While most of my adult life has been devoted to simply imparting basic Economics to policymakers, I have to admit to being a little skeptical as to if they are actually listening. I’ve seen too many times, especially during my service as staff in the Senate, politicians support policies they have to know are harmful. So it always encouraging to see some evidence of Congress taking basic Economics into account.

The evidence is presented in a recent paper in the academic journal Public Choice. The paper examines the 2007 vote to raise the minimum wage. After controlling for a variety of factors, the “study finds that members who majored in economics as undergraduates were less likely to vote for the minimum wage increase than their colleagues.” Again this controls for party and others factors that might also influence a Representative’s decision. As you probably recall, the vote in question did pass. So while I’m not suggesting that a few more economists in Congress would solve all our problems, it might actually help.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) or Common Core? NCLB and Common Core? If you look at the evidence, the answer to both questions is “no.” There’s precious little evidence that NCLB has worked, and just as little that national standards will do any better.

Despite all the fine sounding talk about the federal government demanding “accountability” and forcing states to improve, NAEP data for long-struggling groups reveals many periods before NCLB with equal or faster score gains than under No Child. In other words, the federal government’s own measure of academic achievement provides no support for the idea that accountability – or anything else under No Child – has translated into better performance.

But hasn’t the problem been the lack of a common measure of “proficiency,” which has allowed states to dodge the hard work of getting all kids up to speed? And isn’t that precisely what the Common Core will fix?

No again. What we’ve learned from not just NCLB, but decades of failed federal education intervention, is that politicians and administrators at all levels will find ways to take federal money while avoiding meaningful consequences for poor performance. And there’s little reason to believe that the Common Core will change that.

For one thing, if the Common Core truly is controlled by states – which, given the Race to the Top, waivers, and federal funding of national tests it clearly isn’t – then states will ignore the standards whenever they’re inconvenient. And if the federal government tries to put the screws to states that underperform? All the teachers’ unions, administrators’ associations, and other groups representing those who would be held accountable will mobilize and have the system gutted. It’s the clear lesson of history.

But isn’t the Common Core so good, and having national standards so important, that we must adopt them?

Yet again, no.

There’s essentially no meaningful evidence that, other things being equal, countries with national standards perform better than those without. And there is serious disagreement over the quality of the Common Core, including powerful critiques from well known English language arts expert Sandra Stotsky, and the only mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, R. James Milgram.

Common Core, No Child Left Behind – both are cut from the same, moth-devoured cloth: top-down government control. In light of decades of costly failure, it is well past time we stop entertaining such fixes and move on to something different. It’s time to focus on fundamentally changing the system so that educators have the freedom to tailor teaching to the needs of unique children, while parents are empowered to hold educators truly accountable. It is time for school choice, which, unlike NCLB and national standards, the evidence very much supports.

C/P from the National Journal’s “Education Experts” blog.

Webster’s defines “idiosyncrasy” as “a peculiarity of constitution or temperament” or “characteristic peculiarity (as of temperament); broadly: eccentricity.”

And what does the New York Times define as an idiosyncrasy? A headline this weekend tells us that

Idiosyncrasy Runs Deep in the Soil of Wyoming

And what’s this idiosyncrasy? Cowboy poetry? Jackalopes? Being the first state to grant women the vote?

No, here’s what the Times finds idiosyncratic:

Wyoming’s way — always idiosyncratic in the windblown, rural grain that mixes mind-your-own-business cowboy libertarianism and fiscal penny-pinching — is getting its moment in the spotlight.

Yep, what the New York Times finds idiosyncratic in a nation formed to guarantee the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is a libertarian spirit combined with fiscal conservatism.

It’s not clear that Wyoming lives up to this picture: The Cato Institute’s Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors noted in 2006 that Wyoming’s budget had risen 60 percent in less than four years. And the Mercatus Center report “Freedom in the 50 States” put Wyoming barely above the national median for both personal and economic freedom. But the libertarian instincts are there, as Jason Sorens and I found in calculations of voter attitudes in the states.

