So, what have we learned from the May Day general strike? We learned that there are a whole lot of immigrants–here legally or not–who can take a day off from work or school to attend a rally calling for equal treatment. (Such as, say, freedom of speech or association….) I learned (via a live broadcast on Dan Yorke’s show) that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan sent a representative who talked about the the Bush Administration’s “terrorism” of immigrants. (Soak in that irony for a bit…) And I learned a whole lot more about the history of the general strike and of the true motivations of those behind it. Finally, I’ve concluded that any distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigrant seems to have been lost.
[Open full post]Do I agree with the President’s guest worker visa program? Yes. Do I favor allowing more immigrants into this country? Again, yes. I believe we’re all immigrants unless we’re Native American, and that would only count for 1/16th of me and about 1/8th of my wife. Probably less for many millions of Americans.
However, proponents of today’s “strike,” as it were, fail to realize that illegal is illegal. I support a “path to citizenship” as much as anyone, but we cannot forget the fact that numerous people are in this country illegally — to the profit of American businesses or not. The question is not whether these people are contributing to the economy (more than they are draining tax dollars elsewhere), but whether they are morally justified in staying here and/or claiming they have “rights” to be here.
If I were in France illegally, what right would I have to claim that the French government should give me a “path to citizenship?” None. Surely, I could ask and probably would be given the details of the 5 Step Program to Citizenship, if such a one exists. But it would be egregiously arrogant and even more presumptuous of me to assume that, just because I and a few other million or so people like me went to France, and continued there illegally, we deserve to be given a path to citizenship.
I’d be much more comfortable with protests such as today’s and earlier ventures if the dialogue were different. Rather than demanding equal treatment, be humble enough to admit that you are here illegally. The country isn’t about to ship out 11–15 million people, nor is this President deaf to the needs of the immigrant community. I think that most undocumented people do understand their precarious position, but that left-wing ideologues are pushing an agenda seeking to de-Amerify America by trying to equate illegal immigration with a human rights issue.
I’m sorry, but that just falls flat against the reality. Yes, we do need create better and more effective pathways to citizenship/legal immigration. But we cannot ignore the fact that illegal immigration occurs and can be used as an effective tool to harbor those coming to the United States not just for the American Dream. If we ignore this in order to oblige “rights” activists, those same activists will be nowhere to be found when the effects of our actions lead to devastating results.
Common sense dictates that we do otherwise, and whether you support today’s protests or not, if you have the ear of a “rights” activist ask him or her this question: Does it matter that these immigrants are here illegally?
An Ian Donnis article in this week’s Providence Phoenix discusses the troubled-looking future of the Providence Public Library…
Almost two years after the [Providence Public Library] set off a public furor by axing 21 jobs and reducing hours at the downtown Central Library, a far more sweeping proposed reduction — to shut six of 10 library branches and cut staff to make up for a $900,000 deficit — has ignited another impassioned response.Might Providence be willing to consider an innovative way to save its library system? Sunday’s Boston Globe had an article on a new concept for public libraries being tried in London. The concept is that of the “idea store”…
Broadly speaking, Idea Stores are not actually stores-that is to say, the books are still free, and so is the Internet access. But these 21st-century libraries do take a retail approach to aspects of design, promotion, and even financing. Patrons won’t find librarians at an Idea Store, but rather ”idea supervisors,” who wear uniforms of black polo shirts, as do their staff…Yes, the name is gimmicky. And I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest that the PPL should immediately embrace the entirety of the idea store concept. (And I don’t think that the steel-and-glass Borg cube pictured in the Globe article would be a good fit for Providence. I suspect I can find at least one Projo architecture columnist who will agree with me on this). Still, in small doses, the idea store idea might be relevant to the problem of refurbishing the Providence library system.
