Should We Even Be Surprised Anymore?

We have a Treasury Secretary who can't do his taxes correctly, an impeached former federal judge helping to craft rules in the House of Representatives, and the largest recipient of donations from financial interests overseeing the crafting of regulation of the financial industry.

So should we really be surprised to find out that the head of the Department of Education was helping politically-connected politicians and businesspeople get their children into the best public schools in Chicago?

I'm not. But then again, I'm a cynic. HT: Instapundit

Unintentionally Honest Symbolism

Nancy Pelosi strode into the Capitol Building bearing the gavel used in the passage of Medicare in 1965. For me, that gavel has a much different symbolism than I would guess it does for her.

For me, it reminds me that Medicare cost more than seven times what it was originally projected to, and now faces an unfunded liability of over $29 trillion (summing the NPV of excess liabilities of Medicare Part A, B, and  D from the tables on pages 50 and 51).

Nothing like reminding everyone of the budget-busting incompetence that has gone before as you sign off on yet another multi-trillion dollar entitlement.

The True Cost of Public Education

The Cato Institute has done a great job digging into the actual cost of public education. They go beyond the publicly stated per-pupil costs (a ridiculous $10,053 per year in LAUSD, given their performance). They include all costs to the taxpayer, including capital budgets and debt payments, and for the money hole that it LA Unified School District, find that actual per-pupil spending is vastly understated. Were LAUSD being honest, they would be telling the taxpayers that each student (barely 50% of which will graduate in four years) costs them $25,208 per year, over twice the estimated cost of a year at a private school in the area.

Read it, and weep: Cato: They Spend WHAT?

At some point, despite the unions' and politicians' protests to the contrary, this system will become unsustainable, unaffordable, and unacceptable to those being asked to pay for it.

Bribing Legislators With Taxpayer Money

Here is yet another reason why California is in so much trouble: Teachers union tops list of state political spenders

Five special interests were responsible for more than half of the billion dollars spent since 2000, including:

--The California Teachers Assoc., which spent $211.8 million.
--The California State Council of Service Employees, $107.4 million. 

That's right. The teacher's union and the public employees' union has spent $300 million of taxpayer-derived funds lobbying the California state government. Our tax dollars at work, folks.

Their return on investment? California teachers are now the highest paid in the nation, with a 10-year pay increase of 41.6%. Despite these pay hikes, California schools still rank consistently near the bottom in nationwide rankings. Zero layoffs have affected the current state employees, despite California's massive deficits, and the number of public employees in California has grown during the past decade of financial troubles for the state.

Pretty good, really. For them. The state, however, is pretty well screwed.

I'd Better Start Saving for Private School Now

The LA Weekly has a long article describing the ridiculous hoops that administrators at the Los Angeles Unified School District (the school district I currently reside in) have to jump through to fire incompetent teachers.

The most distressing revelations, to my mind, are that teachers in the district receive tenure after only two years on the job, and that the district has attempted to fire only seven out of more than 30,000 teachers for poor performance over the past ten years.

Is it a surprise that just over half of students in LAUSD high-schools graduate after four years? Not really. Is it an outrage? It should be.

Read the whole depressing thing, which should really be coming from the LA Times.

How's that, again?

In the State of the Union tonight, President Obama asked Congress

to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.

referring to the recent Citizens United decision.

Now, this decision was specifically rooted in the First Amendment protection of free speech.

How, exactly is Congress going to pass "a bill" that rights this "wrong." Wouldn't that "bill" specifically have to be a Constitutional amendment that would then be ratified by the states?

Goodbye, Mr. Keynes

So Obama appears to be floating a 3 year spending freeze starting at the beginning of the next fiscal year.

There are some caveats. This will only apply to non-defense discretionary spending, or about one-eighth of the entire budget. Obama is being rightly mocked for this across the blogosphere and in the media. Personally,  I think that enacting a budget freeze now while touting it as the administration's focus on fiscal responsibility is kind of like Tiger Woods not visiting a mistress during a tournament and claiming that it shows his deep commitment to monogamy.

I'd also note that it's conveniently set to expire right when the proposed health reforms kick in, another in a endless serious of accounting tricks.

My more serious question, however, is this: Whose economic model is the Obama administration working off of now? For over a year, we've been pummeled with Keynesian stimulus plans, with rhetoric about how government must stimulate demand, how the huge deficits are needed right now so that the government can be the consumer of last resort. Paul Krugman has been beating the drum from the very beginning about how we need even more stimulus than we already have. 

Now, apparently, the Keynesian view is out of fashion in the Obama administration. So what view is now driving their thinking?