Researchers Patrick Wolf and Michael McShane write in the National Review Online today that the DC Opportunity Scholarships Program saves money. They estimate that the ultimate net savings from the private school choice program’s initial 5 year trial period will amount to $113 million ($183 million in savings set against a cost of $70 million). That’s good news, but I, like Alan Rickman’s character in Galaxy Quest, am somewhat ambivalent about this savings figure.

The trouble is that the real savings are substantially greater, because the above estimate doesn’t seem to take into account not having to pay for these students to attend DC public schools (which would have been necessary, without the private school scholarship program). And as readers of this blog may remember, DC spends a whole lotta money on its public schools. Just shy of $30,000 per student, per year in fact. Assuming that the average program enrollment during the trial period was 1,500 students, it saved taxpayers an additional… $225 million. Added to the Wolf/​McShane figure, the total savings is $338 million—for just a tiny program.

By Grapthar’s Hammer, that IS a savings!

I have long thought, as progressive blogger Anthony Cody discussed a couple of days ago, that libertarian types might form some sort of alliance with progressive educators against national curriculum standards. By and large progressives dislike the rigid standards and testing regimes that have been turning education into a clone assembly line, while libertarians want freedom, which is, of course, utterly incompatible with top-down standardization. But just because we have a common enemy will not necessarily make us policy friends.

As I’ve written before, it is pretty clear that many progressives don’t want educational freedom, they want local monopolies controlled by progressive educators who, often, eschew standards and testing not because all kids and families are different and standardization kills innovation, but because standardization curbs teacher power. Writes Cody:

While there are areas of agreement, there are some areas where progressives clearly part company with some conservatives. Progressives generally do not want public funds going to schools that promote religion. It seems reasonable to have a set of education standards that guides schools as to the focus of instruction at each grade and in each discipline. These standards should be developed by educators, in consultation with academic experts, and should reflect current scientific understanding. Democratic processes matter, so we support public schools overseen by elected school boards, and collective bargaining for teachers.

This doesn’t describe true community control of education, much less freedom. This is a system in which employees – especially teachers – have a huge political upper-hand. Teachers and their associations have greater motivation to be involved in education politics because their livelihoods are at stake, and are better able to organize than both parents, who have full-time jobs, and other citizens, who don’t even have the motivation of having a child in the schools. This is why teacher associations often dominate local school boards.

Note also that there would be standards in Cody’s ideal, but developed by “educators, in consultation with academic experts,” and designed “to reflect current scientific understanding.” So not only would citizens – who are supposed to ultimately control public schooling – apparently have no say in standards-setting, the standards would be based in “current scientific understanding,” as if there were scientific certainty about major educational issues. But there isn’t: From how best to teach reading, to what grade to cover Algebra, disagreements abound and the science is in dispute.

Finally, Cody offers the feel-good assumption that public schools are institutions that bring diverse people together and unite them. But as I often discuss – and we debated at Cato just last week – this doesn’t comport with the reality of public schooling, which was long based in homogeneous communities, systematically excluded out-groups, and today foments constant conflict. And frankly, the demand that those who want religion in their children’s education pay twice for schooling – once for government schools and again for the education they desire – is a gross violation of the basic American principal of equal treatment under the law.

All that said, it would be better to have local monopolies than state or federal. At least you could move to another monopolist if your present one were particularly horrible. But that would be cold comfort, because all government monopolies are heavily inclined toward curbing freedom, and toward serving the people who are supposed to serve the citizens.

I’ll be as happy as anyone if progressives start seriously challenging federally driven, national curriculum standards. But just because we share a common enemy won’t necessarily make us friends.

New 10-year budget projections have been released by the Congressional Budget Office, so it’s time once again for me to show how easy it is to balance the budget with modest spending restraint (though never forget that our goal should be smaller government, not fiscal balance).

• I first did this back in September 2010, and showed that we could balance the budget in 10 years if federal spending was limited so it grew by 2 percent annually.
• I repeated the exercise in January 2011 after new CBO numbers were released, and re-confirmed that a spending cap of 2 percent would eliminate red ink in just 10 years.
• In August of that year, following the release of the CBO Update, I showed again that the budget could be balanced in just a decade by limiting spending so it climbed by 2 percent per year.
• Back in January after CBO produced the new Economic and Budget Outlook, I crunched the numbers again and showed how a spending cap of 2 percent would balance the budget over 10 years.
• Since even a weak economic recovery generates more revenue, the CBO numbers from last August showed that the budget could be balanced if spending was restrained so that it grew by 2.5 percent per year for a 10-year period.

The new numbers show the path is even easier. The budget can be balanced in 5 years if spending grows at the rate of inflation (the green line) and in just 10 years if spending is limited so that it grows 3.4 percent annually (the light blue line).

