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Orange Punch ~ Opinion blog maintained by editorial writers Alan Bock, Mark Landsbaum and Brian Calle.

Archive for the 'Policy' Category

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Teachers’ pensions in a big hole. Guess who will bail them out

January 28th, 2010, 10:05 am by Mark Landsbaum

The big crash may be near, as public employee pensions begin to feel the effects of lousy returns on their investments. Guess who’s on the hook? Yeah, you.

Bloomberg reports (emphasis ours): “The California State Teachers Retirement System, the second biggest U.S. public pension, will need to ask taxpayers for more money after investment losses left it underfunded by $42.6 billion.

“The pension’s unfunded liability, the difference between assets and anticipated future costs, almost doubled from $22.5 billion in June 2008, according to a report Chief Executive Officer Jack Ehnes will deliver to the board Feb. 5. The fund will ask lawmakers next year for an increase of as much as 14 percent to what the state and school districts already pay toward employee retirement benefits, said the report, which was posted on the fund’s Web site today.”

Where do you think that money will come from? Yeah, you.

The pension fund’s CEO says the fund would have to earn more than 20 percent, more than twice as much as it says is feasible, in each of the next five years to make up the gap without higher taxpayer subsidy.

For a good look into the (not so distant) future, pick up a copy of our friend Steve Greenhut’s book: Plunder: How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nationplunder

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Posted in: California • Financial crisis • Policy • pensions | 16 Comments »

Just a thought on what ails the U.S.

January 25th, 2010, 11:51 am by Mark Landsbaum

After 80 years of government as gift-giver, entire generations have grown up expecting to have their every desire and need provided by the government.

When that stealing-from-Peter-to-pay-Paul approach runs up against the inevitable inequities and impossibilities, those who have been accustomed to thinking the government is the solution are reluctant to see that it was the goverment’s involvement that caused the problem in the first place.

Instead of saying “Back off,” they demand government pile on more, albeit differently. Just a little more control, just a little more (of your) money and it’s bound to work next time.

It may require crashing and burning to right this ship. People may not see the folly of government as Nanny, Daddy, doctor, landlord, et al until the system completely fails.

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Posted in: Freedom and liberty • Libertarianism • Policy | 13 Comments »

Getting to know Obama & friends. What’s familiarity breed?

January 21st, 2010, 1:33 pm by Mark Landsbaum

The Washington Post recently reported that only 38 percent of those polled favor larger government providing more government “services.” Now there’s a hopeful change.

The same poll found only 33 percent believe people will benefit from the Democrats’ Obama-esque health care “reform.”

What’s more, health care support has dropped 20 percentage points since April. At this rate, by summer, no one will like it.

What’s this mean for Obama and company? “The more people learn, apparently, the less they like,” writes columnist David Harsanyi.

Hm. If that’s true, given where I started, this writer must be in in negative territory by now.

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Posted in: Congress • Conservatism • Democrats • Freedom and liberty • Health care • National • Obama administration • Policy • White House | 3 Comments »

Republican resurgence? rebirth? We’ll see…

January 19th, 2010, 10:32 am by Mark Landsbaum

Lamenting “a decay and destruction of our liberties,” Orange County GOP Chairman Scott Baugh called for a revolution modeled after the one Ronald Reagan launched so long ago, criticizing the direction of the country and laying blame on Republicans for supporting “a progressive agenda.”

He says Republicans should stop taking public employee union campaign contributions. Does anyone think that’s remotely possible if redistricting makes legislative seats “more competitive”? The GOP will be flooded overnight with more Abel Maldanodo-types, not fewer of them.

Baugh’s got this much right: Republicans often have provided the necessary votes responsible for the  “decay … eroding our most fundamental values and must be stopped.”

Go here to read his speech, which the Register’s Total Buzz says is being distributed to all California county GOP chairmen. Go here if you think it will persuade Rhinos to regeneration.

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Posted in: California • Policy • Republicans • pensions | 1 Comment »

Why (some) students don’t like Kindle

January 18th, 2010, 5:19 pm by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writer

One of our professor commenters mentioned that his students don’t like Kindle, and another commenter wondered why. Here, toward the end of a lengthy and mostly upbeat assessment/guesstimate on the possible impact of Kindle and related electronic reading tools, notes that at Princeton some courses have put all their readings on Kindle but students don’t seem enthusiastic. One student told the Daily Princetonian:

“I hate to seem like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool. It’s clunky, slow, and a real pain to operate … Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes, and other marks representing the importance of passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs. All these things have been lost, and if they’re not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.” The author notes that Adobe has a reader that allows markup and search, but it’s expensive and uses a normal laptop,

I’m sure Kindle will be improved over the years, but those seem like pretty valid concerns to me.

Posted in: Culture • Education • | 4 Comments »

Head Start a bit of a dud

January 18th, 2010, 4:15 pm by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writer

Of all the various and sundry government programs, one that seems to attract widespread support, in part because it seems intuitively helpful, is Head Start, the program that reaches children in preschool with introductory material related to readin’, ritin’ and ‘rithmetic. Can’t do any harm, right, and it just makes sense that it’s got to do a little good.

Here’s a link to the study (it’s a PDF and 420 pp.) by the Health and Human Services Dept that tried to evaluate Head Start’s impact over a broad range of local programs and a diverse student population. The study did find some immediate advantages to students but found that by the end of 1st grade those advantages disappeared and it was difficult to find significant differences between head Start and non-Head Start students. Specifically:

“the advantages children gained during their Head Start and age-4 years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole. Impacts at the end of kindergarten were scattered and are mentioned below only when they appear to be related to the 1st grade impacts.”