And if the wide aisles, cheerful banners, and in-store cafes remind visitors of a British supermarket franchise, all the better, since all seven of the planned Idea Stores will be situated next to-or, in a couple of cases, inside-major shopping centers for the convenience of the busy patron. Wall-mounted flatscreens advertise aromatherapy workshops at the brand-new Idea Store in Canary Wharf, which is nestled in a massive mall complex…
The juxtaposition is apt, because in terms of funding, the Idea Stores aren’t quite as public as the libraries they’re replacing. The money comes from a combination of local council funds, national lottery money, charitable donations, proceeds from the sale of former library buildings, and corporate partners such as Sainsbury’s and Lloyds of London. According to Wills, ”Government funding will not become a thing of the past, but we are confident that we can increase the proportion of funding from nongovernment sources.”
At a traditional library, much of the physical infrastructure exists to house the stacks. But if a multi-library system makes a commitment to circulating materials from the main collection via “innovative delivery methods” (a phrase used in the Phoenix article), then there is no need to use the branches as storage. The system can focus its energies on building a single, comprehensive collection of books and less-popular periodicals that are circulated through the branches. The exception to this is the children’s section; a children’s section should still be maintained at each branch to encourage children and their parents to visit the library.
Freed from the requirement of having to store a large physical volume of books, the branches can either move to smaller, easier-to-maintain locations, or they can convert the freed-up space at existing locations into community, meeting, and electronic access facilities. The non-traditional idea store concepts can be explored in the new community spaces, while a traditional library governing structure remains in place to manage circulation, reference, and the buying of books and periodicals.
The libraries should implement hours that are consistent across the system and from day-to-day. When people can’t remember if today is the day that the library is open from 9-to-5 or 12-to-8, they are discouraged from dropping in. Finally, the system should increase the volume of on-site reference and electronic resources available at each branch and build a reputation as the place to go to find information that can’t be easily found anywhere else.
With an little innovative thinking, there is no reason that a public library can’t be a place as vibrant as a Starbuck’s or a Borders Cafe.
(One other periphal note, addressed to the Phoenix’s online editors: could you please do something on your re-designed web page that makes current Providence news stories easier to find). [Open full post]
Back in February, the Projo editorial page dubbed Senator Lincoln Chafee “Senator Lincoln Hamlet” for taking too long to make up his mind on which way he would vote on the nomination of Samuel Alito to the United States Supreme Court. (The Senator disputes the notion that he took an inordinate amount of time to make his decision).
Now, the time has come for Rhode Island to pass the title of “Hamlet” to a new and rightful holder. According to Timothy C. Barmann in Saturday’s Projo, Senator Jack “Hamlet” Reed has been unable to decide whether he supports or opposes the development of alternative energy sources in Massachusetts…
Sen. Lincoln Chafee and Rep. James Langevin say they oppose a bill pending in Congress that would probably kill the Cape Wind offshore wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound.The article says that the Cape Wind project developers estimate that the wind farm could provide 3/4 of the electricity consumed by the Cape and the Islands. Despite the benefits, Senator and Congressman Kennedy, US Representative William Delahunt, and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney all want to use the power of government to crush innovation and keep the Cape dependent on non-renewable sources of energy.
Rep. Patrick Kennedy, however, supports the measure, his office said, and sides with his father, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, in opposing the Cape Wind project.
Sen. Jack Reed has not taken a position on the legislation or on the wind farm project itself, his office said.
Let’s hope when Senator Reed finally makes up his mind, he doesn’t join the opponents of alternative energy. [Open full post]
As America awaits the big May 1 protest parades, with their likely demands for an unconditional amnesty for illegal immigrants, it is worth noting that many protestors so far reject any requirement for assimilation to historical American principles. This is a non-trivial issue for which the trends in Europe offer a perspective on what the long-term price could be for the failure to educate Americans.
This concern was reinforced this week when my children’s school – a fine school that has been a wonderful place for them – sent out a survey asking parents to judge the quality of their efforts at multiculturalism and diversity. There was a section for comments and I wrote these words:
I find the entire subject of multiculturalism to be fraught with definitional problems.