Today’s path to balance is even easier because of better 10-year growth numbers, and also because of projections that the recent tax increase will generate more revenue (the dark blue line shows total projected revenue over the decade).

Because of Laffer Curve reasons, I’m skeptical about whether all that additional revenue will materialize, so both the chart and the underlying numbers are a bit speculative.

But what they do show is that the nation’s fiscal problems easily can be addressed with some modest spending restraint. Sort of a practical application of Mitchell’s Golden Rule.

Here’s my video explaining the importance of spending restraint. The numbers are now outdated, but the concept is still completely relevant.

As noted at the beginning of the post, I’m much more concerned about reducing the burden of government spending. Balancing the budget is a secondary concern.

That’s why we should impose genuine budget cuts and not just restrain the growth of spending. That would also make it easier to adopt good tax policy.

Maybe, in a parallel universe where politicians are motivated by liberty, we can even get entitlement reform and a flat tax.

Yesterday, a memo describing the president’s legal justifications for drone attacks against U.S. citizens was obtained and published by NBC’s Michael Isikoff. The memo is a disturbing assertion of discretionary executive power that should concern and frighten all Americans. Unfortunately, the secretive use of drone attacks is one of the few areas of bi-partisan consensus in this highly divisive town, and the public still seems to resoundingly support current counter-terrorism policies.

Not being a foreign policy expert, I will not get into the broader questions of counter-terrorism policies. I agree, as I think most Americans would, that there are times in which the government can justifiably use lethal force against even its own citizens. As always, however, the devil is in the details, and here the details are encapsulated in the broad, discretionary language of the memo. Abstractly agreeing that there are times where a killing is justified does not answer who will determine when to use such force, what standards they are expected to uphold, and what possibilities of review exist for mistakes.

These standards—the “who,” the “how,” and the “possibility of review”—are at the core of the Western legal tradition. Putting process—that is, how something is determined—on equal level with substance—what is determined—is one of the Western legal tradition’s most important contributions. The goal of a legal system is not just to reach the correct result, but to reach that result via a just, open, and reviewable process. Fundamentally, these principles are concessions to our inevitable predilection for errors in thinking, judgment, and fact-gathering. The lynching of an obviously guilty child molester is problematic not just because of the disturbing result, but for how that result was determined.

Those are the principles that we should hold dear when analyzing the memo. Perhaps every drone attack has been the correct call (something we know isn’t true), and high-level officials certainly care about civilian casualties. Nevertheless, if we believe in the principles of the Western legal tradition, we shouldn’t okay with this power if it were in the hands of Mother Theresa.

When the memo is parsed out, the possibilities of error and misuse are obvious. In the most head-scratching line in the memo, the authors redefine the concept of “imminence”: “the condition that an operational leader presents an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.”

This redefines “imminence” as a mere “possibility.” In both international law and at common law, “imminence” defines the situation where an individual or a nation can justifiably use self-defense. As Daniel Webster defined it in the Caroline Affair, it is a threat that is “instant, overwhelming, and leav[es] no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”

The memo defines an “operational leader” as someone who

is personally continually involved in planning terrorist attacks against the United States. Moreover, where the al-Qa’ida member in question has recently been involved in activities posing an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, and there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities, that member’s involvement in al-Qa’ida’s continuing terrorist campaign against the United States would support the conclusion that the member poses an imminent threat.

In the emphasized section, the looser definition of “imminent” is presumably being used. Thus, to be subject to a kill order, someone need only to have “recently” been involved in “activities” posing the mere possibility of a violent attack against the United States, a broad and expensive definition indeed. Moreover, the words “recently” and “activities” are incredibly vague. There are holes here you could easily drive a truck through—or a drone.

Obviously, the best rejoinder to my argument is that there are people out there who wish to do us serious harm, even possibly using nuclear weapons, and therefore our interests are particularly acute and thus our margin for error should be bigger. I agree that such people exist. I am not so optimistic, however, that drone strikes are being confined to even those broader individuals within the margin of error. Yet, even if they were, I would still have a problem with the discretionary and unreviewable decisions being made.

Drones pose a particularly acute problem from a public-choice standpoint. Currently, the president and other high-level officials suffer almost no costs for drone attack mistakes. Conversely, the costs to them, politically, personally, and in their legacies, of allowing a terrorist attack on U.S. soil are quite high. Many people will blame President Obama for any attack that occurs over the next four years. Intelligence reports after a future attack will inevitably point out when the U.S. could have acted but chose not to. Perhaps a drone had the eventual terrorist in its sights but the kill order was not given, maybe because innocents were in the area. Therefore, we can reasonably expect high-level officials to err on the side of overkill, and perhaps this is a defensible policy.

