I am interviewed on health care by Charles Ellison of blackpolicy.org. The interview is in three parts: one, two, and three.
The interviewer helps pitch the forthcoming Crisis of Abundance event.
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I am interviewed on health care by Charles Ellison of blackpolicy.org. The interview is in three parts: one, two, and three.
The interviewer helps pitch the forthcoming Crisis of Abundance event.
Not to Scottish pubs, I write in the Guardian’s Comment is free, where a survey says patronage is down 10 percent since a smoking ban went into effect. But if you wondered where all the anti-smoking fascists have gone, check out the commenters.
It is shocking to discover just how much of the debate over politics and policy rests on semi-arbitrary government standards for measuring things. For example, if you believe the Consumer Price Index speaks with absolute authority, then you will believe obviously absurd things, like the idea that real wages have stagnated. Virginia Postrel has a nice short essay in Forbes [free reg. req.] on this aspect of the mismeasurement of economic progress. If Bureau of Labor Statistics true-believers are right, then
… you have to wonder who’s buying all those flat-screen TVs, serving precooked rotisserie chicken for dinner or organizing their closets with Elfa systems. “Anybody who thinks things are getting worse should go to Best Buy and notice the type of people who go to Best Buy,” says economist Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University.
Gordon is the author of a much-cited study showing that from 1966 to 2001 real income kept up with productivity gains for only the top 10% of earners. What the pessimists who tout his study don’t say is that, while Gordon does find that inequality is increasing, he’s convinced that the picture of middle-class stagnation is false.
“The median person has had steadily improving standards of living,” he says. But real incomes have been understated. The problem lies in how the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the cost of living.
Similarly, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicolas Eberstadt has a terrific essay on the bizarre and inaccurate method by which the government calculates the poverty rate in the new Policy Review. Eberstadt shows that the official poverty statistics often get things backwards, indicating that poverty is getting worse when it is in fact getting better according to a number of other noncontroversial measures of economic well-being:
Cartoon editors are painstakingly working through more than 1,500 episodes of classic Tom and Jerry, Flintstones, and Scooby Doo cartoons to erase scenes of characters — gasp — smoking. Turner Broadcasting says it’s a voluntary decision, but the move comes after a report from Ofcom, which has regulatory authority over British broadcasters. So in this case “censorship” seems a reasonable term.
It’s not the first time. France’s national library airbrushed a cigarette out of a poster of Jean-Paul Sartre to avoid falling foul of an anti-tobacco law. The US postal service has removed the cigarettes from photographs on stamps featuring Jackson Pollock, Edward R. Murrow, and Robert Johnson. And in the 20th-anniversary rerelease of ET, Steven Spielberg replaced the policemen’s guns with walkie-talkies.
On one level, this is just a joke: they are redrawing cartoons to make them more kid-friendly. And just to make the rules completely PC, Turner is allowed to leave cigarettes in the hands of cartoon villains.
But there’s something deeper here: an attempt to sanitize history, to rewrite it the way we wish it had happened. Smoking is a part of reality, and especially a part of history. Just look at any old movie. Everyone smokes: doctors, pregnant women, lovers. Real people smoked, too — people like Murrow and Pollock and Sartre. And some of them died of lung and throat cancer, which parents and teachers can point out. It’s Orwellian to airbrush historical photos in order to remove evidence of that of which you disapprove.
Franklin D. Roosevelt spent decades trying to conceal the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair. Historians say that out of more than 10,000 photographs of FDR, only four show him using a wheelchair. Those are the ones that are now used in textbooks and at the FDR Memorial in Washington. One victory for historical accuracy. However, the FDR Memorial removed the ever-present cigarette from FDR’s hands. Orwell’s ministry of truth would be proud.
(Excerpted from Comment is free.)
In “Budgeting in Neverland,” James L. Payne explains that one of the major reasons federal policy is so irrational – and expensive – is that policymakers typically hear only from people who stand to gain from expanding federal expenditures and programs, while those who bear the costs – taxpayers – are almost never heard from.
