Soaking the rich, distributism, no child left behind Mail 688 20110815

Mail 688 Monday, August 15, 2011

· Regulations

· Letter From England

· No Child Left Behind and the testing quandry

In View I asked if anyone in Washington took the situation seriously. I have some mail.

Job-Killing Regulations

Jerry,

What are these “Job-Killing Regulations” you and the “Party of No” keep harping about? Why can’t you or someone enumerate and expound on these “Job-Killing Regulations” instead of just spitting out the words?

Consumers create jobs. We need more consumers.

Who (in his right mind) is going to hire more workers if they can’t sell all the products they are producing with the workers they already have on the payroll? It isn’t a lack of regulations that creates jobs, it is an empty warehouse at the factory that creates jobs. If the product is selling so fast that the warehouse is staying empty and there are back-orders on the books, the powers-that-be at the factory are going to put on more workers, regulations or no. Profit is king.

And read the Warren Buffett Op Ed piece in the August 14 NYT. Lo and behold! Taxing the rich doesn’t kill jobs, either! He even uses numbers.

Bruce

So clearly we don’t have a problem. The environmental regulations don’t have an effect or if they do it is not much; national minimum wages applying everywhere and under every condition are a good way to manage things; naming alcoholism a disability and requiring employers to keep drunks on the job are not an undue burden; none of this needs examining. All’s well, and Warren Buffet thinks taxes aren’t too high. And no one can enumerate just what regulations are harmful. It’s all just spewing out words.

Well, a day. Perhaps I have been mistaken, and am just spewing out words, and there are no problems.

Taxing the Rich

Jerry,

You’ll forgive me if I put just a tad more credence to Warren Buffett’s opinion of taxing the rich than to yours.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_WARREN_BUFFETT_TAXES?SITE=ORAST&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Bruce

I have no great objection to decreasing the large gap between rich and poor, but I do have an objection to raising government revenue by soaking the rich. If you want to make a case for distributism, in which enormous fortunes are confiscated and distributed evenly among the population, I will listen, and even find you some favorable arguments for having a smaller gap between rich and poor: but I will continue to object to having a larger percentage of the GNP go to government. It is the size and power of government that concerns me as much as anything else. I do not want to feed the beast.

More, I do not want to encourage entitlements; I do not think a Republic can survive when those who pay little or no tax determine the size of government and the entitlements to the citizens. I do not want to encourage a society in which all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins – or for his dinner, for that matter.

I don’t even object to the dole and the creation of a social class that does not work and does not intend to work, which is entirely subsidized by those who do produce – so long as that class forfeits its political control. You will argue that if that happens, those who control the government will not give enough to the non-producers; that only the entitled can determine how much they are entitled to. The counter argument is that only those paying the taxes should be represented when it comes to fixing the taxes; that there needs to be a minimum tax paid before you get to vote on just what the taxpayers will give you.

Buffett may well know better than me what taxes he can pay and what taxes his peers can pay and still sustain a large economy; I do not think he is better acquainted with political philosophy and history than I am (and certainly not more so than the Framers of the Constitution of 1787).

The exponential growth of government, financed by exponential growth of debt, is pretty well unprecedented in American history. The exponential growth of rewards for the nomenclatura – the new ruling classes – is not unprecedented in history although it is unprecedented in American history. None of this will much affect Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, nor indeed will it have great effects on those who earn tens of millions of dollars a year. Neither Gates nor Buffett (nor Rush Limbaugh for that matter) would experience all that much change in their lives if they were despoiled of half of their wealth, or 90% of it for that matter. Would the nation be better off if there were no billionaires? The case can be argued; but simply taking their money (a one time bonanza for government) would not solve our debt problems, and using it to increase those entitled to even more, to grow the number of government employees, raise their pay, raise their benefits, raise their pensions is not really likely to make this a better country.

“I am Covetousness, begotten of an old churl in a leather bag.” What is beyond the dreams of avarice? Nothing, actually. The habit of ameliorating your crises by despoiling the wealthy – begin with the idle rich – is indeed a habit. And next it leads to despoiling the productive to benefit the non-productive. Raising taxes feeds a beast that never relents.

We already have about as many who pay no income tax as those who do. We have not yet reached the point where a majority actually receive money through the so-called earned income adjustments, but we are headed there. At some point the spending has to stop. The “balanced” approach in which the spending continues to rise (perhaps just not so fast as before) while taxes rise and size of government increases has been tried and fails. Raising taxes, whether on rich or poor, will only result in more exponential growth of government.

