Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:

• Extending the extra unemployment insurance benefits would be bad for the federal budget and bad for the economy, and there is a better long-term solution for unemployment than the current UI system.
• All of the massive speculation in the housing market didn’t “just happen”—it was the result of massive government distortions in our housing and financial markets.
• The Obama administration and Gov. Mitch Daniels team up to help build a technology park for defense contractors with taxpayer dollars.
• One would think just the sheer lunacy of federal education policymaking would make it clear to all that Washington should get out of education.
• The U.S. Postal Service gives Congress more time to inevitably kick the can down the road.

Follow Downsizing the Federal Government on Twitter (@DownsizeTheFeds) and connect with us on Facebook.

Both Houses have now passed the 2012 Defense Authorization Bill. The president, having dropped his veto threat, will sign it today. That’s too bad.

Authorization bills, keep in mind, are essentially a collection of restrictions and permissions slips for appropriations. In practice, however, budgeteers and appropriators have more say over how we spend. So while authorizers share responsibility for our bloated military spending, I’ll save my customary complaints on that topic for the appropriations bill and focus here on the new policies this bill sets.

On the positive side, the bill creates several reporting requirements that slightly aid future efforts to trim our military ambitions and spending. It requires the Pentagon to look at accelerating the minor drawdown in nuclear weapons required by the New Start Treaty. Another report is to examine options for shrinking our ballistic missile submarine fleet, which could save several hundred billion dollars annually. The bill also requires the administration to produce “independent” studies of overseas basing costs and opportunities for savings. These reports are not likely to themselves promote much change, but they might serve as ammunition for those that do.

A little-noted problem with the bill is that it authorizes the shift of base Pentagon spending to the Overseas Contingency Operations account—the war account. Because the Budget Control Act caps military spending but not war funding, costs shifted from the former to the latter reduce the cuts needed to get under the caps, creating an illusion of savings. Appropriators are trying to protect around $10 billion in base defense costs for 2012 using this ploy. Analysts are still figuring how big a shift in funds the authorization bill endorses. But as Taxpayers for Common Sense has noted, the answer is at least several billion.

The most odious aspect of this bill is its detention provisions. These sections of the bill are confusing because they seem to say various things that they then unsay. Section 1021 requires the president to place al Qaeda members and their associates, with the exception of American citizens, in military custody and deny them civilian trial. It then destroys this “requirement” by letting the president waive it and claim that it serves “national security interests.” Section 1022 affirms that the president has the authority under the 2001 Authorization of Military Force to detain without trial anyone who belongs to al Qaeda or the Taliban, or associates of those groups who are engaged in hostilities with the United States. Language further down in the section insists that this affirmation does not “limit or expand” the president’s authority or endorse his claimed power to seize suspected terrorists in the United States and deprive them of trials.

What that compromise language section leaves us with—beyond a further muddying of the legal waters—is a punt. The offense to civil liberties is less what the bill does than what it doesn’t: deny that the president can arbitrarily detain without trial anyone he decides is al Qaeda or its helper. So when congressional leaders dismiss civil liberty concerns about the legislation by saying it “merely codifies current law,” one response is that that’s exactly the problem.

But as I noted the other day, it isn’t clear that Congress’s efforts here to keep its hand off current law will entirely succeed. Federal courts hearing cases questioning the constitutionality of war powers, including the president’s right to detain people, tend to consider whether Congress has endorsed or rejected the power in question. Judges may take all this throat-clearing as a tacit endorsement of the president’s claims, making them more likely to survive constitutional scrutiny. The question is not whether there is damage to civil liberties here, but how bad it is.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

The battle over school choice in Pennsylvania is instructive in many ways. The most obvious lesson is that education tax credits are easier to pass than are vouchers, ceteris paribus.

But why? The results of a recent poll from UnitePA and the Independence Hall Tea Party make the basic answer fairly plain: education tax credits are substantially more popular than vouchers. More than mere popularity is important, however. Credits are supported, on balance overall, by Democrats, and by a massive 30 points by Republicans. Both liberals and conservatives support credits overwhelmingly.

Vouchers are opposed on balance overall and by Republicans in particular. Unfortunately, this means that Republican legislators who may support vouchers for ideological reasons face a Republican electorate that is decidedly opposed to them. This has consequences; we saw a major rift among the Tea Party groups in PA this year over the issue, with many groups opposing the voucher bill. Between the flak he is sure to get from the government-school lobby and the instinctive opposition to vouchers from many Republican voters who like the public schools and dislike government handouts (which is how vouchers are perceived), a Republican legislator might well put his seat at risk by voting for a voucher.

Democrats actually support vouchers on balance, but less than they do credits. The crosstabs for this poll reveal huge margins of support for vouchers by African-American and low-income citizens, followed by liberals. However, all the affluent liberal interest groups are absolutely opposed to vouchers. With the support of these elites and the assistance of the government-school lobby, a Democratic legislator is extremely unlikely to put his seat at risk if he votes against a voucher bill.