I do not know anyone that would suggest learning about world history is anything but an invaluable experience for our children.
But multiculturalism frequently sets a relativistic tone that values feelings and self-esteem over a rigorous differentiation between truly unique cultural traditions. Look at the definition of it in this survey: “bringing together and celebrating of many distinctive cultures…” Are those who promote multiculturalism willing to teach the superiority of some traditions over others and be able to offer reasoned arguments why? My experience is usually not.
As one writer said: “The foremost idea of multiculturism is the equal value of all cultures, or cultural relativism…Inherent in the idea of cultural relativism is the idea that culture, race, ancestry or gender determines our ideas.”
Do we believe in reason and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong? Do we believe in and teach the uniqueness of the American tradition?
As [Mac Owens, a contributor to this blog site] said: “Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest – the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: “Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will.”…It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality…it is the idea of equality in the Declaration of Independence, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood.”
Are we teaching those principles to our kids? Are we teaching them what Roger Pilon said: “Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration’s seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Grounded in reason, “self-evident” truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a “higher law” of right and wrong from which to derive human law…It is not our political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system. But if reason is the foundation of the Founders’ vision, liberty is its aim…We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government…”
While we must be willing to acknowledge our failures to live up to the Founding standards, no other country in the history of the world was founded on such bold truths.
Are we teaching our children to be citizens capable of the self-government in the American tradition? Are we teaching them the uniqueness of the American tradition? Or, in the spirit of multiculturalism, do we treat our Founding as equivalent to others which can make no such claims? Are we teaching them about the killing fields in Cambodia, the gulags in the Soviet Union, the mass murders in the millions done by Mao, the gas chambers of Nazi Germany – all situations where a Nietzsche-like focus on power trumping all makes the only relevant issue be: who has the power to control?
And that does not even touch the frequently used but undefined phrase called “social justice.” Michael Novak paraphrased Nobel Laureate Friederich Hayek in these words: “…whole books have been written about social justice without ever offering a definition of it..The vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, “We need a law against that.” In other words, it becomes an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion.”
So let us teach our children to be colorblind in the way Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke, where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But let’s not let multiculturalism dumb it all down where there are no standards of excellence or truth discoverable by some combination of reason or faith.
What is the significance of these issues? What does it suggest could be our future? In the May 2006 edition of Commentary Magazine, George Weigel offers a view as he writes about Europe’s Two Culture Wars.
[Open full post]…Earlier this year, five days short of the second anniversary of the Madrid bombings, the Zapatero government, which had already legalized marriage between and adoption by same-sex partners, and sought to restrict religious education in Spanish schools, announced that the words “father” and “mother” would no longer appear on Spanish birth certificates. Rather, according to the government’s official bulletin, “the expression ‘father’ will be replaced by ‘Progenitor A’ and ‘mother’ will be replaced by ‘Progenitor B.'”…
…For the events of the past two years in Spain are a microcosm of the two interrelated culture wars that beset Western Europe today.
The first of these wars…call[ed]…”Culture War A” – is a sharper form of the red state/blue state divide in America: a war between the post-modern forces of moral relativism and the defenders of traditional moral conviction. The second – “Culture War B” – is the struggle to define the nature of civil society, the meaning of tolerance and pluralism, and the limits of multiculturalism in an aging Europe whose below-replacement-level fertility rates have opened the door to rapidly growing and assertive Muslim populations.
The aggressors in Culture War A are radical secularists, motivated by what the legal scholar Joseph Weiler has dubbed “Christophobia.” They aim to eliminate vestiges of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture from a post-Christian European Union by demanding same-sex marriage in the name of equality, by restricting free speech in the name of civility, and by abrogating core aspects of religious freedom in the name of tolerance. The aggressors in Culture War B are radical and jihadist Muslims who detest the West, who are determined to impose Islamic taboos on Western societies by violent protest and other forms of coercion if necessary, and who see such operations as the first stage toward the Islamification of Europe…
The question Europe must face, but which much of Europe seems reluctant to face, is whether the aggressors in Culture War A have not made it exceptionally difficult for the forces of true tolerance and authentic civil society to prevail in Culture War B.