So let’s hear it for “mind-your-own-business cowboy libertarianism and fiscal penny-pinching” — may it spread beyond the four corners of idiosyncratic Wyoming.

Just in case you were wondering where future growth might come from, the Washington Post reports:

a new analysis warns that the Washington area doesn’t have nearly enough housing for the wave of new workers that will arrive in coming decades.

Researchers at George Mason University say the area is projected to add more than a million new jobs by 2030.

That’s the future we can expect if we don’t start constraining the size, scope, and power of the federal government: further transfers of wealth from the rest of the country to Washington, from the productive sector to the redistributive and regulatory sector.

With little publicity, the federal Food and Drug Administration has begun laying groundwork for one of the more audacious regulatory initiatives of the Obama administration: mandatory reductions in the salt content of processed foods in the supermarket aisle and at restaurants.

In a September 15 “Request for Comments, Data, and Information” (PDF) published in the Federal Register, the FDA solicits from the public “comments, data, and evidence relevant to the dietary intake of sodium as well as current and emerging approaches designed to promote sodium reduction.” Among the specific ideas it has in mind: setting federally prescribed “targets” for “stepwise” reductions in the amount of salt allowable in various foods, the phased nature of the reductions indicated because consumers’ “taste preference for sodium is acquired and can be modified.”

Various government programs (notably in Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City) already arm-twist producers into supposedly voluntary reductions, but the FDA notice hints broadly that voluntary measures will not suffice. Its public comment period ends next Tuesday, November 29; let’s hope the agency gets an earful from citizens about the importance of freedom and consumer choice.

As I noted last month in a Cato podcast with interviewer Caleb Brown, the FDA’s new initiative plunges it deeper into social engineering than it has gone in the past. It’s one thing to limit adulteration or contamination of foods, or the use of mysterious chemical additives; it is another to order the reformulation of recipes to reduce intake of a substance that 1) occurs naturally in virtually all foods; 2) is beneficial to health in many circumstances; and 3) has been sought out and purposely added to the human diet through recorded history.

As the FDA acknowledges, salt is far more than a flavor enhancer, capable of such miracles as turning vegetable soup into something small children will gladly eat. It also continues to be (as it has been through history) vital in preventing a wide range of bacterial spoilage and food poisoning dangers in the food supply. It also assists with texture, appearance, and shelf life. Consumers notice when it is missing, as Campbell’s found when it was forced by lagging sales to restore salt to its Select Harvest soup line, and as H.J. Heinz found when it faced a consumer revolt in Britain after reformulating its HP Sauce at the urging of the British government (see Telegraph and Daily Mail accounts).

As I noted a while back, the government’s dietary advice has changed often through the years, and its recommendations in retrospect have regularly proved to be unfounded and even damaging. Sure enough, reports have begun to come out that the salt panic has been exaggerated and may even pose some health dangers of its own. “New review questions benefit of cutting down on salt,” reported Reuters about a new review of more than 160 scientific studies published in the American Journal of Hypertension. “It’s time to end the war on salt,” per a July Scientific American article by Melinda Wenner Moyer.

And as for post-Thanksgiving dieting? As Reader’s Digest points out, eating more produce and less processed food is known to be a healthy step, and will much reduce your sodium intake. In the mean time, you can file comments here about whether you’d like to go on making these choices yourself, or have FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg make them for you.

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Should either Justices Thomas or Kagan recuse themselves from the ObamaCare case?

My response:

Justice Thomas is the easier case, because he had no involvement in the ObamaCare legislation or legal strategy, nor did his wife. As Tevi Troy commented in yesterday’s POLITICO, citing “alumni of the White House Counsel’s Office from several administrations,” Thomas’s “wife’s activities would come into play only if she had a financial interest at stake in the case, which she does not.” And as Marcia Coyle and Tony Mauro noted in Monday’s National Law Journal, citing DePaul Law School’s Jeffrey Shaman, “Twenty-five years ago, they might have said judges should control their wives. But she has a right to her own life.”