Taxing the Rich

I like this one even better:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html?_r=1&hpw

Bruce

Perhaps the remedy would be a house of lords: a group of the super rich who would have sole charge of spending the money taken from them by Congress. It would seem the goal is to eliminate some of their advantages. I don’t mind that so much – I am familiar with Chesterton and Belloc – but I very much mind simply handing the money to be spent by the political machines. I would rather see Bill Gates spend money on education than the Federal Department of Education.

In the Athenian Republic the wealthy were encouraged to donate ships to the Navy (you could even command one if you gave enough money to outfit it and hire the crew), donate cavalry units to the Army, build public buildings — If you can show how to despoil the rich and see that the money taken from them does not simply end up as loot to strengthen the temptations to the covetousness of the looters, I am sure many will listen. But simply throwing more money into the maw of government does not seem a productive way to proceed. I’d rather see Buffett invest the money than simply hand it over to the SEIU.

Incidentally, do not take this as my acquiescence in the Belloc-Chesterton Catholic distributism. They have a case, and on purely political grounds the case for having some limits on the power and wealth of the super rich can be made strongly. But there is a strong economic case against it, and an even stronger one against encouraging covetousness. Taking the money from the rich has one set of consequences; what one does with it is even more critical. Simply voting to send an armed tax collector to grab someone else’s money to distribute it to the voters has been the ruin of many societies. Adams said there never was a democracy that didn’t commit suicide. Despoiling the idle rich, then the rich, then the productive, all to the benefit of the voters, is a common path to self destruction.

I can recommend to your attention the case against distributism, http://mises.org/daily/1062.

On economic policy

Jerry, My understanding is that our tax revenues as a fraction of GDP are relatively low at present, at least in terms of post-FDR days: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/are-taxes-in-the-u-s-high-or-low/

I understand that this is in part due to the recession and the significant and expiring reduction in tax rates that were enacted as part of the 2009 stimulus, but it is not unreasonable to say that the low tax rates at present have quite a bit to do with the deficits the nation’s running. The President apparently offered to put some real entitlement cuts on the table during the debt ceiling negotiations, much to the fury of liberals: http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/07/19/obama-wants-to-cut-medicare-and-social-security-benefits/ but was rebuffed due to the Tea Party caucus’ unwillingness to countenance any tax revenue increases.

I’m with you on putting the bunny inspectors (and the TSA!) out of work, but that’s a very small part of the budget. Entitlements are where the real action is, and Obama apparently was serious enough about them to put some money on the table, as it were. It was apparently the Tea Party which decided the crisis was indeed worth wasting, which is a pity.

If Rick Perry wins office next year and the Republicans manage to hold onto the House while taking the Senate, they will have every opportunity to explain to the public just what they are going to cut. I expect the Democrats will be more than happy to follow the Tea Party caucus’ example and let the Republicans hang for it.

That certainly would not be adult leadership, but I haven’t seen much as I’d like from the Republicans presently in Congress either.

Ours is a two party system, it would be nice if our representatives acted like it.

Best, Jon Jonathan Abbey

Your view of what the President offered is not the one given me by some of the participants, but perhaps they were mistaken. No cuts have been offered; not actual cuts. What was offered was a slower growth rate. Real cuts, and elimination of programs, was not offered.

But in any event, to my thinking, increasing government revenue is itself the wrong course of action. Is there any indication that if they had more money to spend they would spend it wisely? That taking money from those who make more than $250,000 a year (which does not include me) would cause that money to be spent in more productive ways? That hiring another GS 9 would do us more good than leaving an inhabitant of Indian Hills the money to hire a housekeeper and another under-gardener, or take his wife on a trip to – well, I was going to say Acapulco, but given the unrest there I suppose they would choose somewhere else. Perhaps we ought to restrict the rich to vacations in the US so they’ll spend their money here?

Indeed, I would rather see more “frivolous” things made deductible, particularly if those frivolities took place in the US and involved US made products, than see government income rise. Encourage the rich to spend the money: make them spend it or else; I can see some sense in that. I do not think we are better off if we despoil Mr. Buffett to pay more cubicle workers and lower the age at which government workers can collect pensions.

As to the Bunny Inspectors, when I see a serious proposal to cut that program I will pay more attention to the “cuts”; but the fact is that a society that can’t even eliminate spending on the absurd will not eliminate much else.

Stop feeding the beast.

