Destroying Political Class Myths, Part 1: No Child Left Behind, Voter ID Laws,and Global Warming

We are going to have a little fun the next few days exploring the many myths that the politicians of this country would like us to believe. You see, if we believe the myths that they create than we are more likely to vote for them to resolve the unreal issues and problems associated with these myths. 

But what if what they tell is not the true reality? What if we are getting all worked up and headed in the wrong direction for a mythical problem that does not exist or for a mythical solution that resolves nothing? All it does is send us chasing our tails while the same inept politicians get reelected over and over based on nothing more than their own greed, their rigging of the election processes, and the myths that they feed us and control us with.

So starting today we are going to look behind the myth curtail and reveal what is the true reality. With that truth we may finally start resolving some of the major issues of our times. Lord knows the political class has failed miserably over the past fifty years in eradicating poverty, winning the lost war on drugs, fixing our failing public schools, securing our borders, etc. 

Maybe it is because we have allowed them to work on myths that they created and not the true problems of our age. Keep in mind the following wise words of Groucho Marx over the next few posts: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” Sounds like myth building to me.

1) One of the biggest national initiatives under the Bush administration was the move to try and improve education in this country. He tried to do so under the banner of “No Child Left Behind. (NCLB). 

According to a late 2013 Education Action Group article by Ben Velderman, 89% of Congressional members voted for NCLB, which became law in 2002. Politicians supported the NCLB legislation because “it represented the first major effort by the federal government to impose academic accountability, through annual standardized testing, on public schools that received federal assistance.”

But liberals and Democrats pounded it for what they positioned as ineffective and an expensive failure. That became the storyline and assumed truth of this program that spend tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth.

But was total NCLB failure the reality or the political class myth?

According to Mr. Velderman’s article:

• Paul Peterson, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance completed an in-depth analysis of NCLB in 2013 and wrote a very credible defense of the legislation based on real data, more than a decade after the law became a reality.
• He goes as far to seriously call it one of the Bush administration’s “crowning achievements.”
• Using 2012 math and reading scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Peterson found that NCLB helped African-American and Hispanic students make “remarkable gains” in learning.
• Additionally, it actually helped close the achievement gap between white and minority students” “For the first nine years, the average gains (in reading and math scores) were six points annually for African-Americans, five points for Hispanics and three points for whites. Over that stretch, the test-score gap closed by two to three points each year, on average. While minority students did not attain the proficiency NCLB expected, the record shows steady positive momentum.”
• Unfortunately, according to the Peterson, those gains came “to a virtual halt” after the Obama administration decided to stop enforcing most of NCLB’s primary provisions and offered waivers to states that signed up for more lenient rules implemented by the Obama administration.
• According to Peterson, minority students benefited under NCLB largely because the law forced schools to produce learning results or face a series of penalties.
• In other words, the law held people accountable for results, a novel idea when it comes to government programs and employees.
• This notion of accountability was another key to NCLB’s success, according to Peterson, since it required that students’ test scores be made public. Letting parents and taxpayers know how much (or little) their students were learning in school put pressure on administrators and teachers to step fix their broken educational processes. But that transparency has been lost under the Obama administration, an administration that was supposed to be the “most transparent ever.”

So, what was supposed to be the worst bill ever passed turns out to be not so bad, according to an education expert from a university that will never be mistaken for a right leaning, conservative, Republican institution. The sad thing is that the Democrats and Obama, in this case of myth building, destroyed something that was working to some degree and replaced it with nothing that is working to no degree.

But somehow they got the myth established and minority kids, the people they brag they support, are the losers.

2) The Obama administration, via Eric Holder and his renegade Justice Department, have been going around the country and pressuring state government’s to abandon or severely water down their voter id requirements for elections. The mythical reason for the crackdown was to avoid the Jim Crow restrictive voting rules and laws of the past, laws that restricted the voting ability of African Americans. Holder’s public reasoning was that tight voter id laws restrict minorities’ abilities to vote.

The real reason, in many peoples’ minds, was to loosen voting rules so much that voter fraud could be practiced on a wide spread basis. What is reality and what is a myth of Holder’s intentions does not matter in this case. Late last year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the results of its investigation into how Georgia’s strict voter identification had affected the voting behavior of different demographic groups. The tight voter id laws had been in effect for about five years. 