Here’s the problem: vouchers sound like a Progressive policy. Vouchers send government checks to low-income families, which sounds to many voters like some form of welfare. But it is adamantly opposed by liberal elites and supported by conservative elites.

Education tax credits bridge this political disconnect, drawing more support and less opposition across the political spectrum. And credits happen to be better policy to boot.

These lessons hold across the country, in state after state. And yet vouchers, more often than not, are the primary focus of national school choice organizations that provide advice, assistance, and money to proponents of school choice at the state level. A reassessment of how the school choice movement’s resources are invested is long overdue.

It’s often difficult to recognize the value of things we already have and easy to take old gifts for granted.

For much of this year, an intense and bruising battle has raged over the issue of education vouchers in Pennsylvania. This week, the House once again rejected the voucher proposal that has passed the Senate and is supported by Gov. Tom Corbett.

Overlooked amidst the tumult is another, better school choice bill passed months ago by the House and now waiting for action in the Senate. The House passed a huge expansion of the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC), more than doubling the size of the program with an astonishing 96 percent in favor to 4 percent opposed. At current levels of student support, it would help more than 60,000 additional children get a good education.

The EITC program has been a priceless gift to the children and state of Pennsylvania each year since 2001, helping to improve public schools and allowing taxpayers to invest education dollars more effectively. And an expanded credit program would bring the gift of a good education to tens of thousands more children, the gift of empowerment to thousands of parents.

The Senate can easily deliver these gifts to Pennsylvania for the New Year; just unwrap the EITC bill passed by the House and take a vote.

In a new op-ed, I have the regrettable task of pointing out to my fellow Washingtonians (of the PNW rather than D.C. variety) that we have increased public school spending in the past decade by $1.6 billion and gotten _________ in return. Nothing. Nada. Rien du tout, mes concitoyens.

NAEP scores are pretty much flat at the end of high school, as are SAT scores. It is hard to argue that we really care about children’s education when we’re willing to waste $1.6 billion that is purportedly meant for that purpose. If politicians and voters in the Evergreen State do decide, at some point, to do something for children, the first step would be to stop wasting that $1.6 billion. The next step would be to follow the lead of other states, like Florida, that have found ways to improve student achievement while _lowering_ taxes.

Last week, the U.S. Postal Service filed a plan with its regulator to close half of its mail processing facilities and reduce delivery standards in order to reduce costs. I called the move a message to Congress because “the USPS is running on financial fumes and Congress is still trying to figure out how to kick the can down the road.”

This week, the USPS said that it’s delaying the closure of mail processing facilities and post offices by a few more weeks in order to give Congress more time to come up with “comprehensive postal legislation.” According to the press release, the delay comes “in response to a request made by multiple U.S. Senators.”

That’s hardly a surprise. Here’s what I wrote last week:

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of the proposal is, of course, Congress. I would venture a guess that legislation will be introduced to stymie the plan—if it hasn’t already. After all, members of Congress have consistently fought USPS efforts to shutter post offices. Naturally, the postal employees unions aren’t happy and will make sure that policymakers know it.

According to the Washington Post, “a group of 21 senators from mostly rural states led by Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, signed a letter to congressional leaders asking them to add language to legislation that would halt closings for six months.” Sen. Sanders also sponsored legislation in November that would hand the USPS a bailout and preserve the status quo. Well, Sanders calls himself a socialist so I suppose it would make sense that he’d want to do whatever it takes to preserve the government’s floundering mail business.

And in other postal news, the House passed legislation on Tuesday to name a post office.

I spent the afternoon debating, among others, Rick Perlstein, on the economy. The debate was being taped for Aljazeera TV (set to air tonight some time in the 7 pm hour EST). Rick claimed that since both government and the economy were getting bigger between World War II and the 1970, then growing federal expenditures couldn’t be bad for the economy. The economist in me, was thinking, well what does the data say? Obviously we didn’t have the data at hand, so the issue was not explored any further.

I’ve tried to reproduce the core of the question in the graph below, which shows on the left axis federal spending as a share of GNP and on the right axis the real increase in GDP, both measures on a quarterly basis. If the visual trend is not enough for you, the correlation between the two is a negative 0.4. Keeping in mind that correlation isn’t causality, it does appear that as the federal government increased as a percentage of the economy, the growth rate of the economy slowed.

During most of this period federal spending to GNP averaged around 16% (can’t we at least get back to the magical 1960s level of government?), while the annual growth rate in GDP averaged 3.9 percent. I find the pattern starting around 1966 to be particularly interesting as we witnessed both a sharp increase in the size of government and a dramatic fall in the growth rate of the economy. Of course I don’t expect those wedded blindly to a faith in big government to find any of this convincing, but for those of us with an empirical fact-based bent, it does suggest to me that had we restrained the late 1960s growth in government, our economy would be a lot bigger today (but then who cares about the size of the pie when you can fight over the pieces?).