Western Europe’s descent into the languors of “depoliticization,” as some analysts have called it, once seemed a matter of welfare-state politics, socialist economics, and protectionist trade policy, flavored by irritating EU regulations…indeed there has been no let-up in Europe’s seeming determination to bind itself ever more tightly in the cords of bureaucratic regulation…
What does all this have to do with Culture War A? The plain fact is that even as Europe’s regulatory passions continue to bear deleterious economic consequences, they have also been sharpened to a harder ideological edge, not least where religion is concerned…
…Culture War A represents a determined effort on the part of secularists, using both national and EU regulatory machinery, to marginalize the public presence and impact of Europe’s dwindling numbers of practicing Christians…
Culture War A finds expression as well in efforts to coerce and impose behaviors deemed progressive, compassionate, non-judgmental, or politically correct in extreme feminist or multiculturalist terms. In recent years, this has typically taken the form of EU member-states legally regulating, and thus restricting, free speech…
…the most dramatic fact about the continent in the early 21st century: Europe is committing demographic suicide, and has been doing so for some time…
…Not a single EU member has a replacement-level fertility rate, i.e., the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population. Moreover, eleven EU countries – including Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and all three Baltic states – display “negative natural increase” (i.e., more annual deaths than births), a clear step down into a demographic death-spiral…
Over the next quarter-century, the number of workers in Europe will decline by 7 percent while the number of over-sixty-fives will increase by 50 percent, trends that will create intolerable fiscal difficulties for the welfare state across the continent. The resulting inter-generational strains will place great pressures on national politics…Demography is destiny, and Europe’s demographics of decline – which are unparalleled in human history absent wars, plagues, and natural catastrophes – are creating enormous and unavoidable problems.
Even more ominously, Europe’s demographic free-fall is the link between Culture War A and Culture War B.
History abhors vacuums, and the demographic vacuum created by Europe’s self-destructive fertility rates has, for several generations now, been filled by a large-scale immigration from throughout the Islamic world…
Far more has changed than the physical appearance of European metropolitan areas, though. There are dozens of “ungovernable” areas in France: Muslim-dominated suburbs, mainly, where the writ of French law does not run and into which French police do not go. Similar extraterritorial enclaves, in which sharia law is enforced by local Muslim clerics, can be found in other European countries. Moreover, as Bruce Bawer details in a new book, While Europe Slept, European authorities pay little or no attention to practices among their Muslim populations that range from the physically cruel (female circumcision) through the morally cruel (arranged and forced marriages) to the socially disruptive (remanding Muslim children back to radical madrasses in the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan for their primary and secondary education) and the illegal (“honor” killings in cases of adultery and rape – the rape victim being the one killed)…
Sixty years after the end of World War II, the European instinct for appeasement is alive and well. French public swimming pools have been segregated by sex because of Muslim protests. “Piglet” mugs have disappeared from certain British retailers after Muslim complaints that the A. A. Milne character was offensive to Islamic sensibilities. So have Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirls, which reminded some Muslims of Arabic script from the Koran. Bawer reports that the British Red Cross banished Christmas trees and nativity scenes from its charity stores for fear of offending Muslims. For similar reasons, the Dutch police in the wake of the van Gogh murder destroyed a piece of Amsterdam street art that proclaimed “Thou shalt not kill”; schoolchildren were forbidden to display Dutch flags on their backpacks because immigrants might think them “provocative.”…
These patterns of sedition and appeasement finally came to global attention earlier this year in the Danish-cartoon jihad…
The response from Europe, in the main, was to intensify appeasement…the EU’s justice minister, Franco Frattini, announced that the EU would establish a “media code” to encourage “prudence” – “prudence” being a synonym for “surrender”…
For all the blindness of the politicians who in the 1930’s attempted to appease totalitarian aggression, they at least thought that they were thereby preserving their way of life. Bruce Bawer…suggests that 21-st century Europe’s appeasement of Islamists amounts to a self-inflicted dhimmitude: in an attempt to slow the advance of a rising Islamist tide, many of Europe’s national and transnational political leaders are surrendering core aspects of sovereignty and turning Europe’s native populations into second- and third-class citizens in their own countries.