Their findings kill the Holder myth that tight voter id laws suppress minority voting volumes:

• While it is a reality that the tighter Georgia state voter id laws failed to catch a single documented case of voter fraud, it did not suppress minority voting in the state either.
• The paper’s analysis found that during the five years of tighter voter id rules, minorities are actually turning out to vote at a higher rate than the rate that their population of their demographic is growing: “Turnout among black and Hispanic voters increased from 2006 to 2010, dramatically outpacing population growth for those groups over the same period,” according to reporter Shannon McCaffrey.
• Elections data reviewed by the paper’s research proved that black voters election participation actually rose by a whopping 44% from 2006, before the law was implemented, to 2010. 
• The increase for the Hispanic population during the same period was even more impressive, 67%. 
• As a benchmark, voting turnout among whites rose only 12%.

Thus, according to real life data, the Obama administration was perpetrating myth, at least in the state of Georgia, when they claimed that voter ID laws were discriminatory and detrimental to minority voting. Minority voting rates increased during the five years after the tighter restrictions took hold: “If you look at the numbers, they clearly show that critics of this law were wrong,” Hans von Spakovsky, a former legal counsel to the Justice Department’s civil rights division who now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation, told the newspaper. “Their argument has always been it would depress turnout, but it didn’t happen — quite the opposite.”

Political myth destroyed by real life results. And really, given how easy the state of Georgia made it to get a valid id to vote besides making getting the id for free, shouldn’t the price of citizenship include at least a little effort on the part of citizens to get an id to exercise their right AND privilege to vote?

3) One more myth destruction for today. For well over as decade, we have been bombarded with politicians telling us that we had to give up a lot of our wealth and a lot of our freedom because of global warming. Passively implied in this campaign, or this myth, was the reality that we were giving up these precious things, our wealth and freedom, to politicians which would increase their control over our lives.

But what has happened to global warming over the past 17 years or so? In reality, the myth died on the vine since global warming stopped a long time ago despite the dire warnings and forecast models of the political class’s climate scientists:









That is why the myth had to be adjusted in mid stream by the political class. After almost 18 years of no warming and the failure of almost every climate forecast model to take this into account, we now have a rebranded new myth called “climate change.” But like most myths, how can we believe this new political class myth when the old myth they so passionately and vehemently defended for decades turned out to be false?

So what is the lesson learned today? The political class stays in power and office by manufacturing myths to excite their base and show how important they are. In reality, the myths are not important because they never resolve real issues but we end up paying with our wealth and freedom for very little in return.

I once worked for a boss whose favority saying was: “There is nothing more devasting to an opinion [or in our case, a myth]than the right number.” The No Child Left Behind failure myth was destroyed by the number analysis done by a Harvard professor. The voting id laws prevent minorities from voting myth was destroyed by a newspaper research effort of real life data and numbers. The global warming myth is destroyed by simply looking at a single graph's numbers. Boy, who thought destroying political class myths could be so much fun? More fun at least through tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Political Class Actions and The Many Unintended Consequences

One thing that most Americans never think is what happens after the political class takes action or passes a law? I think most of us just assume that once the law is passed, everything will be okay and work as planned. Unfortunately, that is almost never the case. For one, most of the laws pass never solve, or even address, the issue that they are purported to be addressing. Anti-drug laws do not work, Bush's public education initiative, No Child Left Behind, does not work (and the Obama version will not work either), the Federal government funded and started building a fence along our southern border to keep illegal Mexicans out of the country but the fence has been breached over 3,000 times, allowing who knows how many illegals to get into the country, we are told that we need an economic stimulus package that will be used to fix our crumbling infrastructure but the Associated Press reported that about half of the stimulus money for bridges was spent on bridges that were in excellent condition, etc. The list goes on and on.

Consider some more recent occurrences of unintended consequences:

• The main reason that BP has not gotten its runaway well under control is that the accident occurred about a mile under the Gulf Of Mexico. Why are they so far out in the Gulf and drilling in such deep water? Because Congress decided to force drilling further and further from the coastline, falsely assuming that our beaches would not get fouled by an oil disaster if the oil rigs were further away. The unintended consequence of their logic is that once the disaster did occur in deep water, it could not be readily fixed compared to if the drilling had been closer to shore. Yes, there may have been some localized ecological damage but it would have been contained and easily and more cheaply cleaned up. Now, this unintended consequence will spread disaster all along the Gulf and into the Atlantic Ocean, unintended consequences from a political class that did not think through the problem.
• In the past year or so, there have been horror stories of airline passengers spending hours and hours in airplanes waiting to take off resulting malfunctioning toilets, shortages of food and water, high degrees of stress, and other behaviors that one would expect being cooped up in a plane for long hours but not going anywhere. To remedy the situation, the political class passed a law that puts a cap on how long passengers can sit in a waiting plane before the airline starts being fined. Their logic was that if the airlines were facing stiff fines for delaying flights on the ground for more than a few hours, they would act more efficiently and promptly to get the passengers airborne. However, the unintended consequence of this law was that airlines can avoid fines if they cancel the flight before the time limit is reached. Consider this unintended consequence example: if a plane is scheduled to actually leave the ground fifteen minutes after the time limit elapses, rather than going through with the flight, the airline will cancel it to avoid the heavy fines and inconvenience all of the passengers even though they were very close to taking off. Thus, an airline will probably never get fined under this law but untold number of passengers will be inconvenienced by canceled flights, an unintended consequence.
• Back when the economy first started to implode, the political class told us that we had to bail out the banks because they "were too big to fail." If they failed, then the entire financial system might collapse. Two years after the political class sold us this bill of goods, it appears that the four biggest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, Citi, and JP Morgan, are now bigger than ever with a bigger percentage of deposits and assets than before the economic meltdown. Thus, in an attempt to save banks "that were too big to fail", the unintended consequence was that the political class made a handful of the surviving banks bigger than ever. This must mean that we are no closer to getting out from under the "too big to fail" dilemma despite wasting billions and billions of taxpayer dollars on bailouts.
• In almost every past recession, it was small businesses that led the country out of the economic downturns with their hiring of new workers. However, in this recession, unemployment has stayed very high and small businesses are not hiring people, they are just getting more productivity out of their current workers. What happened? According to many sources, small businesses are having a very difficult time getting loans to expand. No loans, no new hiring. Thus, the unintended consequence is that the political class has been so tied up with the big banks, all of their actions in the banking industry over the past two years has resulted in an environment where banks do not want to loan money except to the biggest companies.
• Last year, it was discovered that many children's products coming from China factories had high levels of lead in them. The serious concern was that kids might put the toys and other products in their mouths, ingest some of the lead, and suffer serious health issues. The political class and government agencies got involved after the fact and made sure that those products were removed from the shelves and not longer imported. The unintended consequence of their late actions were highlighted in a May 20, 2010 Associated Press report that found high levels of the toxic metal cadmium in some imported children's products. Thus, through incompetence, the removal of lead from products was not enough to protect our kids since the overseas factories just replaced one toxic metal with another. So, just when you thought it was safe to have your child suck on a toy because of what the government did to remove the lead, you run smack into the unintended consequence of a different dangerous metal to be ingested.
• The recent health care reform legislation that was passed was opposed by every Republican in both the House and the Senate and had to be carried by all Democrat votes. The Democrats have traditionally been strong advocates of abortion rights for women. However, according to an Associated Press May 17, 20120 article, the way the final legislation was written had the unintended consequence of making it easier for a state government to restrict abortion coverage by private insurance plans serving the 30 million uninsured Americans in the so-called insurance exchanges that will take place in 2014. In other words, if you buy your health insurance through these new exchanges, the state where you live can make it much more difficult to get funding for an abortion. Arizona and Tennessee have already passed laws to this effect and dozens of other states are considering doing the same. Not quite the result the Democrats wanted in the area of abortion rights, certainly an unintended consequence.

There are probably a number of reasons why political class and government programs do not go as planned and result in unintended consequences. First, some of these issues are very complex (the banking/financial industry, the 2,400 page health care reform bill) and the politicians are not smart enough to understand how things work. As a result, their intentions result in unintended consequences that they were not intelligent enough to foresee.

Second, there is no accountability for correctly implementing many of these programs. Why was taxpayer money wasted fixing bridges that did not need to be fixed, especially when we were told by the politicians that one benefit of spending obscene amounts of borrowed money is that our crumbling infrastructure would be improved? The fence on the border costs billions of dollars to build, why is no one being held accountable for its poor performance and numerous breaches?

Third, as we have said many times in this blog, politicians do not solve problems, they only get re-elected. They are either not smart enough to find root causes and solutions for problems, they are too lazy to find the the root causes and solutions, or they do not want to find the root causes and solutions since it may harm their election chances. In any case, we suffer the unintended consequences of bad legislation, legislation that is not properly executed, or politicians that are not held accountable for laws and policies that go astray.

Thus, in the future, whenever Congress passes a law, do not think what good the law will do. Focus on all the ways things that could go wrong, you are far more likely to be right tracking the latter possibility than the former. At the same time check out Step 39 and Step 34 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" to see what could be done to help minimize unintended consequences. If we do not do it, our political class will certianly not do it.




Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Government Education Programs That Do Not Educate

The majority of kids in this country receive their education from government run and financed public schools. As reported previously in this blog, numerous, reputable sources have researched and analyzed the quality of public education in this country and have continually found it lacking despite the trillions of dollars we have spent on it over the decades. Two recent events suggest that we are no closer to fixing this problem even though the taxpayer money continues to flow.

Earlier this year, Obama's Department of Health and Human Services finally released a long term, comprehensive study that showed that the $150 billion that has been spent since the beginning of the Head Start program has resulted in "yielding zero lasting benefits for participating children." In other words, Head Start is nothing ore than an expensive government day care program. Anything the kids gain at age four from Head Start are largely absent by first grade. The Heritage Foundation's review of the material from HHS concluded: "Head Start has little to no effect on cognitive, socio-emotional, health and parenting outcomes of children participating in the program."

Now this study was not done by a tea party group, the Republicans, conservatives or others against large government. This was done for the government and released as fact by the Obama administration. The real question is whether or not the administration will stop the program, given that we now know it is ineffective. Consider President Obama's past statements on government programs in general and pre school programs in particular:

• "For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health care costs, and less crime." (pre school programs)
• His administration would "use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars. It's not whether the idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works." (any government program)

This is why the Obama administration is having more and more people tune it out. First of all, it makes up the numbers. Where did the ten to one, benefit to cost, number come from? It certainly did not come from Head Start since we now know that Head Start is worthless from an education perspective. Second, does anyone really think he will have the guts to shut down Head Start even though his own administration says it does not work. I doubt it, contributing to the growing body of hypocrisy this administration specializes in.

The sad part about all of this waste is that the Government Accounting Office reports that currently there are 69 Federal early education and child care programs that cost taxpayers more than $25 billion a year. If the flagship program, Head Start, does not work, do we really think that the other 68 programs are working and effective?

The second education event was a story in the March 26, 2010 issue of The Week magazine. This article summarized some of the facts and reactions to Obama's replacement program for the current No Child Left Behind Law that was pushed and approved during the Bush administration. Most people believe that this Bush bill was mostly a failure also since its goal of having all American children proficient in math and reading by 2014 will never be reached and that the law forced schools and teachers to educate to pass the mandatory proficiency tests and not focus on the wider process of learning. According to the article, on third of U.S. schools are still not reaching their progress benchmarks. A post we did in this blog in late 2009 cited a research study that proved that the $6 billion spent on increasing the reading skills of a set of students was a failure and thus, a waste of money.

What does the Obama replacement program do:

• It also would require proficiency in reading and math but pushes the deadline until 2020 (similar to the Bush plan, just a later date).
• It also would require standardized testing in math and reading every year (similar to the Bush plan).
• It also would get rid of bad teachers (similar to the Bush plan).
• It also would strive for common education standards (similar to the Bush plan).

Thus, how much of a difference is Obama's program going to make if four big components of his plan are the same as the failed Bush plan? The article does point out some differences which includes judging schools on additional criteria including graduation rates and individual progress in addition to test scores. However, which of the these common and additional requirements will survive the Congressional debate, and in what form, is yet to be determined. Given that the Obama plan is nothing revolutionary, how much better do we really think this plan will be once it gets through the lawyers in Congress and the associated lobbyists?

Thus, two major and very expensive government education programs do not work and there does not appear to be any hope that the current members of the political class know how to fix them or have the courage to fix them. Diane Ravitch of the LA Times was quoted in The Week article and she made some excellent points, namely that poor performing "teachers are only one of many factors that influence a student's education, including family support, the distractions that come with poverty, and student motivation." Thus, as Ms. Ravitch astutely observed, the political class again has not identified and quantified the root causes for failing education in this country. As with the health care fiasco, by not understanding what is causing bad public schooling, the root causes, the chances of curing the problem is nothing better than a shot in the dark.

This not understanding the problem comes back to Step 27 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" which proposes that an expert panel of education experts from various fields be convened to come up with fact based, root caused analyzed solutions. Twenty eight years after a government commission identified the problems and the causes of poor public education and forty five years or so after Head Start began, we are no closer to solving education shortcomings in this country using the politicians' approach. Maybe we should try something different. Waiting until 2020 (best case) and wishfully spending tens of billions of dollars in the hope the political class will some how get it right is way too risky.



Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.