Letter from England

Although the stock market is currently signalling its concern over the likelihood of a double-dip recession, the private sectors in America and the UK seem to be recovering from 2008. The massive unemployment is in the public sector, which is about half the economy in the UK. That pain has led to rioting in England, initially triggered by resentment about police tactics. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tottenham_riots>

What caused the riots and what should be done about them? A debate: UK police opinion: <http://tinyurl.com/3hlnlxo> <http://tinyurl.com/4x4obhh> <http://tinyurl.com/448yea4> US police opinion: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/13/bill-bratton-advice-uk-police> Tory opinion: <http://tinyurl.com/3np2jar> <http://tinyurl.com/3upngok> Other opinion: <http://tinyurl.com/3lkedjj> <http://tinyurl.com/3ox7ntn> <http://tinyurl.com/438sqjl> <http://tinyurl.com/3hr69js> <http://tinyurl.com/3kxevkl> <http://tinyurl.com/4ypjvzb> <http://tinyurl.com/44anhg3>

A shortage of engineers in the UK <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14521890>.

Problems with disability assessment in the UK: <http://tinyurl.com/3zmtuu9>

NHS cutbacks hit: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/12/nhs-accident-emergency-waiting-times>

Competition for university places: <http://tinyurl.com/4xuk3h3> Student debt to double: <http://tinyurl.com/3ea6usz> <http://tinyurl.com/3eh4c4n>

You may enjoy this: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/13/monty-python-life-brian-bbc>

My take on English politics is similar to the driver’s comment in Ustinov’s Gran Prix of Gibraltar: "I think none of us has much of a chance". The Tories are a bunch of amateurs; the Lib-Dems have committed suicide; and Labour is committed to making things worse.

—

"We do not understand how a country,… can produce people who seem to be acting without thinking, let alone making serious efforts to investigate the consequences of their actions." (Mary Evans in the Times Higher Education)

Harry Erwin

And actually all is well in this best of all possible worlds where the regulations all work, and we have no real problems. It’s all illusion. It certainly seems so to those with tenure and pension.

No Child Left Behind

NCLB musinbgs

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

The recent comments by Mike Schmidt concerning Soviet math education are identical to those found in China as recounted in the book “Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series)” by Liping Ma.

I have enjoyed your many columns on education, NCLB, etc. and I have a few comments to add. Your readers may not be familiar with the test, its scoring and its application. I have experience with both Texas and New Mexico NCLB testing.

To begin, the tests are trivially easy. For example, the formulas for calculating areas, volumes, etc. is printed in the test booklet! No need to remember that the area of a circle is the pi * the radius squared. As another example, it is possible to pass (and in fact, to excel) on the Social Studies test by consistently answering the question in the most "politically-correct" manner.

If this was not bad enough, the "cut score" which determines the proficient/not-proficient breakpoint is determined by the state AFTER the test is graded. Thus, the state can arbitrarily set the value at anything it desires.

Lest you think the "cut-score" is set too high you should know that a few years ago in Texas the cut-scores were in the low- to mid- 50% range.

To make matters worse, the Spanish language test has "cut-scores" set independently of the English-language tests. In Texas, the cut-score for Spanish-language exams averages 5 to 10 percentage points less than their English counterpart. Supposedly for the same test. I suspect most parents would assume that the "passing" score on the NCLB exams is perhaps 70%. They would be wrong.

States can take advantage of this by setting their cut-scores very low and having most of their students then meet annual yearly progress (AYP) goals. Mississippi is notorious for this. If you compare Missisippi NCLB-scored proficiencies with the proficiency scores for the nationwide National Assessment for Educational Progress you find a massive discrepancy in proficiency. States that do not practice this cut-score legerdemain show comparable NCLB and NAEP proficiencies (Massachusetts, for example).

From the school’s perspective AYP is virtually unobtainable because of one little testing requirement. All subgroups in the school (containing at least 15 or so students) must meet AYP for the school to meet AYP. For most groups, this is not a problem. Asians, Whites, Hispanics, Blacks, Low-income are all potentially capable of making AYP. One group however will never make such progress and that is the developmentally disabled.

It is not uncommon to have a dozen or so mainstreamed developmentally disabled students in a school. I am not talking about high-performing autistic students or mildly mentally deficient. No, I am talking about sixth-grade students who require a constant caretaker companion and who read (if at all) at the first grade level. Many have been mainstreamed from institutional care. The dirty little secret of school principals is that to make AYP, you must make sure that your school has fewer than the minimum number of students in any AYP-problematic category. Principals routinely use their power in the district to transfer such students to other schools prior to testing.

I am familiar with perhaps several hundred schools; I know of none that achieved AYP on scores alone with a full demographic of developmentally disabled students.

It is possible to make AYP through various exemptions,loopholes, etc. without actually having your scores improve. This fact is never mentioned in the district press releases.

Here in the borderlands, an additional problem arises with illegal immigrant children. A not uncommon scene in my hometown is to see a car with Mexican license plates dropping off a student at a local elementary school. The car will often feature bumper stickers for the local Mexican political arty and a "My Child is an Honor Student at …" where the school is an American elementary school.