Bawer blames Europe’s appeasement mentality and its consequences on multiculturalist political correctness run amok, and there is surely something to that. For, in a nice piece of intellectual irony, European multiculturalism, based on postmodern theories of the alleged incoherence of knowledge (and thus the relativity of all truth claims), has itself become utterly incoherent, not to say self-contradictory…
[You have to read some of the examples cited throughout the article to fully appreciate how extreme things have become.]
Yet to blame “multi-culti” p.c. for Europe’s paralysis is to remain on the surface of things. Culture War A – the attempt to impose multiculturalism and “lifestyle” libertinism in Europe by limiting free speech, defining religious and moral conviction as bigotry, and using state power to enforce “inclusivity” and “sensitivity” – is a war over the very meaning of tolerance itself. What Bruce Bawer rightly deplores as out-of-control political correctness in Europe is rooted in a deeper malady: a rejection of the belief that human beings, however inadequately or incompletely, can grasp the truth of things – a belief that has, for almost two millennia, underwritten the European civilization that grew out of the interaction of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome.
Postmodern European high culture repudiates that belief. And because it can only conceive of “your truth” and “my truth” while determinedly rejecting any idea of “the truth,” it can only conceive of tolerance as indifference to differences – an indifference to be enforced by coercive state power, if necessary. The idea of tolerance as engaging differences within the bond of civility…is itself regarded as, well, intolerant. Those who would defend the true tolerance of orderly public argument about contending truth claims (which include religious and moral convictions) risk being driven, and in many cases are driven, from the European public square by being branded as “bigots.”
But the problem is deeper still. For one thing, however loudly European postmodernists may proclaim their devotion to the relativity of all truths, in practice this translates into something very different – namely, the deprecation of traditional Western truths, combined with a studied deference to non- or anti-Western ones. In the relativist mindset, it thus turns out, not all religious and moral conviction is bigotry that must be suppressed; only the Judeo-Christian variety is. In short, the moral relativism of Europe is often mere window-dressing for Western self-hatred…
In the latest report (available for a fee) of dishonest manipulation of reporting performance results required under No Child Left Behind, we get this report:
When the Associated Press reported last week that nearly two million mostly minority children “aren’t counted when it comes to meeting the law’s requirement that schools track how students of different races perform on standardized tests,” Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s response was something less than urgent concern.
“Is it too many? You bet,” said Ms. Spellings. “Are there things we need to do to batten down the hatches, make sure those kids are part of the system? You bet.” Other than that, Ms. Spelling didn’t have much to say about states’ rampant noncompliance with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act…
…Ms. Spellings…tenure has been marked by lax enforcement of NCLB. Last month we reported that parents and children in failing schools nationwide aren’t being notified of their school-choice transfer and tutoring options, even though notification is a requirement under NCLB. The news that Ms. Spellings is also letting states slide on even reporting the math and reading test scores of minorities is especially disturbing because accountability is the heart of the federal law.
NCLB makes allowances for schools that have racial groups too small to be statistically significant. But states have been abusing their freedom under the law to determine when a group is too small to count. And Washington is letting them get away with it. According to the AP, nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the Education Department “for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories.” Today about one in 14 test scores overall go uncounted. Minorities, whose test scores on average lag those of white students, are seven times as likely to have their test results ignored. That’s an odd way to enforce a law called No Child Left Behind.
“The point of these testing requirements is to put pressure on schools to close their achievement gaps by making those gaps more transparent,” says Michael Petrilli, who follows federal education policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “If you’re not going to enforce this, what are you going to enforce?”
