… which makes this video out of date by about 20 minutes, but it’s instructive nonetheless.

That was my inner conversation when I heard that the “Super Congress”* (or “Super Committee”) created by the debt ceiling deal might operate behind closed doors.

Congress is free to create any committee it wants, of course. Congress determines the rules of its proceedings. But ordinary committees and subcommittees are too opaque. A “Super Committee” should lead—not lag—in transparent operations.

In a forthcoming report on government transparency, we’ll be looking at the kinds of things committees should be publishing in computer-useable formats, and in real time or near-real-time: meeting notices, transcripts, written testimonies, live video, original bills, amendments to bills, motions, and votes. There are ways that many of these documents and records can be optimized for transparency, including by flagging agencies, programs, dollar amounts, and so on in the texts of published documents.

That’s why I’m glad to see transparency stalwart the Sunlight Foundation calling for a transparent Super Committee. “Congress pushed through the ‘Debt Ceiling’ bill with almost no transparency,” they say. “Let’s make sure the new ‘Super Congress’ committee created by this bill operates in the open.”

The things they highlight, reflecting priorities of transparency groups across the ideological spectrum, include: live webcasts of all official meetings and hearings; the committee’s report being posted for 72 hours before a final committee vote; disclosure of every meeting held with lobbyists and other powerful interests; Web disclosure of campaign contributions as they are received; and financial disclosures of committee members and staffers.

The legislation creating the Super Committee calls for some minimal transparency measures: public announcement of meetings seven days in advance; release of agendas 48 hours ahead of meetings, and:

Upon the approval or disapproval of the joint committee report and legislative language pursuant to clause (ii), the joint committee shall promptly make the full report and legislative language, and a record of the vote, available to the public.

By my read, that’s a requirement to release the language the committee is voting upon after the vote has been taken.

I don’t see public access to the language of such an important document as conducive to the public overseeing the committee’s work. Some may argue that the committee will be pressure-cooker enough if it operates in closed sessions. Delicate political balances require important decisions to be made out of the limelight. This is how massed power in Washington fully manifests itself: major decisions about the direction of the country that people cannot even know about until the decisions are finalized. I’m not havin’ it. Kudos, Sunlight Foundation, for pressing an open Super Committee.

*Many are calling the committee “Super Congress.” It’s a joke I … don’t quite get. So I’ll go with “Super Committee.”

As the Balanced Budget Amendment once again comes to the front of political debates, I wondered what David Primo thought about the return of the BBA to public notice. Primo is the author of Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions.

John Samples: David, you have studied the history and politics of budgeting by Congress and the federal government. Your studies led to your book Rules and Restraint which, as I recall, was somewhat skeptical of the constitutional solutions requiring a balanced budget. What did you think of the importance the House Republicans attached to the Balanced Budget Amendment?

David Primo: Supporters of the BBA are certainly correct that constitutional restraints on Congress will help restore fiscal discipline to the federal government. It’s unfortunate, however, that the BBA has become so politicized. Without buy-in from Democrats, the chances of ratification are nil. I understand the fear of compromise here; we don’t want a poorly constructed rule placed into the Constitution, after all. That said, I’d love to see serious reformers like the Gang of Six get together and craft a constitutional budget rule that has a chance of being ratified. Rep. Justin Amash has also introduced an amendment that is a twist on traditional BBA proposals, and it deserves to be part of the debate.

That’s how I describe the individual mandate in my contribution to SCOTUSblog’s online symposium on Obamacare, which Trevor Burrus has already highlighted. Here’s an excerpt:

All the Obamacare legal challenges boil down to Congress’s authority – or lack thereof – to require people to buy private insurance. Although unfortunately not dispositive of modern judicial decisions, the text of the Constitution demands that the Supreme Court strike down the individual mandate as an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. Finding the mandate constitutional would be the first interpretation of the Commerce Clause to permit the regulation of inactivity – in effect requiring an individual to engage in an economic transaction.

