush Violated No New Taxes Pledge”
writes:

Halloween is looking especially scary this year. On Monday, Republican leaders in Congress declared an unconditional fiscal surrender to President Barack Obama and the  left, negotiating a dangerous budget deal that eliminates all of the checks on Washington’s spend-and-borrow binge by breaking the budget caps, ending the sequester and raising the debt ceiling by over $1 trillion.

It’s the worst budget deal to be negotiated by the GOP since George H.W. Bush violated his no new taxes pledge in 1990 at Andrews Air Force Base.

The result of that capitulation was to make Bush a one-term president and to split the Republican party right down the middle. This deal has the same catastrophic potential.

Read more.

Citizens Against Government Waste reports:

Forty-six cents!  That’s how much of your individual income tax dollar the government squanders on wasteful spending programs.

donate

Another 31 cents goes to pay the $433 billion in annual interest on the national debt!

That leaves just 23 cents – or not quite one quarter of your tax dollar – to pay for the services that you expect from government!

 

RELATED VIDEO: Rep. Vern Buchanan on balancing the federal budget:

RELATED ARTICLES:

Lame Ducks, Lame Deal: The Boehner-Obama Budget Plan

Boehner-Obama Budget Deal Uses Same Accounting Gimmick as Obamacare

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of John Boehner and President Obama is by Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Newscom.

Aiding and Abetting Illegal Students

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On October 20 President Obama, through the Department of Education, took another heavy-booted step in unlawfully transforming America by announcing the release of a 63-page “resource guide” to help educators, school leaders and community organizations better support “undocumented youth,” including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients.  The “deferred action” does not create legal status, but DACA, which granted exemption from deportation to those who had entered the country illegally before age 16 was issued by Obama in 2012 and then in 2014 was expanded to extend, among other things, eligibility to age 31.

The announcement stated that the guide includes information for high school and college educators about “the rights of undocumented students”; tips on supporting “undocumented youth”; a list of private scholarships; “guidance for migrant students in accessing their education records for DACA”; and “information on federally-funded adult education programs and on non-citizen access to federal financial aid.”  An increasing number of documents coming in departmental mailings are in Spanish, as are the accompanying “Superintendent Dear Colleague Letter” and the “Higher Ed Dear Colleague Letter.”  There is little question about which “undocumented students” are being targeted.

The guide was presented as an “effort to ensure that all students have access to a world-class education that prepares them for college and careers.”  What it promises in reality is to create more new Democratic voters, stretch resources, and further degrade education.  And it will surely add to the level of disapproval of Obama’s immigration policies, which was at 60 percent last summer.

But most teachers, professors, and administrators are out-of-step with the American public and in-step with Obama’s policies.  They welcome the suggestions.

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, and former provost at King’s College and former associate provost at Boston University, says, “The resource guide will help [administrators] figure out the best ways to divert state and university resources to the cause.”  The federal government is following California, which especially has been on the forefront of the effort to treat illegal aliens as a privileged and desirable group of potential college enrollees.

Wood’s observations are on target. At the 2009 annual meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies, teachers shared tips on indoctrinating young students about illegal aliens. In Georgia, administration-supported teach-ins were held on various campuses, including one in 2010, at Kennesaw State University (along with a number of more official-sounding ones).  In 2012, the College of Education at Georgia State University held a “Teach-In on Tucson,” to protest Arizona legislation (HB 2281) prohibiting the use of Raza Studies curricular materials that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government” or “promote resentment toward a race or a class of people.”  At the “teach-in,” Dean Randy Kamphaus made opening remarks, and workshops offered tips for incorporating curriculum materials from the Zinn Education Project about Christopher Columbus’s “genocide.” Associate Professor Jennifer Esposito pledged to give “extra points” to students for letters to legislators asking them to vote against enforcement of immigration laws.

After attending this teach-in, I testified before the Judiciary Non-Civil Committee. President of the Georgia pro-enforcement group, the Dustin Inman Society, D.A. King, had warned me about the teachers and students that routinely pack hearing rooms.  One of these professors had to be reprimanded by the chairman when she shouted out, accusing me of lying.  In reply to inquiries from the committee, Dean Kamphaus stated that although Esposito had “pledged” to give the assignment, she had not in fact done so and that a memo reminding faculty of university policy had been sent out.