Good question. We already know that schools would much rather report “average” scores, which let education bureaucrats hide the fact that large groups of mostly poor and minority students aren’t learning…
School board associations, state boards of education, teachers unions and others have been demanding one type of exemption or another since the law was passed in 2002. Under Ms. Spellings’s predecessor, Rod Paige, they were unable to make much progress. The current secretary, however, is herself a former associate executive director of the Texas Association of School Boards. We hope this history isn’t the reason that the public education blob is having much more success in weakening NCLB now that Ms. Spellings is in charge.
NCLB’s raison d’etre is to hold schools accountable for all of their students; otherwise, why not leave schools to be run by local officials, who pay most of the bills? In return for record amounts of new federal education spending, schools not only are required to test regularly, they are also required to disaggregate the data by race so that parents (and taxpayers) can see who’s learning and who isn’t.
That can’t happen if Bush Administration officials won’t enforce their own law…And it is hurting the system’s most vulnerable children.
This kind of behavior is not surprising. It occurs because the government-mandated monopoly called public education means educational bureaucrats, politicians, and teachers’ union pay no price for the failing status quo and, therefore, have no incentive to change their actions. It occurs because parents are not in charge of their childrens’ education, as would occur under school choice. It also occurs because No Child Left Behind – however noble its stated overall goals – is a structurally flawed law.
All of society is appropriately outraged when children are physically abused. What I find appalling is that the very people who claim to care so much about children in other areas are stone-cold silent about the failings of our public schools. Talk about tolerating abuse.
Andrew has written about state education aid to Rhode Island towns. He has also written how Mayor Cicilline of Providence thinks $188 million or $6,772/student is not enough state aid, aid largely paid for by the rest of us in the state to fund the ongoing non-performance of his city’s schools.
The Mayor’s brazen attitude is another example of how he is one major tax-eater. Why is he so certain he can get away with throwing a child-like tantrum and walking out of a meeting with the Governor – unless he was certain his demand for more state monies will be successful? Could it be he is counting on additional monies through a manipulation of the political system via the educational adequacy study being funded here in Rhode Island, as written about by Marc?
If you want to see where all of this could easily go in Rhode Island, consider this news story:
In Educating From the Bench: Judges order legislators to spend more on schools, and taxpayers see less in return, Jay Greene writes:
Spending on public schools nationwide has skyrocketed to $536 billion as of the 2004 school year, or more than $10,000 per pupil. That’s more than double per pupil what we spent three decades ago, adjusted for inflation–and more than we currently spend on national defense ($494 billion as of 2005). But the argument behind lawsuits in 45 states is that we don’t spend nearly enough on schools. Spending is so low, these litigants claim, that it is in violation of state constitutional provisions requiring an “adequate” education. And in almost half the states, the courts have agreed.
Arkansas is one such state, and its “adequacy” problem neatly illustrates the way courts have driven spending up and evidence out…Like courts in other states, Arkansas’s court ordered that outside consultants be hired to determine how much extra funding would be required for an adequate education.
A firm led by two education professors, Lawrence Picus and Allan Odden, was paid $350,000 to put a price tag on what would be considered adequate. In September 2003 Messrs. Picus and Odden completed their report, concluding that Arkansas needed to add $847.3 million to existing school budgets…bringing the total to $4 billion, or $9,000 per pupil…
…To determine adequate spending [Picus and Odden] rely on what they immodestly call the “evidence-based” approach. This involves selectively embracing educational practices that some research finds beneficial and costing those policies out. Their method does not address whether their favored reforms would really result in an adequate education or are in fact the most cost-effective…
But the most obvious sign the Picus and Odden report is not really evidence-based is its neglect of empirical examination of the overall relationship between school spending and student achievement. If spending more is the answer to inadequate education, it should be the case that schools that spend more per pupil, all else being equal, have higher student achievement.