But we should not and cannot ignore the costs incurred by the civilian living under constant fear of drone attacks. A recent report, Living Under Drones, from Stanford and NYU law schools estimates that between 474 and 881 civilians have died in U.S. drone attacks, including 176 children. Moreover, the constant presence of drones over northwest Pakistan has caused “considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians,” including the undermining of “cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals” out of fear that drones will attack large gatherings of people.

These costs to innocent civilians must always be considered. Yet, the memo disturbingly omits a crucial element of the Supreme Court’s due process test that would give these costs more weight. In Mathews v. Eldridge, the Court articulated the test for how much process is due a citizen who the government seeks to deprive of some vested right. That case dealt with depriving Mr. Eldridge of his social security benefits, but the test used by the Court is generally applied to all possible “deprivations,” including life. The test is three-pronged: 1) the nature of the private interest; 2) the risk of error in the procedures used and “probable value, if any, of additional or substitute procedural safeguards”; 3) the nature of the government interest. Astoundingly, even while citing Mathews, the memo omits the second factor entirely. As Lawfare’s Steve Vladeck writes:

There’s no discussion–none–of the risk of false positives under the existing procedures, or the potential cost of additional process. This turns the Mathews test on its head, for it suggests that the relevant question in any case is simply whether the balancing of the interests supports the already provided level of process–and not whether the error rate and/​or cost of more process is at all relevant to that determination. Not only has the Supreme Court never so understood the Mathews test, but such an approach would convert an already controversial metric for “measuring” due process into a completely standardless one–and completely obfuscate the underlying principle that the government has an obligation to provide as much process as can reasonably be expected under the circumstances.

Ultimately, this is the omitted factor that Americans should care about. There are certainly heightened interests when it comes to protecting Americans from violent attacks, and the government can act swiftly to counter a truly imminent threat, but it must take into account the risk of error and whether more procedures could help minimize those errors. And we must be clear: sometimes these “errors” are dead children.

The U.S. Postal Service announced today that it intends to end Saturday mail delivery beginning on August 1st. According to the USPS, the move would save the government’s beleaguered mail monopoly $2 billion a year. The USPS has lost over $40 billion since 2006 and it has maxed out its $15 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury. With mail volume in permanent decline, the USPS has no choice but to try and cut costs.

Congressional meddling has made it difficult for the USPS to downsize its operations to reflect economic and financial reality. Indeed, the USPS has been asking Congress to allow it to drop Saturday delivery service for the past couple of years, but those pleas have been rebuffed. With the USPS literally on the verge of not being able to pay its bills in full, it will be interesting to see if Congress finally relents.

Even if Congress does allow the USPS to drop Saturday mail delivery, the postal service faces a bleak future. The technological revolution in digital communication has undermined the USPS’s mail monopoly. Compounding matters are excessive labor costs and the aforementioned unwillingness of Congress to grant the USPS sufficient operating flexibility. Without dramatic reforms, taxpayers face the possibility of ultimately being forced to clean up yet another federal mess.

Instead of kicking the can down the road (one thing that Congress is actually good at) policymakers should be considering privatizing mail delivery. In a competitive free market, customers might choose six-day delivery, or five-day delivery, or one-day delivery, etc, etc. Entrepreneurs would have an incentive to tailor services to satisfy customers and to seek new cost-effective delivery methods. Prices would be higher or lower depending on what customers want as is the case with any other service provided by the market.

The Texas Transportation Institute has released its annual urban mobility report, and Washington, DC once again takes the crown of wasting the most time and fuel per commuter. Though the urban mobility report makes some questionable claims about the congestion relief provided by urban transit, not even DC’s expensive Metro rail system has kept traffic from costing the average DC-area auto commuter $1,400 a year in wasted time and fuel.

Of course, one reason DC is number one in congestion is that, with the growth of government during the recent recession, it has enjoyed far more job growth than most other major urban areas. Yet, if rail transit really were such a good way to relieve congestion, it should have been able to absorb that growth.

Instead, the rail system operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is actually losing capacity as maintenance shortfalls force the agency to run smaller trains and those trains become less reliable. Last summer, when passengers on the Green line were stranded and had to walk along the rail line in the summer heat, WMATA promised that the agency would improve its safety procedures and keep people better informed.

Yet just last week, several rush-hour trains on the Green line were again stranded for hours without power. Temperatures on underground trains quickly rose to 90 degrees or more, leading some passengers to get sick and others to force the doors open so they could escape. One passenger reported that the only message they heard from WMATA was, “At this time, the station manager KNOWS NOTHING, I repeat, the station manager KNOWS NOTHING.” How reassuring.

WMATA claims to have a solution to its woes: a 30-year strategic plan. That should take care of all those pesky cracked rails, smokey tunnels, and non-functioning elevators and escalators. Except that the strategic plan is more a puff piece about how wonderful Metro is and much more wonderful it would be if only it had a lot more money. The plan calls for spending $1 billion a year that the agency doesn’t have on maintenance that it isn’t doing, plus another $1.24 billion a year increasing the system’s capacity.