In 2013, the Association of Teacher Educators conference featured Bill Ayers as keynote speaker and a panel called “Immigration and Education: Critical Issues, Critical Times” with the director of a “Freedom University,” the president of the Lawyers Guild, and  two public high school teachers sharing tips on helping illegals.

For years, educators have been conspiring on ways to subvert federal immigration law.  Now the Obama Department of Education is helping them.

The pro-illegal lobby has also been getting help from Republican lawmakers.  In Georgia, a state with a larger population of illegal aliens than Arizona, the majority of citizens have been opposed to supporting illegal students. Yet, the Republican-controlled state government, which, according to King, is “run by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the 21st-century slavers in the Ag industry,” voted to continue to give drivers licenses to illegal aliens.

“Increased special treatment in schools is only part of the story,” he says.

The latest Education Department guidelines, says Wood, will provide “ideological encouragement and talking points to answer citizens and legislators who criticize the use of public and private resources to subvert the nation’s laws on immigration.”

But the radical pro-amnesty group La Raza is “in the White House–and making policy,” says King.  Cecilia Munoz, Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council, lists her prior service as “Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation at the National Council of La Raza …” on her White House bio.  Ten years ago jokes were being made about putting La Raza in charge of enforcement.

The joke has become tragic fact.  Even after Kate Steinle died at the hands of an illegal alien residing in the sanctuary city of San Francisco U.S. Senate Democrats killed a bill that would punish already illegal sanctuary cities.

Obama’s directive to schools is part of a bigger plan: to mainstream illegal aliens and “set up an incremental action so that illegals are actually a special, protected class,” says King.  Illegal immigration will become a civil right, he predicts.

When breaking the law gets you special privileges, then you know that America is indeed being transformed.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website.

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) Joins Democrats to Clear Path for Vote Reviving Export-Import Bank

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Representative Vern Buchanan (R-FL District 16) was one of 62 Republicans to vote in favor of bringing to the House floor a bill funding the Export-Import Bank.

The Daily Signal reports:

The House of Representatives moved one step closer to bringing the Export-Import Bank back from the dead Monday after 62 Republicans teamed up with 184 House Democrats to force a vote to reauthorize the embattled agency.

Despite opposition from the vast majority of Republicans, the House passed a motion to discharge a bill reauthorizing Ex-Im from the Financial Services Committee, 246-177. (See how your member of Congress voted.)

The vote clears a path for the chamber to vote on the legislation sponsored by Rep. Stephen Fincher, R-Tenn. Under Fincher’s legislation, the 81-year-old bank would be reauthorized through 2019. Lawmakers are expected to vote on his bill tomorrow.

Read more.

Can you say bust the budget yet again?

Buchanan seems to say one thing and vote for the special interests.

Buchanan has repeatedly called for a Constitution balanced budget amendment but he has also consistently voted to raise the debt ceiling and keep wasteful spending programs – such as the Import-Export Bank – fully funded.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL 16) Busts the Budget — Votes for Amnesty and Obamacare

The Boehner-Obama Budget Deal Explained in One Chart

This [Budget] Deal Is Unacceptable. Congress Should Wait Until New Speaker Chosen

Find Out How Your Congressman Voted on Reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank

Freedom Caucus Members Will Stick With Daniel Webster in Today’s Speaker Vote

The Federal Reserve’s Counterfeit Prosperity

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When I was a young Secret Service agent on a local financial crimes task force between 2000 and 2002, I was inundated with an explosion of new counterfeit cases. There were a number of causes for this explosion in currency counterfeiting but the main ones were: the rapid advancement in ink-jet printing technology, the declining costs, and correspondingly increased availability of affordable home printers. Prior to these technological advancements, counterfeiting U.S. currency was the near exclusive purview of state-sponsored actors, sophisticated criminals and criminal syndicates.

With the growth in ink-jet printing, any thirteen-year-old with a printer could counterfeit money. I, along with hundreds of other Secret Service agents, were so preoccupied with tracking down this new class of counterfeiters and stemming the tidal wave of new counterfeit making its way into the money supply that I never had the time to philosophize on the deeper reasons why this crime is so dangerous to national cohesion.