As it turns out, they don’t. The vast majority of social science studies find no relationship between spending and student achievement…the fact that per pupil spending has doubled over the past three decades while student achievement has remained stagnant ought to give us a clue that simply spending more won’t fix schools. The shortcomings of schools are not generally attributable to the lack of resources, but to a lack of incentives to use resources effectively.
By declaring that spending had to increase, the court foreclosed consideration of this relevant evidence…If legislators did not increase spending by roughly what Messrs. Picus and Odden asserted, they would be held in violation of the court order.
Yet even this wasn’t enough. After the total amount provided to Arkansas schools increased by 25% in one year, the legislature slowed the pace of spending. For the 2005 school year…the minimum amount that school districts would receive for operating expenses…was left unchanged at $5,400. The plaintiff attorneys argued before the state high court that spending had to at least match inflation.
The court agreed and ordered the governor to call the Legislature in special session to remedy the situation. Legislators met in early April and in less than a week increased spending again. They were so eager to placate the court that they gave schools more for the current school year, even though it could hardly do any good with only a month remaining. They also increased spending without knowing how the last round of additional money was being used or whether it had any effect. Messrs. Picus and Odden were retained for another $450,000 to provide this information, but their report is not expected until August…
One legislative leader attempted to justify their haste by declaring, “Lack of information does not justify legislative procrastination.” Doesn’t it?…Unspent reserves as of October 2005 were $1.1 billion, more than 25% of the total budget. That is, schools can’t even spend the additional money fast enough as the court orders more.
In Arkansas, as in too many other states, elected leaders have ceded control over the size of education budgets to unaccountable courts…As long as this continues, expect to spend more on education and see less in return.
Unsatiated tax-eaters, enabled by an engorged public sector which faces no constraints on its appetite for wasting your hard-earned monies. Will this be our future here in Rhode Island? What are you doing to change outcomes in your community?
[Open full post]A dueling round of political ads has appeared on the Rhode Island airwaves. The Chafee campaign’s new TV ad can be seen here. The advertisement names “environmental cleanups paid for by polluters and not taxpayers”, “ending deficits with a strict pay-as-you-go plan”, being “named the most fiscally responsible Senator in the nation” (presumably by the Concord Coalition), and an endorsement “by the US Chamber of Commerce for his pro-growth agenda” as reasons to re-elect Senator Chafee.
The Club for Growth is also running an ad, which can be seen here. Citing three specific Senate votes (vote #170 from 2001, vote #196 from 2003, and vote #130 from 2004), the CfG ad says that $1,300,000,000,000 is “how much higher taxes would be if Lincoln Chafee had his way”. The ad also claims that Senator Chafee “pushed for $48,000,000,000 dollars in wasteful spending”, providing a reference to spending data from the National Taxpayers Union.
As noted below, Senator Chafee has made a recent stand against pork spending. The Senator voted to rescind some questionable appropriations attached to the Defense, Global War on Terror, and Hurricane Recovery Supplemental Appropriations Bill, displaying a fiscal conservatism that extends beyond mere deficit hawkishness (to understand the difference between true fiscal conservatism and mere deficit hawkishness, click here). Senator Chafee has also signed a letter to the President sent by 35 Republican Senators pledging to sustain a veto on the supplemental spending bill if the total amount appropriated exceeds what was requested by President Bush…
We are seriously concerned with the overall funding level in the Senate-reported bill, and the numerous items that are unrelated to the Global War on Terror or emergency hurricane relief needs. Should the final bill presented to you exceed the total amount you requested, forcing you to veto the bill, we will vote to sustain your veto.These actions show a positive evolution in the Senator’s position towards pork spending. Last October, Senator Chafee told the Projo that pork was not an important issue (h/t Patrick Casey)…
The day may come where all of us are going to say we are not going to add any more earmarks onto appropriations bills,” Chafee said. “In the meantime, there are many worthwhile projects and in the grand scheme of things, it is not a significant part of the budget.”And the Laffey campaign has wasted no time in pointing out some of Senator Chafee’s pork-friendly votes from the past, including his vote in support of the infamous bridge-to-nowhere…
Senator Chafee also has a long track record of voting for outrageous pork projects including $223 million for Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” (Senate Roll Call Vote #262) (10-20-05), $98 million for an animal disease center in Iowa (Senate Roll Call Vote #118) (04-03-03), and $1.85 million for Cornell University’s viticulture consortium (Senate Roll Call Vote #215) (11-20-04).Viticulture, for those unfamiliar with the term (like I was until I looked it up on dictionary.com) is the cultivation of grapes. [Open full post]
Senator Tom Coburn has identified 19 items (see the table below) that he believes to be wasteful pork spending in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Hurricane Recovery bill currently being debated in the United States Senate . The Senator has introduced amendments that would rescind the 19 items.