Proposed improvements include two new crossings of the Potomac River. Operationally, the new crossings make sense. The two existing crossings are at or near capacity, and the opening of the misbegotten Silver line to Tyson’s Corners and Dulles will actually reduce the capacity of the Blue and Orange lines to carry passengers since some of the Rosslyn-Foggy Bottom tunnel’s capacity will have to be diverted to the Silver line.

Fiscally, the plan is nothing more than a pipe dream. Just what DC needs: more rail lines that WMATA can’t afford to maintain.

The advantage of trains is that they are supposed to move so many more people than any other mode. Is this true? Scrutiny of train schedules indicates that no line ever runs more than 20 trains an hour. Station platforms limit trains to eight cars, and though the “crush capacity” of each car is supposed to be 180 standees in addition to 70 seated passengers, a more realistic load is about 150 people total. That means each of the three trunk lines–Red, Blue/​Orange, and Yellow/Green–can carry no more than about 24,000 passengers per hour. This is supported by WMATA reports that the most number of riders carried per quarter-hour on this year’s inauguration day was about 17,000, which means 68,000 per hour or about 22,666 per each of the three lines.

While 24,000 people an hour is a lot compared with a single freeway lane carrying 2,000 cars an hour with a rush-hour average of 1.1 persons per car, there is no reason why freeway lanes have to be limited to cars. A freeway lane dedicated to buses is capable of moving 1,200 buses per hour safely spaced six bus lengths apart. If WMATA used 80-seat, double-decker buses such as those used in Las Vegas, that lane could move 96,000 people per hour, without even counting standees.

On reaching downtown, the buses could disperse to various streets, any of which are capable of moving at least 160 buses an hour (40 buses per hour per stop with four designated stops every two blocks). That means directing buses down three or four north-south streets and four east-west streets, allowing most riders to find a stop close to their actual destination.

The Washington DC region could spend tens of billions of dollars and many years planning building new subway lines that would provide a modest increase in the rail system’s capacity. Or it could spend a small fraction of that amount of money and time on new buses running on high-occupancy toll lanes that would more than double the system’s capacity. Unfortunately, the political momentum created when DC made the mistake of building rail in the first place will probably doom it to doing the former. The result will be a lot of money spent but little congestion relief.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has delivered a lot of money for ideas to make higher education more affordable. One of the many papers it funded came out of the New America Foundation last week, and the report contains lots of proposals for Gates to work with. Unfortunately, its backbone — making the Pell Grant an entitlement program — is a complete nonstarter. Not only does Washington need a new entitlement like the Super Bowl needed a sudden spike in hair dryer use, the Pell Grant is utterly unjust, taking from Peter and giving to Paul so that Paul can make a million extra bucks.

The first point should be self-evident. Entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security are already gigantic fiscal asteroids hurtling directly at us. Indeed, at their present rate of growth, by 2050 entitlements will likely eat up every single cent the federal government brings in, leaving not a dime for defense and other discretionary spending.

A Pell entitlement would certainly be small compared to, say, Medicare. If I’m reading NAF’s report right, the total Pell cost in 2022, after all their recommended reforms, would be about $53.3 billion. (NAF says its plan would cost $94.4 billion over the next ten years “compared to current policy.” For simplicity, dividing $94.4 by ten and adding the resulting $9.4 billion to the CBO-projected 2022 Pell cost of $43.9 billion yields $53.3 billion.) In contrast to that $53.3 billion, Medicare is expected to cost about $1 trillion in 2022. But while the cost would be relatively tiny, the root pathology would be the same: a program with funding put on autopilot.

And don’t think Pell won’t sneak up to include increasingly higher-income people. No one likes seeing others get free taxpayer money, and no politician will let the “middle-class” — whoever that is — get “squeezed.” Indeed, NAF tries to soften the blow for those who would lose tax deductions and credits under their plan (very good proposals, by the way) by noting that “some of the aid that these benefits provide to families with middle incomes will be replaced with the significant increases to the maximum Pell Grant that are proposed in this paper.”

All that said, the root objection to Pell applies, whether it is an entitlement or not: There is no just reason for taking money from Paul and giving it to Peter so that Peter can get much wealthier. But that is precisely what Pell is intended to do: Take money from taxpayers and give it to other people so that they can get degrees and earn “$1 million more over their lifetimes.” If any entity other than government were to do that, we’d call it “stealing.”

The Pell Grant program absolutely should not be an entitlement — we have way too many of those as it is. Even more important, though, Pell shouldn’t exist at all. It is, essentially, legalized theft.

Cross-posted at seethrue​du​.com