We are lucky enough to live in a time where the authenticity of the physical currency in our wallets is taken for granted, but when the Secret Service was founded in 1865 to combat counterfeiting—the Secret Service’s role in Presidential Protection didn’t formally begin until 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley—it was estimated that approximately half of the currency in circulation was counterfeit. Think about that: you had a roughly 50 percent chance, when engaged in commerce, of receiving money with ZERO value. That people had faith in their currency was so important to the U.S. government at the time that the Secret Service was established and charged with hunting down and prosecuting counterfeiters in order to re-establish public trust in the battered dollar.

Read more.

 

RELATED ARTICLES:

62 House Republicans Join Democrats to Clear Path for Vote Reviving Export-Import Bank

How Marriage, Strong Families Contribute to Economic Growth

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image of Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is by Jacquelyn Martin | AP Photo.

The Legacy of Arne Duncan, Common Core and So Much More: College (Part 2)

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As noted in my last post, outgoing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has done his part to transform America through K-12 education.  This has happened through Common Core and by expanding the Department’s reach into younger and older cohorts.  Duncan got the promise for an additional $1 billion for preschool education.  As the Chronicle of Higher Education noted, Duncan is also leaving a “big imprint” on higher education.  His legacy is one of “innovation and regulation.”  College is put into a seamless web of K-16, or P-20, with an unprecedented federal role in admissions, placement, assessment, and financing.

The Chronicle notes that Duncan has deviated from the standard practice of Democratic secretaries who have just doled out money.  He has been “personally upbraid[ing] colleges over rising prices and low graduation rates, their handling of cases of sexual assault, their lax academic standards for athletes . . . , and their resistance to greater oversight.” Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, has become disillusioned with Duncan’s “top-down approach.” Institutions, like Yale University, get nervous about the Department’s investigations of “sexually hostile environments.”

The nonprofits, like the Lumina Foundation, that have been funding Common Core, however, give a positive assessment. Jamie Merisotis, President and Chief Executive, praises Duncan’s “strong leadership” in putting our higher-education system “a step closer to reflecting the needs of today’s increasingly diverse college students — and the changing meaning of ‘college’ to include all types of postsecondary learning.”  Competency-based programs that “measure learning” through demonstration of a skill set are among his many “innovations.”  Inside Higher Education calls it “new delivery model with the potential to improve degree completion, reduce costs to students, and improve transparency and alignment of learning outcomes to the needs of employers and society.”

Currently, over 600 colleges are designing, creating, or already have competency-based education programs. This number has grown from 52 last year. As with Common Core, it is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with “guidance” from the U.S. Department of Education.

The notion of “competency” changes the fundamental notion of education, taking it from learning for its own sake, with a knowledgeable, independent citizenry as an outcome, to producing workers with skill sets.  Colleges that have agreed to align financial aid to such tests have ceded their own power.

Funny, Arne Duncan, when he spoke at the 2013 meeting of the American Education Research Association (AERA) and promised a “sea-change” in assessments for K-12 students, included “competency-based education,” as well as “non-cognitive skills.”  Others at that AERA meeting of academics and researchers working at universities, federal and state agencies, school systems, test companies, and non-profit agencies were Linda Darling-Hammond, who oversaw the development of the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) tests, one of the two Common Core tests, and her close colleague, Bill Ayers.

Many colleges are following the Department of Education in emphasizing non-cognitive, “social and emotional learning” skills.  Seventeen colleges have received funds from the Department’s “First in the World” grants to identify and help at-risk students through the aid of a tool called Diagnostic Assessment and Achievement of College Skills to measure such emotional attributes as “grit.”

Colleges have been targeted strategically.  Jacqueline King, director of Higher Collaboration at SBAC, has been working to “create greater academic alignment between K-12 and higher education.”  Common Core tests are determining placement in college courses.  In 2014, college faculty in Tennessee attended workshops to learn how to “synch up with Common Core,” in effect to teach grade 13.

I reported that the Department of Education had funded the 2013 working paper, “The Common Core State Standards: Implications for Community Colleges and Student Preparedness for College.”   It described the “Core to College” program in ten states: Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington.  Core to College is funded by the Lumina, the William and Flora Hewlett, the Bill and Melinda Gates, and other foundations.  Their report, “Making Good on the College-Ready Promise and Higher Education Engagement Core to College Alignment Director Convening, August 1-2, 2012,” provides a record of discussions by “alignment directors” and guest speakers on teaching “a new type of student, more prepared for college-level, discipline-specific work.”  (As a former college instructor I am skeptical: having “more prepared” students meant an easier time in teaching them—not the need for special workshops.)

