At the Daily Caller, Duke University Prof. Chris Conover writes:

There you are, about to sign the papers, when the car salesman offers to throw in a $1,000 options package. He knows those options will cost you a further $440 by reducing the performance of your new car’s engine, but he doesn’t tell you that.

Sounds sleazy, right? Congress does it every day.

Politicians love to rail against car dealers and mortgage lenders who surprise consumers with hidden costs. Yet Congress hides from voters a huge part of the cost of government: the hidden costs of taxes, which include lost income and jobs. Failing to account for these costs creates a bias in favor of bigger government and a less efficient tax code.

Read the rest of Conover’s oped here, and his Cato study here.

The Obama administration’s attacks on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce look a lot like a three-day story on its final day. The national media had its doubts, and even Democratic operatives decried the gambit.

Why did the administration go after the Chamber? The politics are not hard to figure out. Earlier actions of the Obama administration mobilized the Republican base. At the same time, the President and his party have been losing the support of independents for a year or so. Their only hope of limiting the electoral damage was to rally the Democratic base, who are discouraged and divided.

The Democratic base might agree about what they don’t like and fear: business, money in politics, and foreigners — or at least, foreigners spending money on politics. The attack on the Chamber of Commerce appealed to all three. The administration hoped that fear would engender hatred and hatred would bring people to the polls to vote against business and the GOP.

The most surprising part of the attack was the rather naked appeal to anti-foreign bias (see Bryan Caplan’s discussion of this concept here). Most people think of Democrats as friendly to undocumented foreign workers. But Democrats are first of all egalitarians; for them, the whole point of politics is to help the oppressed and harm the oppressor. They do not favor undocumented foreigners because they believe people have a right to free exchange, borders notwithstanding. Instead, Democrats see undocumented foreigners as victims of oppression by American businesses. Foreigners who have enough money to spend on elections are oppressors in the egalitarian mind.

Obama promised hope and change. He and his party now want to maintain — so far as possible — the political status quo (that is, their control of Congress). To do that they are trying to prompt fear and hatred among their most loyal voters. The new motto of the administration appears to be: fear and stasis.

Of course, the administration had no evidence the charges were true and argued that the Chamber should be seen as guilty until proven innocent. All in all, the whole affair suggests desperation and a complete loss of constraint in pursuing a political end. It suggests, I think, conduct that used to be covered by the word “Nixonian.”

A study from the American Institutes of Research finds that federal and state governments have wasted billions of dollars on subsidies for students who didn’t make it past their first year in college. The federal total for first-year college drop outs was $1.5 billion from 2003 to 2008.

Due to data limitations, the figures are only for first year, full-time students at four-year colleges and universities. Community colleges have even higher drop-out rates, and part-time students or students returning to college are more likely to drop out. Therefore, the numbers in the report are “only a fraction of the total costs of first-year attrition the nation and the states face.” Moreover, it doesn’t include the cost for students who drop out some time after their sophomore year.

Federal policymakers from both parties are fond of lavishing subsidies on college students. Proponents argue that without federal subsidies, an insufficient number of future workers will possess the skills necessary to compete in a global economy.

However, a Cato essay on federal higher education subsidies argues that students wishing to attend college already have plenty of incentive to save or borrow from private sources:

Supporters of student aid subsidies argue that higher education is a “public good” that would be underprovided in a free market. However, that is probably not the case. People have a strong incentive to invest in their own education because it will lead to higher earnings. Those with a college degree will earn, on average, 75 percent more during their lifetime than those with just high-school degrees. That is a big incentive for people to save or borrow in private markets to pay for their own college costs. There is no “market failure” here.

In fact, higher education subsidies drive up tuition prices:

It is matter of supply and demand. More and more Americans have sought a college education, which has pushed prices higher. Ordinarily, such upward pressure would be restrained by consumers’ willingness and ability to pay, but as government subsidies have helped absorb tuition increases, the public’s budget constraint has been lifted. Peter Wood, a professor at Boston University noted that federal subsidies “are seen by colleges and universities as money that is there for the taking … tuition is set high enough to capture those funds and whatever else we think can be extracted from parents.”

But isn’t it great that Uncle Sam is helping put more young folks in college? Not necessarily:

Many of those additional students may not have been ready, or suited, for college. As evidenced by the rising shares of college students who require remedial work. Further evidence of the problem is that institutions have lowered their standards to adapt to the rise in second-rate students. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported that from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, college grade point averages grew steadily but Scholastic Aptitude Test scores declined. The share of entering college students who complete degrees has also fallen over the decades. In addition, while college attendance is up, overall adult literacy has barely budged over the last 15 years.

