While the newest federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), has been controversial for many reasons, its most troubling feature may simply be its unconstitutional structure. Its sole director reports to no one but himself, and, under the terms of Dodd-Frank, can be removed by the president only for cause. And it receives its funding not through Congress, but through the Federal Reserve. Not even the Fed has the authority to challenge its spending, however. Instead, the law says the Fed “shall” give the CFPB the funds it requests, up to 12 percent of the Fed’s total operating expenses. As of 2015, that meant the CFPB could demand up to $443 million in one year.
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Real Talk: Day Without a Woman
Women certainly should be celebrated for their many contributions, and “Day Without a Woman” did a little of that and a lot of advocacy for labor policies yesterday. According to the organizer’s website, the strike was intended to “call out decision-makers” on topics like the minimum wage, the gender pay gap, women’s healthcare, vacation time, and child care.
An impartial observer would likely believe that women’s prospects must be quite depressing, given the missed work, public school closures, and street protests that occurred in some U.S. cities. Luckily, American women’s social welfare and economic prospects are better than many strikers realize.
Take female leadership, for example: it would probably surprise Day Without a Woman strikers that 42% of legislators, senior officials, and managers in America are female. This figure is higher than comparable places like Canada, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe. According to World Bank data, the U.S. is at the top of the pack and has been for at least the last decade.
![chart1](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/wp-content/uploads/chart1.png?itok=k0MAIUyN)
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School Choice War Goes Hot
With a presidential administration that is disliked for myriad reasons openly pushing school choice, what had been kind of a cold war over choice for years has exploded into a hot one. And the tip of the anti-choice spear seems to be the New York Times. Last week it ran a piece by New America education director Kevin Carey suggesting that choice has been “dismal,” and doubled down on that yesterday with an attack on choice as an academic “failure.”
Is it a failure? First, the vast majority of random-assignment studies of private school voucher programs—the “gold-standard” research method that even controls for unobserved factors like parental motivation—have found choice producing equivalent or superior academic results, usually for a fraction of what is spent on public schools. Pointing at three, as we shall see, very limited studies, does not substantially change that track record.
Let’s look at the studies Carey highlighted: one on Louisiana’s voucher program, one on Ohio, and one on Indiana. Make that two studies: Carey cited Indiana findings without providing a link to, or title of, the research, and he did not identify the researchers. The Times did the same in their editorial. Why? Because the Indiana research has not been published. What Carey perhaps drew on was a piece by Mark Dynarski at the Brookings Institution. And what was that based on? Apparently, a 2015 academic conference presentation by R. Joseph Waddington and Mark Berends, who at the time were in the midst of analyzing Indiana’s program and who have not yet published their findings.
Next there is Ohio’s voucher program. The good news is that the research has been published, indeed by the choice-favoring Thomas B. Fordham Institute. And it does indicate that what the researchers were able to study revealed a negative effect on standardized tests. But Carey omitted two important aspects of the study. One, it found that choice had a modestly positive effect on public schools, spurring them to improve. Perhaps more important, because the research design was something called “regression discontinuity” it was limited in what it was able to reliably determine. Basically, that design looks at performance clustered around some eligibility cut-off—in this case, public schools that just made or missed the performance level below which students became eligible for vouchers—so the analysis could not tell us about a whole lot of kids. Wrote the researchers: “We can only identify with relative confidence the estimated effects…for those students who had been attending the highest-performing EdChoice-eligible public schools and not those who would have been attending lower-performing public schools.”
That is a big limit.
Finally, we come to the Louisiana study, which was random-assignment. Frankly, its negative findings are not new information. The report came out over a year ago, and we at Cato have written and talked about it extensively. And there are huge caveats to the findings, including that the program’s heavy regulations—e.g., participating schools must give state tests to voucher recipients and become part of a state accountability system—likely encouraged many of the better private schools to stay out. There are also competing private choice programs in the Pelican State. In addition, the rules requiring participating private schools to administer state tests are new, and there is a good chance that participating institutions were still transitioning. Indeed, as Carey noted, the study showed private school outcomes improving from the first year to the second. That could well indicate that the schools are adjusting to the change. And as in Ohio, there was evidence that the program spurred some improvements in public schools.
Choice advocates should not cheer about the latest research, but in totality, the evidence does not come close to showing choice a “failure.” Indeed, the evidence is still very favorable to choice. And the primary value of choice is not necessarily reflected in test scores: it is freeing families and educators to choose for themselves what education is best.
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Donald Trump’s “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior”
As any pedantic patriot can tell you, there’s really no such thing as “Presidents’ Day”–the official name for the federal holiday we celebrated on Monday is “Washington’s Birthday.” And it wasn’t the first president’s actual birthday, which is today, February 22.
Washington had his faults, but, especially when compared to most of those who followed him, he provided an admirable model of probity and restraint. The teenage Washington copied in his own hand 110 precepts on etiquette: “The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” and, as I noted recently, they make for a pretty stark contrast with the deportment of 1600 Pennsylvania’s current occupant. So, in honor of Washington’s (actual) Birthday, contemplate the distance between our first president and our 45th, with a selection of Washington’s “Rules”–and Trump’s:
Washington’s “Rules”:
Shew Nothing to your Freind that may affright him.
The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our "borders." Act fast!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2014
Speak not when you Should hold your Peace
The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016
do not Presently play the Physician if you be not Knowing therein.
If I were President I would push for proper vaccinations but would not allow one time massive shots that a small child cannot take - AUTISM.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 27, 2014
Undertake not what you cannot Perform but be Carefull to keep your Promise.
Trump: “I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one” (campaign rally, North Dakota).
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Condition of Highway Bridges
Mainstream media reporting on infrastructure seems to be driven by the lobby groups that are pushing for more federal spending. A Washington Post article today reflects two popular lobbyist themes: “the bridges are falling down” and “the federal government needs to solve the problem.” For today’s story, the Post could have saved the reporter’s salary and simply asked the press office at the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) to write it.
The headline, “More than 55,000 bridges need repair or replacement,” captures the bridges-falling-down theme. That figure is the number of “structurally deficient” bridges, which the Post sources from the ARTBA. But the story does not mention that these bridges (56,007 according to federal data) are 9.1 percent of the nation’s 614,387 bridges, which is the lowest such percentage in 24 years. The chart below shows that the share of bridges in this category fell from 21.7 percent in 1992 to just 9.1 percent in 2016.
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Do Opioid Restrictions Reduce Opioid Poisonings?
In a recent working paper, economists Thomas Buchmueller and Colleen Cary find that one particular kind of restriction does reduce opioid misuse among Medicare beneficiaries:
The misuse of prescription opioids has become a serious epidemic in the US. In response, states have implemented Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs), which record a patient’s opioid prescribing history. While few providers participated in early systems, states have recently begun to require providers to access the PDMP under certain circumstances. We find that “must access” PDMPs significantly reduce measures of misuse in Medicare Part D.
Yet, they also find
no statistically significant effect [of must access PDMP’s] on a key medical outcome: opioid poisoning incidents.
How is this possible?
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The Road to Cordray’s Removal Just Got Longer
The plot thickens in the ongoing battle for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the controversial agency created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yesterday, a federal appeals court decided it would grant rehearing of last year’s case, PHH v. CFPB, which held the agency’s structure to be unconstitutional. The decision issued last year not only ruled the agency’s structure to be unconstitutional, but also placed the director under the president’s authority, giving the president the power to fire the director at will. Now that the court will rehear the case, its earlier decision is no longer binding, meaning the president can no longer rely on it if he wishes fire Director Richard Cordray.
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