The ten states are to serve as “bellwethers and models for the rest of the country.”  Among the strategies, directors suggested more data, outreach to other “stakeholders” and private colleges, and more meetings.  They are also looking beyond “the English and Math Departments” that receive Common Core-certified students.  Speakers proposed “engaging faculty in other disciplines that could be touched by Common Core implementation, such as history or the social sciences.”

WestEd, a major Common Core funder, is evaluating the initiative.

The push for new assessments (especially at community colleges) has been quickly followed by calls for free community college.  In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama cited Tennessee’s still-developing program as a model.  The American Association of Community Colleges welcomed the proposal.  This year, on September 9, Obama announced that the “College Promise Campaign” would be chaired by Second Lady Jill Biden.  AACC President Walter Bumphus and Trustee President J. Noah Brown will serve on the National Advisory Board.

Democratic front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, pushed free college in their first presidential debate on October 13, 2015.

To top it off, the federal government is providing a college “scorecard.”  Of course, those who continue to refuse federal aid, like Grove City College and Hillsdale College, will continue to be left off.

Students at these colleges will also find themselves at an increasing financial disadvantage. One of Obama’s first orders of business was to make the federal government the bank for student loans.  This “bank” practices “loan forgiveness,” by graduating payment to income and providing complete forgiveness through work in government jobs, such as in public schools or at Americorps, the federal agency.  Indiana University law professor Sheila Seuss Kennedy and Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce manager Matt Impink enthused about such a “tour of duty” that sounds like the “civilian corps” Obama put forth at the beginning of his presidency.

We are well on our way.  With schools producing graduates with competencies “align[ed] to the needs of employers and society,” and with Common Core spitting out high school graduates “college and career ready,” we will no longer worry about higher learning.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website. The featured image is of President Obama announcing free community college with Vice President Joe Biden and Second Lady Jill Biden.

Anti-American Muslim Supremacist receives $164,050 in U.S. Taxpayer Money

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Linda Sarsour is an energetic purveyor of the “Islamophobia” myth, and has hysterically claimed that “Muslim kids” are being “executed” in the United States. She was instrumental in prevailing upon de Blasio to end legal and necessary surveillance in Muslim communities in New York. She is also a frequent visitor to the Obama White House, and has claimed that the jihad underwear bomber was a CIA agent — part of what she claims is a U.S. war against Islam.

She is a practiced exploiter of the “hate” smear against foes of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, and has never apologized for using the Islamic honor murder of Shaima Alawadi to spread lies about the prevalence of hate crimes against Muslims in America. She is also an enthusiastic supporter of the “Palestinian” jihad against Israel. Given the general support for that jihad among Leftists, and the hard-Left tilt of the de Blasio regime in New York, it is not surprising that her hate-filled endeavors are taxpayer funded. But it is scandalous nonetheless: a grim sign of the times.

“Taxpayers should not be funding this anti-American hate-spewer,” by Andrea Peyser, New York Post, October 23, 2015:

…[Linda] Sarsour, a Muslim activist and ally of Mayor Bill de Blasio, blasted into the mainstream in August with a fawning profile published in The New York Times headlined: “Linda Sarsour is a Brooklyn Homegirl in a Hijab.” Although at age 35, the married mother of three who favors hijabs, or Muslim headscarves, is hardly a girl.

President Obama named Sarsour one of his “Champions of Change.” The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, who told the Times that she wed in an arranged marriage at age 17, is described on the White House website like this: “Ambitious, outspoken and independent, Linda shatters stereotypes of Muslim women, also treasuring her religious and ethnic heritage.”

But some observers got acquainted with Sarsour’s anti-Americanism two weeks after the politically correct Newspaper of Record lionized her. Sarsour, who serves as executive director of the generously city-taxpayer-funded Arab American Association of New York, based in her native Brooklyn, responded when Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz tweeted, “America is and remains a nation built on Judeo-Christian values.”

“Genocide & slavery?” she shot back….

Her outrageous online assaults sank to a depressing level this month, when Sarsour tweeted a picture of a small Palestinian boy standing before Israeli soldiers clutching rocks in both hands. She added the words, “The definition of courage.”

“No, the definition of barbarism,” Queens City Councilman Rory Lancman, 46, responded.

Sarsour has the right to free speech, however reprehensible. So says the US Constitution. But as she waged a social-media war with Lancman, first reported by The Post’s Rich Calder, she seemed unaware that he, too, enjoys the same right.

