After months of not releasing official data on the number of drug-related killings, the Mexican government announced yesterday that in the first nine months of 2011, 12,903 people died in episodes of drug violence. The Mexican authorities, struggling to find a silver lining, noted positively that the figure reveals “a significant decrease” in the growth of the murder rate from previous years.

This tactic is similar to Washington’s creative accounting when it comes to spending “cuts:” spending continues to increase, but at a smaller percentage than previously planned. Thus, spending has been “cut.” Similarly, the number of people killed in Mexico’s drug war continued to rise in 2011, but at a lower pace than 2010. Thus, the murder rate has declined. Moreover, the 11 percent increase in murders in 2011 follows a record setting number in 2010.

* BBC estimate.
Source: Mexico’s Federal Attorney General’s office.

According to an estimate from the BBC, the total number of drug deaths in 2011 is approximately 16,700. That means over 51,000 people have been killed in Mexico since president Felipe Calderón launched a war on drug cartels in December 2006. And the number may be higher.

As Mexico’s former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda said last November at the Cato conference “Ending the Global War on Drugs,” the number killed in Mexico’s war on drugs will soon equal the number of U.S. deaths in Vietnam. And let’s remember that Mexico’s population is a third of the United States’ and the Vietnam conflict lasted twice as long as Calderón’s drug offensive.

The main worry for 2012 is not that drug killings stabilize at a high rate—although that would be terrible—but that violence engulfs other areas of the country that have remained relatively peaceful, such as Mexico City. If that happens, Mexican authorities will find it even more difficult to identify “victories” in their war against cartels.

One of the rationales oft heard for Obama’s recent “recess” appointments is that the Senate is not “doing its job” or that Republicans have blocked his nominees and that our government “cannot function.” Putting aside the absurdity of the argument that somehow if Congress fails to “do its job” that empowers the President to take over its job, the simple fact is that the vast majority of Obama nominations have actually been confirmed by the Senate.

Between January 5, 2011, the beginning of the 1st session of the 112th Congress, and December 30,2011, the Senate received 20,517 nominations from the Obama Administration. Of those, 19,815 were confirmed by the Senate, which rounds up to 97 percent. And this ignores the fact that some nominations, like those to the National Labor Relations Board, were not received until December, hardly giving the Senate any time to consider and confirm said nominations.

One can argue that not all nominations are equal. For instance the majority of nominations are military positions. You can decide for yourself whether a general or admiral is equal to an assistant secretary or bureau director. If one wants to produce a “quality-adjusted” nominations index, they are free to do so. None of this changes the basic fact: President Obama has had the majority of his nominations confirmed by the Senate. Claims to the contrary are simply false.

In just a few weeks Washington enters that alternative universe called “budget season,” when the President delivers his budget proposal to Congress and Congress begins constructing its budget for the coming fiscal year (at least in normal years, don’t expect much budget action in 2012). Underlying the budget process will be government projections of the deficit. Such projections will be given considerable weight, both in Washington and among the press. So if said projections are way off, then budgeting decisions by Washington will also miss the mark. 

Just in time to help frame this debate is a new paper from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The entire paper is well worth a read, and accessible to the general public. Below is a chart, reproduced from the paper, that expresses the basic point.

On the X axis is the Congressional Budget Office’s projected 5 year budget surplus/​deficit, as a percent of GDP. The Y axis plots the actual budget surplus/​deficit. An easy way to read the chart is that points below the 45 degree line are instances of where CBO was too optimistic. Points above the 45 degree line are where CBO was too pessimistic. If CBO’s errors were random, then the number of points below and above the 45 degree line would be about equal. As you can see, however, CBO’s errors were not randomly distributed. They were biased in the direction of being too optimistic. So when you see the next round of CBO budget forecasts, take them with a huge grain of salt. The truth is likely to be much worse.

On Sunday we marked the tenth birthday of the No Child Left Behind Act by reviewing its decade of futility and explaining why federal education adventuring is basically doomed to failure. (Enjoy some of our extensive coverage here, here, and here.) This week we got yet more evidence that federal policy is always big on promises, itty-bitty on results. According to the latest reports, most of the winners of President Obama’s $4.35-billion “Race to the Top” competition are well off pace to fulfill the promises they made to get the dough. Well off schedule, that is, except for adopting the laughably dubbed “state-led and voluntary” national curriculum standards that the federal Race to the Top essentially demanded they use.

It’s just as I warned back in 2009, when Race to the Top was all the transformative rage in both left and right edu-policy circles:

Have plans for reform? Sure. Break down a few barriers that could stand in the way of decent changes? That’s in there, too. But that’s about it. And the money is supposed to be a one-shot deal – once paper promises are accepted and the dough delivered, the race is supposed to be over.