Federal higher education policy illustrates this perfectly. Case in point: a Department of Education notice issued just last Friday to establish “negotiated rulemaking,” part of the process for revising federal regulations. Take a look at the groups the feds will permit to have representatives on various rulemaking committees, and you’ll see Payne’s problem in action:
The Department has identified the constituencies listed below as having interests that are significantly affected by the subject matter of the negotiated rulemaking process. The Department anticipates that individuals representing each of these constituencies will participate as members of one or more of the negotiated rulemaking committees. These constituencies are:
Students; Legal assistance organizations that represent students; Financial aid administrators at institutions of higher education; Business officers and bursars at institutions of higher education; Institutional servicers (including collection agencies); Trustees; State higher education executive officers; Business and industry;
Institutions of higher education eligible to receive Federal assistance under Title III, Parts A and B and Title V of the HEA, which includes Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, American Indian Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions, and other institutions with a substantial enrollment of needy students as defined in Title III of the HEA; Two-year public institutions of higher education; Four-year public institutions of higher education; Private, non-profit institutions of higher education; Private, for profit institutions of higher education; Guaranty agencies and guaranty agency servicers (including collection agencies); Lenders, secondary markets, and loan servicers; and Accrediting Agencies.
In addition to these groups, the Department would like the following groups to be represented on the negotiating committee for the ACG and National SMART Grant program:
K‑12 public schools, including charter schools; Governors; Private schools and home schooled students; Registrars; Admissions officers; Parent organizations; and Organizations related to National SMART Grant majors.
The feds recognize numerous groups as having “interests that are significantly affected by the subject matter of the negotiated rulemaking process,” but the people who actually pay the federal bills are nowhere among them. It’s just another example of your – I mean, their – government at work.
In its 38th annual poll of the public’s attitudes toward education released yesterday, Phi Delta Kappan magazine makes the following statements:
This representation of their own survey results on the subject is incomplete, disingenuous, misleading, and, in one instance, factually incorrect.
PDK actually started asking the American public about vouchers back in 1970, with a rather more informative question:
In some nations, the government allots a certain amount of money for each child for his or her education. The parents can then send the child to any public, parochial, or private school they choose. This is called the “voucher system.” Would you like to see such an idea adopted in this country?
Response to this question was initially somewhat unfavorable, but those answering favorably began outnumbering those opposed in 1981, and that pattern was never reversed. The last time PDK ever asked this question, in 1991, 50 percent of respondents were in favor while only 39 percent were opposed.
I guess PDK’s editors just didn’t happen to have those back issues of their magazine handy when writing up this year’s report — which is somewhat odd given that they are now all available on-line…
That’s the misleading and disingenuous part. The factually incorrect part is that they confuse the starting year of their own newly revised question (see the bullet points above), suggesting that it was introduced in both 1991 and 1993. In reality, it was first administered in 1993. As noted above, they were still asking their original voucher question — the one whose existence they now fail to acknowledge — through 1991.
I like to think — in the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Telltale Heart” — that their guilty conscience over sweeping their earlier voucher question and its positive results under the rug caused them to slip up on their chronology for the new question.
Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering, if you change just a handful of words in PDK’s current voucher question, the results are almost exactly reversed. The public’s response goes from being 60 percent opposed (PDK/Gallup 2006) to 60 percent in favor (Harris, 2005). A hearty thanks to the Friedman Foundation for pointing that out.
As a final historical note on the original voucher question wording, it was asked one last time, to my knowledge, in 1992, though not for Phi Delta Kappan. The response in that year was that 70 percent of Americans favored school vouchers when informed that they already exist in other countries.
How surprised should we be that an advocacy organization for the public school monopoly is reluctant to tell Americans about the competition and parental choice that exist in other nations?
The new president of Canada’s National Medical Association is an outspoken advocate of greater privatization of Canada’s national health care system. Dr. Brian Day, who was elected at the organizations annual meeting on Tuesday, operates a private-pay medical clinic in technical violation of Canada’s single-payer health care laws. Last year, the Canadian Supreme Court struck down Quebec’s prohibition on private payment for health care, and implying that other similar restrictions in other provinces were similarly unconstitutional. However, the prohibition remains on the books in Vancouver where Dr. Day runs his clinic. Dr. Day points to the long waiting lists and patient suffering under Canada’s system and says, “A state-run monopoly is not the best way to run anything, let alone a health care system.”
Canadian journalists and observers say that Day’s election is the latest manifestation of a Canadian unhappiness with their government-controlled system. Maybe they know something that advocates of a single-payer system in this country don’t?