She tweeted: “city elected official attacking a constituent on foreign policy issue when they weren’t asked. Welcome to NYC Council.”

“You must be especially proud of the 13-yr-old Palestinian who stabbed the 13-yr-old Israeli,” Lancman wrote.

She replied: “don’t put words in my mouth. Shame on you. Using my tax payer $$ to attack people online. Go do your job.”

But this tweet by Sarsour turned the fight downright ugly: “The Zionist trolls are out to play. Bring it. You will never silence me.”

“This is a woman who supports violence and supports terrorists while at the same time proclaiming that this country is founded on Judeo-Christian values of genocide and slavery,” a prominent political insider, who led me to Sarsour’s nasty “genocide” tweet, told me.

“And somehow, she receives taxpayer money,” the insider said. “I think that’s a very sad commentary on where this city and society are right now.”…

Lancman, who is Jewish, put out a statement that read, “Attacking Jews in their homes, schools, supermarkets, cafes, buses, roads, synagogues and seder tables is barbarous, and enlisting children to commit those acts is even more so.”

But he would not comment further to me about Sarsour, or say whether he believed her organization should continue receiving city funds, which have totaled $164,050 since 2012.

Sarsour, a co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, has said she’s considering running for the Brooklyn City Council seat that Vincent Gentile, 56, is to vacate in 2017 due to term limits.

The Times piece describes Sarsour as some kind of dynamo, celebrating her for helping to partly dismantle the city Police Department’s surveillance program of Muslims….

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Linda Sarsour with NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Bernie Sanders’s Plan to Fix College Is Worse than Nothing by Ariel Deschapell

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Bernie Sanders has tapped into a frenzied millennial base by proposing “free” college tuition (that is, tuition paid for by the government). Bachelor degrees are pitched as the primary means by which individuals can gain skills and increase their incomes, so skyrocketing tuition is becoming a hot election topic. But are more subsidies to the university system a legitimate solution to the problem, or simply a stunt to capitalize on youthful outrage?

There’s no denying that the price of higher education is unrealistically high, and a fix is needed. But Sanders’ plan doesn’t even purport to be a solution. It does nothing to address the root problem of rising costs. It merely spreads those costs to society as a whole by socializing them.

Proponents of this idea don’t ever seem to explore the more fundamental question of why the cost of college continues to increase, let alone how socializing those costs stops the inflationary trend.

The assumption seems to be that rising costs are simply a law of nature that we have to deal with. Fortunately, this isn’t the case. If we look at the wider economy, the cost of higher education is clearly an anomaly. Products across the economic spectrum, from smartphones to automobiles, decrease in cost and increase in quality year after year, despite heavy demand. Indeed, consumer demand is what drives continuous innovation in these industries.

Could the problem be something as simple as decreased public funding? Even if that were true, it still wouldn’t explain why universities seem incapable of cutting costs and maximizing performance. Apple, Samsung, and most any other firms seem perfectly able to do so without any regular source of taxpayer funding.

Higher education possess no unique characteristic that prevents it from improving and adapting as every other industry regularly does. But incentives matter, and the market incentives that drive competitive innovation in other industries are heavily distorted in the college and university system.

For starters, under the Higher Education Act signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, universities and colleges gained a de facto monopoly on higher education.

As Senator Mike Lee explains,

Under the federal Higher Education Act, students are eligible for Title IV student loans and grants only if they attend formally accredited institutions. That makes some sense, for purposes of quality control.

Except that under the law, only degree-issuing academic institutions are allowed to be accredited. And only the U.S. Department of Education gets to say who can be an accreditor.

That is, the federal government today operates a kind of higher-education cartel, with federally approved accreditors using their gatekeeper power to keep out unwanted competition.

Can this explain why higher education seems perpetually stagnant and inefficient? Since 1965, computers have gone from being the size of a small building to vastly more powerful, more common, and more affordable pocket-sized devices. Whole other industries have been continuously disrupted again and again, giving way to newer and better models for doing business.

Yet despite a relentlessly increasing price tag, a college education is largely the same beast it was decades ago. In 21st century America, our higher education system is still governed by rules written in 1965.

Because of these rules (and a flood of taxpayer-backed loans), more students are funneled into accredited higher education every year, while the supply remains artificially restricted. Even the smallest regional colleges turn away more students than they could hope to take in.