The essay also notes that college students devote 3.2 hours to education on an average weekday, versus 3.9 hours to “leisure and sports,” and that the six-year graduation rate for bachelor’s students is only about 56 percent, indicating that many students are not very serious about education.

Just as housing subsidies incentivized people to purchase homes that they otherwise shouldn’t have, higher education subsidies have incentivized people to go to college who weren’t ready or suited for it. In both cases, the cost to taxpayers has been substantial while the alleged benefits have proven illusory.

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Looking at the repeated failures of campaign finance reforms, is it time to end the restrictions?

My response:

Funny, we didn’t hear the primal scream about campaign finance from liberal Democrats during the 2008 campaigns, when money was pouring into their coffers from everywhere. Do we need any better evidence of the hypocrisy surrounding their screams this year? If so, turn to the lead editorial in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. It’ll tell you all you need to know about the campaign finance “reform” ruse that has been going on for years.

In a study released today by the Cato Institute, Duke University professor Chris Conover estimates how much ObamaCare and related provisions will reduce economic output:

The Congressional Budget Office has projected the 10-year, on-budget cost of [The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare] will be just over $1 trillion. This paper estimates PPACA will impose an additional, hidden cost of $157 billion to $494 billion in the form of reduced economic output. Related provisions (such as the so-called “doc fix”) could drive the economic losses to $550 billion, or more than half of the bill’s official cost estimates.

The Washington Post reports that Michelle Rhee is on her way out of the DC Public School system:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee will announce Wednesday that she is resigning at the end of this month, bringing an abrupt end to a tenure that drew national acclaim but that also became a central issue in an election that sent her patron, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, to defeat. Rhee survived three contentious years that made her a superstar of the education reform movement and one of the longest-serving school leaders in the city in two decades. Student test scores rose, and the teachers union accepted a contract that gave the chancellor sweeping powers to fire the lowest-performing among them.

No man or woman, mayor, chancellor or superintendent can significantly and permanently reform the government education monopoly. It is unreformable. Rhee’s tenure and modest success underscores this fact. Entrenched interests regroup, respond, bide their time, and reformers move on or are shoved along.

We’re all still waiting for Superman in DC and across the nation, and it reminds me a whole lot of waiting for Godot. Rhee, Geoffrey Canada, and all the rest of the celebrated reformers clearly aren’t Superman, and the whole reform conversation is far past absurd.

Only systemic reform that creates a market in education will bring sustained, continual improvement. Try looking a this for a sustainable bite out of the system.

The New York Times has an odd story today on campaign finance on its front page. The story argues that organizations which do not have to identify their donors are sponsoring ads that criticize candidates for office. Complaints about secrecy notwithstanding, the third paragraph of the story discloses one of the major contributors to a group and reveals his putative interests in becoming involved. It also goes into great detail about the donor, his political associates, and even meetings his associates attended and what decisions were made therein. Later parts of the story recount the already disclosed names of supporters of Karl Rove’s efforts in this cycle. True, the story does not reveal everything the reporters believe should be disclosed about donors. But the groups and their donors are hardly secret given what is revealed in the story itself.

The story also cannot get its story straight. The Times’ reporters evidently wanted to fit what they have found into a standard, “special interest” template: the organization in question — the American Future Fund — as a front for energy interests. The story also says the group has sponsored ads on general themes like too much spending, Obamacare, and another stimulus. But the reporters are determined to see “suggestions of an energy-related agenda,” their own reporting notwithstanding. This forcing of facts into a template comes along with a recognition that the politics of energy and ethanol have become more complicated making it difficult to say what interests are actually being advanced in the American Future Fund effort.

So the story discloses, while decrying secrecy, and both asserts and denies the domination of special interests. In the end, the story holds fast to a simple, conventional theme which is then undermined by its reporting. We should admire, I guess, that the Times’ reporters were willing to undermine their own narrative. But why not just embrace complexity? They are writing the first, not the final, draft of history.

The story also reports that donors desire anonymity because they wish to avoid taking sides in political disputes in public. The story does not say why they desire to avoid taking sides. Perhaps a quick call to the Koch family or George Soros might have provided an answer to that question.