In light of those things, how is this more appropriately labeled the Over the Top Fund than the Race to the Top Fund? Because while not requiring anything, it tries to push unprecedented centralization of education power. It calls for state data systems to track students from preschool to college graduation. It calls for states to sign onto “common” – meaning, ultimately, federal – standards. It tries to influence state budgeting.

To be fair, the feds could still hold states accountable and keep the RTTT dough if and when the states break their promises. But that would still be another failure, and all the money states and Washington will have spent on RTTT will have gone for naught. But, then, spending for naught is something we should be very much used to by now.

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Are Romney’s GOP rivals smart to continue their attacks on capitalism that have so far fallen flat? Would this theme be any more effective for the Obama campaign?

My response:

The Gingrich and Perry attacks on Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital are appalling. We expect that from Obama — as in yesterday’s “insourcing” press conference — because his understanding of how markets work is so slim and everything, for him, is politics. Those in the party that purports to stand for free markets should never stoop to such shameless pandering.

Steven Rattner’s piece in POLITICO this morning nicely summarizes the facts surrounding Romney’s work at Bain Capital. And yesterday my colleague Steve H. Hanke pointed to a more detailed study issued recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Private Equity and Employment.” As Rattner puts it, Bain Capital’s record “was extraordinary, among the best in the business.” Yes, restructuring companies may cost jobs. Letting them fail does too — but also costs those who’ve invested in them, many of whom are or will be small retirees. At least Romney did it with private funds, not with taxpayer money or regulatory protections. That’s how capitalism works, for the benefit of all of us.

John Mueller was right and everyone else was wrong. (Well, not everyone else…)

That’s Cato senior fellow John Mueller. He noted on the National Interest blog last week that 79 per cent of top terrorism experts queried in 2006 thought it was likely or certain that there would be another major terrorist attack in the United States by the end of 2011. They got it wrong.

When the survey came out, it touted these experts as the “very people who have run America’s national-security apparatus over the past half century.” Mueller lampoons them thus:

The Very People’s 79 percent error rate is especially impressive because, although there had been quite a bit of terrorist activity in Iraq and elsewhere during the four-and-a-half years between 9/11 and when the survey was conducted, none of these attacks even remotely approached the destruction of the one on September 11. Nor, for that matter, had any terrorist attack during the four-and-a-half millennia previous to that date. In addition, although terrorist plots have been rolled up within the United States, none of the plotters threatened to wreak destruction on anything like the scale of 9/11, except perhaps in a few moments of movieland-fantasy musings.

Mueller was one of few suggesting in 2006—and well before—that 9/11 might be more of an aberration than a harbinger.

Mueller’s studied correctness so far is not proof of what the future holds, of course. If you want to, it is certainly possible to cling to the threat of terrorism and the metastasis of policies that purport to address your fears. Part of terrorism’s design is its operation on fear to produce cognitive errors like probability neglect, for example.

But thanks to Mueller, terrorism is holding fewer and fewer people in thrall. It is a serious, but manageable security threat. Those still transfixed by terrorism may add another fear to their long list: They may be mocked by the man who knows the subject matter better.

At a recent Cato event on transparency, I emphasized that there is no federal government “organization chart” published in a way computers can use.

Here’s what I mean:

Appendix C of the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A‑11 is the White House’s definitive public listing of agencies and bureaus, along with their OMB and Treasury codes—unique identifiers for the agencies and bureaus of the federal government.

First problem: It’s a PDF document. To be computer-usable this should be represented in digital form as a lookup table.

But beyond that, it doesn’t follow a coherent organization. There’s an agency code (“200”) called “Other Defense Civil Programs,” for example. There’s obviously no agency called “Other Defense Civil Programs.” That’s a catch-all description, not an agency.

With most agencies, the bureau codes refer to bureaus, such as the Bureau of Land Management (bureau code: “04”) in the Department of the Interior (agency code: “010”), but with respect to the Department of Defense (agency code: “007”), the bureau codes become functional descriptions such as “Military Personnel” (“05”). There is no bureau in the Department of Defense called “Military Personnel.”

Even the most basic organizational information is a hash, and it’s published in PDF, unusable for computer-assisted oversight of the government!

The House appears committed to improving its publication practices. If the administration wants to advance the ball on transparency for its part, it will begin to publish coherent information—starting with basic information about the organization of the executive branch—in machine-readable form, using standardized identifiers. An edict from OMB to harmonize on identifiers down to the program level could be implemented in months, if not weeks.

My recent paper “Publication Practices for Transparent Government” talks about what to do. Our data model for budgeting, appropriating, and spending articulates how government agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects—and the relationships among them—should be represented.