Is it any surprise then that tuition continues to climb when there exists so little competitive pressure to keep it in check? Without the risk of losing potential students to superior alternatives, universities lack the basic incentives to maximize the value they provide while minimizing the cost.

With this in mind, what does Sanders’s proposal do to address the underlying structural problem in higher education? As it turns out, worse than nothing.

Instead of seeking to weaken the cartel and drive down prices by increasing competition, free tuition goes the exact opposite way. Like decades worth of failed higher education programs, Sanders seeks to continue stimulating demand while doing nothing to address the artificially limited supply and dearth of innovation. Unchecked by any last remnant of market forces college costs will continue to run away at an even faster rate than before.

Were it still 1965, the Senator might suggest we deal with the AT&T telephone monopoly by demanding free landlines for all Americans forever. Thankfully, this isn’t what happened, and instead of a sprawling federally subsidized landline monopoly, we have a cheap, competitive nationwide market for cellular and mobile internet providers.

But this is exactly what Sanders proposes for higher education: a stagnant, expensive, uncompetitive industry, stuck in the past and eating up billions in subsidies. In doing so, he threatens to deny us the creative destruction sorely needed to bring higher education into the 21st century.

Socialized college tuition may provide a popular and illusory respite for students, but only the competition present in free markets can actually reduce costs and spur sustainable innovation.

Ariel Deschapell
Ariel Deschapell

Ariel holds the Henry Hazlitt Fellowship for Digital Development at FEE. He is a student of Florida International University with a focus in finance and economics.

American Immigration Crisis: One Vote, One Man, One Time

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Manchester, NH: On Saturday, July 25th, the Center for Security Policy, in partnership with First Principles and High Frontier, hosted The New Hampshire National Security Action Summit. A number of America’s most influential national security leaders addressed the current state of U.S. foreign and defense policies in an increasingly dangerous world. Its purpose was to ensure that the common defense receives the priority attention it requires from elected officials and their constituents, at both the federal and state levels.

Specifically, the event covered four key topics of interest to both our nation and the state of New Hampshire:

  • The threat from Iran, shariah and the Global Jihad Movement
  • The hollowing-out of the U.S. military
  • The border insecurity and immigration crises
  • America’s electrical power grid and threats to critical infrastructure

Here is the 18-minute video on border security and the immigration crisis given by James Simpson:

To view the full video of the action summit click here.

U.S. Muslim Migrant Resettlement: How to follow the money

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So many of our readers are eager to start researching the resettlement contractors working near you, so here are a few places to start to learn about how they are financed (this is in no way meant to be an all inclusive list, because I don’t know every place to research myself!).

But, first, although off-topic, I want you to see what a one-woman blogger accomplished in Chicago (not a refugee issue, but one involving fraud in the Chicago school system!).  See here (hat tip: Judy).  It can be done!

I’m tech-impaired, but if I can find stuff, so can you.  It just takes a little patience!

Call or write the non-profit group:

Start with contacting the resettlement agency near you (a handy list is here).  As IRS designated 501(c)3 organizations they are NOT allowed to keep their financial documents from you—they are required to give anyone who calls a copy of their financial statement and their Form 990 (if they have one).  Legitimate churches are not required to file Form 990’s so some of the contractors are doing this federal work (resettling refugees) pretending to be churches only.

Go to Guidestar:

Find their IRS Form 990’s on Guidestar by going here and registering to use Guidestar.  It can get tricky because you have to use their exact name as they filed on their Form 990.  For example, you won’t find the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, but you will find its Form 990 by typing in HIAS, Inc.

USA Spending.gov:

USA Spending.gov is a very handy site as long as you know the exact name of the entity you are searching for.  It also has the advantage of tracking across federal agencies and will give you grants and contracts!  Enter the name of the non-profit in the search window in upper right.

For example, you might find that a resettlement contractor is getting cashola, not just from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS), but from the US Justice Department from some voter registration grants.  If you don’t find the non-profit group listed, don’t give up right away, try to find the exact name it is using. I looked up a specific Catholic Charities this morning under its diocese name and nothing came up, but then I saw on their website that they had a slightly different name and found what I was looking for under that name.

Annual reports to Congress:

These are a treasure trove of information on grants and statistics on welfare use (among other things). I see here that they are late again.  FY2014 should have been released months ago.