Moreover, upholding Obamacare would grant the federal government wide latitude to mandate that Americans engage in activities of its choosing. An expansive holding here would fundamentally alter the relationship between the government and the people. If the challenges fail, there will be no principled limits on federal power.

I go on to describe the current state of play at the appellate and outline what we can expect going forward, as well as providing links to useful resources on this issue. Read the whole thing.

Everyone agrees that it’s rather stupid for a federal funding dispute to idle about 70,000 workers on airport-related construction. Just as absurd, there have been 20 stop-gap funding bills passed for the FAA since 2007. News stories are digging into the political disputes surrounding the FAA, but they aren’t addressing the root problem.

The root problem is that we have federalized the funding of airports in this country, when there is absolutely no need to. Airports are generally owned by state and local governments, and it should be up to them to figure out how to finance them. By federalizing infrastructure financing, we are simply encouraging the misallocation of resources through the political pork barrel.

We should get the federal government out of financing airports. Then state governments should look to the advantages of airport privatization, which is a reform that has swept the world from London to Sydney. Private airports can plan their investment programs in an efficient manner, balancing costs and the market demand for services. Privatized airports can raise revenue from debt, equity, fees on airlines and passengers, advertising, retail concessions, and other items. There is no need for taxpayer funding of airports.

The FAA dispute doesn’t affect current air traffic control operations, but it is affecting investments in ATC upgrades. Our ATC system needs large new investments in technology, but it is a battle in Congress to secure funding and to make sure the funding is spent efficiently. The FAA has a very poor record at making cost-efficient investments. The solution is to privatize our ATC system, as Canada has done.

When the federal government is like an octopus with tentacles stretching into every area of the economy, the economy gets dragged down by political dysfunction in Washington. We see the same sort of dysfunction in the federal government’s other business activities, such as passenger rail and mail delivery.

A lot of people worry about the quality and quantity of the nation’s infrastructure investments. But we don’t need to rely on disorganized and indebted governments to fix the problems. We can move ahead with privatization and let America’s entrepreneurs take on the challenge.

Today the good folks at the journal Education Next released their annual survey of education opinion. What follows is a quick summary of many of the things the pollsters found, followed by a little commentary about the national-standards results. (Adam Schaeffer, I have it on good authority, will be flogging the tax credit and voucher findings in an upcoming post.) Bottom line: The public usually has the right inclinations, but gets some answers wrong as a result.

One note: As is always the case with polls — but I won’t go into great detail with Education Next’s questions — remember that question wording can have a sizable impact on results.

So what did Education Next find?

• Almost everybody reports paying at least some attention to education issues
• 79 percent of Americans would grade the nation’s public schools no better than a “C”
• 54 percent of Americans, and 43 percent of parents, would grade their communities’ public schools no better than a “C”
• Even when told how much their district spends per pupil, 46 percent of respondents think funding should increase. But that’s down from 59 percent when the current expenditure isn’t given
• Pluralities of Americans favor charter schooling and government-funded private-school choice (without mention of the sometimes toxic word “voucher”), and a close majority supports tax-credit-based choice 
• A huge majority, even after having been given the average teacher salary, thinks teachers should get paid more or about the same as they currently do
• A plurality thinks teachers should pay 20 percent of the cost of their health-care and pension benefits
• Large pluralities — and for one question a majority — support judging and rewarding teachers based on performance, as well as easing credentialing and tenure rules
• The public is about evenly split on whether teachers’ unions are good or bad for their districts
• Big majorities support federal testing demands (without mention of the often-toxic No Child Left Behind Act) as well as states adopting the “same set” of standards and tests (without mention of federal incentives to do so)
• A plurality of Americans oppose taking income into account when assigning students to schools
• Only 16 percent of respondents think local taxes for their district should decrease

All of these results demonstrate good reflexes by the public. They know, for instance, that overall the public schools are performing poorly, but they are a little happier with the districts they often chose when selecting homes. They want to spend more money on schooling because education is generally a good thing, but that drops when they are told how much is actually being spent (a slippery figure few hard-working Americans have time to pin down themselves). They recognize the need for choice, something they benefit from in almost every other facet of their lives. They believe in judging and rewarding people based on their performance. They oppose forcing physical integration — in this case based on income — on students and communities. And they even, reasonably, want all states to have the same academic standards.