At one Texas border school, I was asked to estimate the number of immigrant students. Using telephone numbers provided by the students, I found that 40% were invalid. Now some of these numbers might have been legitimately unavailable but I estimated that roughly 1/3 of their student population was cross-border. Remember, the Supreme Court has ruled that schools cannot enquire of the immigration status of their students.

Such cross-border populations wreak havoc with NCLB testing. Above a certain grade, all NCLB tests are given in English only. A large number of English language limited students will destroy any chance of meeting AYP.

At the classroom level, the teacher is caught between the rock of meeting NCLB standards and the hard place of inadequate teaching methods.

The current pedagogical methods in elementary school, in the vernacular, suck!

The math curriculum is seriously deficient and fails in almost all ways imaginable (see http://www.kathematicallycorrect.com) for a damning critique of current math curricula. Most parents assume that math is math and their children are being taught the same,things they learned — the multiplication table, the rules of arithmetic, etc. As you can see from the web critique nothing could be further from the truth.

Language and literature fares no better. Whole language instruction does not teach phonics, encourages guessing at words, down not teach spelling, do not roots and parts of words, etc.

If the methods were not bad enough (and they are truly atrocious), teachers are reminded that they will be judged and graded on the "fidelity to the method" (exact quote. To me, the word fidelity implies a cultish rather than a pedagogical imperative.

Experienced teachers get around these restrictions in the manner of Jack Black in School of Rock. They are,able to reposition the classroom and students to bamboozle the principal when she visits. Not surprisingly, their students routinely do better on the NCLB exams.

Less experienced teachers slavishly teach the poor methods and are surprised when their students fail to meet the meager NCLB cut-scores.

Students are further short changed by the NCLB emphasis. My wife is a music teacher (30+ years experience K – college level) and she occasionally has her students work on a writing assignment. Perhaps a report on a performance they have seen, or a thank you letter to a visiting music group.

Invariably, she is asked two questions. How many sentences? and How many words is a sentence?

The students have been so brainwashed that they view composition as solely filling out the minimum for the exam booklet.,They seem genuinely surprised that a paragraph is designed to hold one topic and can vary from a single word to a multiple-page Joycean exposition. Likewise, sentences.

Finally, the scoring and criteria for AYP can lead to perverse outcomes. Let’s imagine two teachers, Mrs. Bad Teacher and Ms. Good Teacher. Both teach the same grade and both have 30 students in their classes. Let’s further assume that this year the cut-score is 54% and the AYP goal for the school is 70% proficient. For these teachers that means to meet AYP goals they need to have 21 students (70% of 30) achieve a test score of 55.

Mrs. Bad Teacher’s results

9 students scored a zero

21 students scored a 55%

MEETS AYP

Ms. Good Teacher results

10 students scored a 53%

20 students scored a 100%

DOES NOT MEET AYP

Any evaluation tool that can lead to such perverse outcomes is seriously deficient.

One consequence of this scoring dilemma is that teachers and schools rationally focus only on the muddled middle. Students with low scores cannot likely be improved enough to pass the cut-score point. Students above the cut-score gain nothing for the school by improving their scores (in the example above a 54% and a 100% score are equally "proficient").

Thus, teachers devote all of their effort in an attempt to raise scores from the mid-40s to the mid-50s. Needless to say, this lowered expectations approach is not training many future scientists or engineers!

Terry A. Ward

I do not believe that we can devise a national test that makes sense. In a sense we already have them for those entering universities; for the rest, I do not think anything can be done. I have no idea what is the best education system: I can say that allowing local control allows real diversities. Some will be abysmal, but some might be excellent; I do not think that our system before federalization was everywhere worse than it is now, nor that the worst now were more horrid than the worst then or vice versa. The search for a national system with the consequent loss of local control does not seem to me a way out of the problem.

Late at night while you’re sleeping

There’s a drill sergeant creeping

all around…

<.>

The Kaibiles, the ruthless U.S.-trained Guatemalan state militia infamous for their role in killing civilians during Guatemala’s civil war, are being recruited in large numbers to violent Mexican drug gangs. Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel is paying large sums to a multitude of Kaibiles forces to pass on the training they received from the United States military.

</>

http://news.antiwar.com/2011/08/15/us-trained-guatemalan-forces-tied-with-drug-gangs/

Men at War cadence:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM22zUmithg

A classic (Blood on the Risers):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWgsdexkv18&feature=related

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Competent Empire creates auxiliaries and puppet kings, and keeps control of them with the Legions. The United States has never been very good at that game.