Office of Refugee Resettlement:

Go here to programs and click on those of your choice to see who is getting all of the (your!) money!

Non-Profit Facts. com:

A reader sent me this website, which I have never used until today, so try it too by clicking here.  I did test it on the specific Catholic non-profit I searched at USA Spending.gov and was disappointed to see that this website did not mention the $140,000 HUD grant they had received in the last year.  However, there are still some useful bits of information here.  For example, I learned that this “church” group was not required to file a Form 990.

And, finally, you will need to check with your state and local governments about funding these ‘non-profit’ groups receive from you at that level.  This post is meant to address only federal money flowing to them.  You may have to use state public information laws to extract information from them.

Other suggestions that have worked for you?  Send them my way!

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Florida and Texas Win Again

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The far Left’s actions with regard to tax policy rarely match up to their lingo. Whether it’s John Kerry’s tax savings by docking his boat in Rhode Island rather than Massachusetts to dodge the penalty, or the Clinton’s avoidance of a hefty real estate tax bill by using slick accounting, it’s clear that the far-left’s luminaries do not practice what they preach.

As I reported in August when I wrote about the mass exodus from high-tax states toward more profitable areas, a number of blue state residents are following the same “do as I say, not as I do” approach. To be fair, many of those fleeing blue states for more business-friendly environments are conservatives fed up with having their hard-earned money pilfered by the blue state tax-vacuum, but the laws of probability state this exodus cannot be comprised of conservatives alone.

With the release of a new batch of IRS tax migration data for the 2013-2014 filing year, the evidence keeps piling up that Americans are voting with their feet, and their feet are voting for lower-tax, business-friendly states.

With the release of a new batch of IRS tax migration data for the 2013-2014 filing year, the evidence keeps piling up that Americans are voting with their feet, and their feet are voting for lower-tax, business-friendly states. This data has to be devastating to tax-and-spend liberals who keep insisting that the economic arc of history bends in their direction, but when the IRS data—along with something as simple as market-based U-Haul rates—conclusively indicate otherwise, it’s time to reevaluate that approach.

So, who are the winners and who are the losers? Again, low-tax, business-friendly, Florida and Texas are the big winners, while the high-tax, big government states like New York, California, Illinois, and New Jersey are the big losers.

Recently released IRS tax migration data from the 2013-2014 year indicate that an astonishing 5.4 billion dollars in taxable income fled the state of New York alone, while 4.2 billion left California (hat tip to Jim Pettit, who has written frequently on this topic, for organizing the data). Where is the money going? Florida enjoyed an influx of 10.6 billion dollars in income and Texas gained 4.9 billion. This is in addition to the 17.5 billion, which flowed into the top four finishers, Florida, Texas, South Carolina and, North Carolina, in the 2012-2013 filing year.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that tax rates are the only reason that people are leaving blue states for lower-tax red states, but it defies common sense to insist that this isn’t a major contributing factor. I even had someone write to me that it’s “the weather” that best accounts for the shifts. Really, the weather? I’ve heard a number of complaints from Californians about things ranging from taxes to traffic, but I’ve rarely heard complaints about the weather.

Adding to this pervasive “do a I say, not as I do” phenomenon—in which liberals vote for higher taxes and then move away from regions where their policies have won the day—is that the migration is happening at the county level as well.

As reported by Andrew Blake in the Washington Times and congressional candidate Frank Howard, Washington D.C. and its surrounding suburbs, which overwhelmingly vote Democratic in local, state, and federal elections, witnessed nearly 2 billion dollars flee from the city and its surrounding bedtime communities.

I witnessed this firsthand during my campaign for Congress.

I witnessed this firsthand during my campaign for Congress. I would knock on doors in Frederick County, MD, a largely conservative county just north on I-270 from Montgomery County, a D.C. bedtime community, which has zero countywide elected Republicans. People in Frederick would tell me that they just moved in. When I inquired, “Where from?” they would often respond: “Montgomery County. You just can’t run a business there.”

There’s a crucial election cycle right around the corner. If you are running for office, or supporting someone who is, please do your future constituents a favor and tell them in a clear and well-thought out message why you are running, and why people are running away from tax-and-spend liberal governance.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. FULL DISCLOSURE: Frank Howard, referenced herein, served as Dan Bongino’s campaign chairman for a brief period during his 2014 congressional campaign.