Justice Kagan is a closer call. We already know her sentiments about ObamaCare from her breathless email to Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe: “I hear they have the votes, Larry!!” But the real question is how closely she was involved in developing the legal strategy for defending the law – as head of the Justice Department office charged with that responsibility. As The Hill reported yesterday, “Emails show that Kagan’s office mounted an early and aggressive effort to prepare for legal challenges to the individual insurance mandate, but the records released so far do not contradict Kagan’s statement that she was not directly involved in the planning.” The operative words are “so far,” which is why House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, as POLITICO reported yesterday, “has asked the Obama administration to provide documents and internal correspondence on … Kagan’s role in defense of the health reform law.”

In the end, of course, recusal is the justice’s call. But especially in a case as important as this, the public deserves to know the facts.

So far Occupy Wall Street and its imitators across the country have directed their rage at Wall Street and the rich in general. But they would be better served if they aimed their criticism at the true authors of this country’s problems: the politicians in Washington.

Obviously there are unscrupulous businessmen, and some on Wall Street behaved unethically, if not dishonestly taking advantage of lax oversight and bailouts to make fortunes while the rest of the economy suffered. But, if you look at the one percent that OWS is denouncing, most of them got rich by giving us things that makes us better off, or at least things that we want. Of the top one percent of earners, roughly a third are entrepreneurs or managers of nonfinancial businesses. Nearly 16 percent are doctors or other medical professionals. Lawyers, engineers, scientists, and computer professionals make up another 15 percent. In fact, fewer than 14 percent are involved in the financial industry at all. And even those much reviled bankers provide valuable services, including generating the capital that enables businesses to start, expand, and hire workers. At the same time, the rich are paying a disproportionate share of the taxes and contributing more than $150 billion annually to charity.

On the other hand, what have the politicians in Washington given us?

Many of the students taking part in the OWS protests are reportedly concerned about the cost of their student loans. Since the average student who graduates this year will do so with a debt of more than $25,000, that concern is understandable, though there is ample reason to believe that government is more responsible for that debt than the rich or even the banks. But, as bad as that debt is, worse is the $48,000 that each of those students owes because the politicians in Washington can’t stop spending. That’s each student’s share of our $15 trillion national debt.

And that doesn’t even take into account the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. If one counted the full indebtedness of the U.S. government, each of those students owes more than $196,000.

And, if they are worried about jobs, well the blame for that can also be laid at the feet of big-spending politicians in Washington. The International Monetary Fund looked at the relationship between federal debt levels and economic growth and concluded that from 1890–2000, those countries with high debt levels consistently experienced slower economic growth than those with low debt levels. Similarly, Carmen Reinhardt of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard concluded that countries with a debt totaling more than 90 percent of GDP have median growth rates 1 percent lower than countries with a lower debt, and average growth rates nearly 4 percent lower.

And, it’s not just debt; it is also the size of government. Numerous academic studies show that when government grows too large, costly, and intrusive, it acts as an economic anchor. For example, a pair of studies by Harvard’s Robert Barro found that “public consumption spending is systematically inversely related to economic growth” and that there is a “significantly negative relation between the growth of real GDP and the growth of the government share of GDP.” Similarly, an empirical analysis of 23 OECD countries by Florida State University economist James Gwartney and his colleagues found that a ten percentage point increase in government consumption as a share of GDP reduced the growth rate of real GDP by one percent. In other words, as government spending goes up, economic growth goes down.

In fact, even the current economic crisis has its roots in Washington. The housing bubble and the crash which followed were driven in large part by government policies that discouraged old-fashioned lending criteria such as down payments, as well as government-run institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose implicit government guarantee encouraged speculation on mortgage-backed securities. Meanwhile, other government policies deliberately targeted housing loans to low-income buyers who were far more likely to default.

There are certainly more than a few bad apples on Wall Street. But for all their faults, we are generally better off with the rich than without them. Can anyone say the same for big government?

This article originally appeared in a PolicyMic debate with Demos co-founder David Callahan.