Well, give HHS credit for releasing the study. Wonder how widely it will be reported and how quickly Congress will move to eliminate Head Start and other programs that either don’t work or deliver very little bang for lots of bucks.

Posted in: Education • Health and Wellness • Nanny State • • | Post a Comment »

Government “solutions” don’t work. Latest evidence: Head Start

January 18th, 2010, 12:56 pm by Mark Landsbaum

Despite solid proof that the touted Head Start government-run preschool program accomplishes zilch, they plug on.

It turns out that the Department of Health and Human Services knows better, but is sitting on an evaluation of Head Start that showed the program has virtually no lasting effects on participants. It’s a glorified government babysitting service under the auspices of early childhood education.

Our friends at the National Center for Policy Analysis say the study used a gold-standard, random assignment design to measure a large nationally representative sample.  The findings:

  • Researchers collected 41 measures of lasting cognitive effects. Of those, only one was significant and positive while the remaining 40 showed no statistically significant difference.
  • The one significant effect was for receptive vocabulary, which showed no significant advantage for Head Start students after kindergarten but somehow re-emerged at the end of 1st grade.
  • For students randomly assigned to Head Start or not at the age of 3, researchers also collected 41 measures of lasting cognitive effects. They found two statistically significant positive effects and one statistically significant negative effect.
  • Again, 38 of the 41 measures of lasting effects showed no difference and the few significant effects.

“It is safe to say from this very rigorous evaluation that Head Start had no lasting effect on the academic preparation of students,” says Jay Greene, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Glorified, tax-paid babysitting. Anyone want more government programs?

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Posted in: Congress • Education • Freedom and liberty • National • Obama administration • Policy • White House | 18 Comments »

What’s a worse risk than California?

January 14th, 2010, 1:21 pm by Mark Landsbaum

Sometimes someone says it so perfectly it needs to be repeated verbatim. We bring you this gem from the Wall Street Journal’s Brett Arends that pretty much captures the mess that California has become:

It now costs more to insure Californian municipal debt against default than it does bonds issued by the government of Kazakhstan, the central Asian country satirized in “Borat.”

That is neither a joke nor hyperbole. Californian munis cost 2.6% of face value per year to insure, reports CMA DataVision in London, which tracks bond insurance data. Kazakh bonds: Just 1.8%. It is “now less expensive to insure Kazakh debt than that of Greece, California and various other entities,” confirms CMA spokesman Simon Mott. (Crisis-stricken Greece, incidentally, costs about the same as California).

Borat, one. The Terminator, zero.

Arends is on balance optimistic about bond-holders, however. But the reason is they are backed by your taxes, and nothing except public schools can be paid before the bonds - and that includes your tax refunds. So yeah, the state’s lousy rating doesn’t risk much for bond buyers, but it makes it even more expensive for the state, which makes it more expensive for you. Unless you thought the state got its money somewhere else.

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Posted in: Budget • California • Policy • Schwarzenegger • Tax • Taxes | 9 Comments »

You WILL sell digital books

January 13th, 2010, 12:02 pm by Mark Landsbaum

A new state law comes upon a good idea - digital books that will greatly reduce costs for students and schools - but of course comes at the idea from a horrible angle.

Companies that sell textbooks to California universities MUST offer electronic versions by 2020, under a new law, reports the Ventura County Star. The ones who won’t, don’t get to do business with schools, apparently. Anyone bothered by government picking and choosing winners?

If electronic books are a good idea, one might think smart publishers would do such a thing without being ORDERED to by the government. If they are a bad idea, the last thing needed is the government ORDERING companies to do something not in their - or their customers’ - interest.

But the wise guys in Sacramento think otherwise. Senate Bill 48 says if you sell books to the UC, CSU and get this, to private colleges, you MUST make them available digitally. We love (actually loathe) this part: The senator who wrote this diktat reasoned that digital tyextbooks are the future of the market.

Right. A politician once again is telling the market its future. Poor market wouldn’t be able to figure it out, otherwise. That’s sort of like those wonderful other commercial successes forced on us by government like roof-top solar heating devices and those electric cars you see at every turn and those wildly thriving ethanol powered vehicles. We could go on, but you probably get the point.

If the market finds digital textbooks desirable and profitable, the market will need no help from dictators in Sacramento. If digital texts have the opposite effect, the market needs diktats from Sacramento even less.

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Posted in: California • Freedom and liberty • Policy | 6 Comments »

Job ’stimulus’ math. Uh, does that compute?

January 11th, 2010, 8:23 pm by Mark Landsbaum

Nobody asked, but remember a year or so ago when President Obama demanded Congress OK about $800 billion to stimulate the economy? We were promised unemployment wouldn’t rise about 8 percent.

Now unemployment’s 10%. That worked.

In the tradition of government-as-solver, the government decided it hadn’t done enough to fix the problem, rather that admitting it had done too much and contributed to the problem. So, the House passed another whopping stimulus bill and the Senate will vote on it this month.

Economists at five major universities told AP the stimulus spending on all those “shovel ready” infrastructure projects “has had no effect on local unemployment.” Gee, how could that be?

Can we get a refund? Or will we get more of the same?

H/T Gary Bauer.

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Posted in: Congress • Democrats • Economy • Financial crisis • National • Obama administration • Policy • White House | 4 Comments »

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