About that last point: Intuitively, it seems to make sense. Why should kids in Mississippi be asked to learn less than those in Massachusetts? If I didn’t get paid to analyze education policy — if I had to do other work for 40-plus hours a week — I, too, would probably support national standards because I wouldn’t have time to look at the evidence, or cogitate over the politics behind such a fair sounding proposal. But I do analyze education policy full time, and I know that (1) there is little evidence supporting calls for national standards; (2) many states have adopted national standards mainly in pursuit of federal money; (3) even if you can get initially high standards, they’ll be dumbed-down by politics; and (4) states can perhaps be standardized, but unique, individual students never can be.

Of course, the good-intentions problem is not unique to education. The huge opportunity costs — among other disincentives — that keep members of the public from being able to sufficiently analyze complicated political issues is a major problem in all public policy matters. That’s why good intentions — which the public demonstrates in spades in this poll — can often lead to bad outcomes. But we cannot blame the public for that. We must, instead, inform the public as best we can.

Centrist and liberal columnists are lamenting the lack of tax increases in the debt deal. But the hollowness of the deal itself provides a good justification for Republicans to oppose all tax increases in such bipartisan deals.

The federal debt crisis is being caused by spending increases, not revenue shortfalls. When the economy recovers, revenues will rise to the normal level of about 18 percent of GDP, even with all current tax cuts in place. It is spending that is projected to rise to abnormal levels, as I discussed in my recent Senate testimony.

However, let’s say a fiscal conservative in Congress was willing to swap, say, $1 of tax increases for $3 of spending cuts in a deficit-reduction deal. Most likely, the tax increases would turn out to be real and damaging, but the spending cuts would probably be phony or overstated, as the deal just passed illustrates.

In the debt-limit deal, discretionary spending rises over time. It isn’t cut.  Economist Larry Summers seems to agree that the cuts in the deal aren’t real:

Despite claims of spending reductions in the range of $1 trillion, the agreements reached so far are likely to have little impact on actual spending over the next decade. The deal confirms the very low levels of spending already negotiated for 2011 and 2012 and caps 2013 spending about where most would have expected this Congress to end up. Beyond that, outcomes are anyone’s guess — Congress votes on discretionary spending annually, and the current Congress cannot effectively constrain future actions. True, there are caps and sequester threats in the debt deal, but these are virtually certain to be reformulated in 2013.

Deficit deals during the Reagan and Bush I years typically promised the public more spending cuts than tax increases. But the tax increases stuck, while the spending cuts were either smoke-and-mirrors or they didn’t last.

Consider the big budget deal in 1990, the one where Bush I infamously reneged on his “read my lips” promise. Bush claimed that the deal delivered two and a half dollars of spending cuts for each dollar of tax increases. But the cuts to defense in the deal were against an inflated baseline, and nondefense spending increased 15 percent in the two years following the deal.

Looking ahead to the special congressional committee that will report in November, I don’t see any incentive for a fiscal conservative to agree to tax increases. Democrats will call for a “balanced” plan, but that makes no sense because the cause of the government’s problems is not balanced. In addition, the idea that giving in a bit on taxes in order to leverage larger spending cuts has not worked in the past, as noted.

I’d like to be an optimist about spending cuts in a November deal, but most current political leaders show no interest in real cuts. Leaders in both parties continue to be positively allergic to naming any actual programs that they want to cut. Indeed, in the Washington Post today, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner calls for more federal spending, not less. He wants more for “education and innovation.” He wants to “strengthen” Medicare. He decries the “extreme agenda” of policymakers who want to “dismantle” programs for the elderly and less fortunate. And he wants “short-term measures to strengthen the economy,” by which he means spending on infrastructure and unemployment subsidies.

Good grief. Geithner’s op-ed reflects the administration’s intransigence in defending the bloated welfare state, not any willingness to make serious budget reforms.