Determining if a spending earmark is truly pork generally requires a more complete project description than is provided in the text of legislation. For instance, the first of Senator Coburn’s proposed rescissions would have cut funds earmarked for the relocation of a rail line in Mississippi. Superficially, this sounds as if it could be a reasonable Katrina cleanup project. However, according to the Washington Post, the $700,000,000 is being appropriated to relocate a railway that has already been rebuilt with Federal dollars within the past year…
Mississippi’s two U.S. senators included $700 million in an emergency war spending bill to relocate a Gulf Coast rail line that has already been rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina at a cost of at least $250 million.
Republican Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who have the backing of their state’s economic development agencies and tourism industry, say the CSX freight line must be moved to save it from the next hurricane and to protect Mississippi’s growing coastal population from rail accidents. But critics of the measure call it a gift to coastal developers and the casino industry that would be paid for with money carved out of tight Katrina relief funds and piggybacked onto funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Senate has already voted to “table” the amendment that would have eliminated this project, i.e. the $700,000,000 appropriation remains in the bill. A vote to table the second Coburn amendment, rescinding $15,000,000 allocated for “seafood promotion strategies”, did not pass. The Senate could still vote to eliminate this earmark.
Senator Lincoln Chafee voted with the porkbusting side in both cases, voting against tabling either amendment. Senator Jack Reed voted to allow a vote on rescinding the railway spending, but to preserve the seafood promotion spending.
The toughest vote for the New England delegation will be the vote on $20,000,000 earmarked for assisting New England coastal communities that were impacted by a red tide outbreak (item 13).
| I | Rail Line Relocation Capital Grant program (Federal Railroad Administration) | $700,000,000 |
| II | Implement seafood promotion strategies (National Marine Fisheries Service) | $15,000,000 |
On Wednesday, the US Senate approved $1,900,000,000 in increased funding for border security (breakdown here). Two versions of the bill were proposed. One bill offset the new spending with a 2.8% cut from the Defense Department’s supplemental appropriation, the other bill provided no offset. Senator Lincoln Chafee voted for the additional funding and the offsetting cut. Senator Jack Reed voted for additional funding, but no offsetting spending cut. Apparently, the Senate is aware of the polls showing that an overwhelming majority of the public believe that improving America’s border security is a national priority.
Wedensday’s votes were not on the “comprehensive” immigration bill that includes amnesty and guest worker programs as well as further border security enhancements; that bill is still before the Senate. At National Review Online, Senator Bill Frist’s view of the comprehensive legislation is available here, Senator Jeff Sessions’ less favorable view is available here.
There is a point-of-fact discrepancy between the articles by the two Senators. Senator Frist claims the current immigration bill before the Senate (the Hagel-Martinez compromise) would require immigrants who had been in the US for less than two years to return to their home country before entering a guest worker program. Senator Sessions says that the current legislation would not require immigrants here for less than two years to leave. It would be nice to know who’s right.
Also in National Review Online, Newt Gingrich proposes a four-point plan for immigration reform…
First, control the borders with decisive legislation aggressively implemented with tight deadlines. Once we have stopped the illegal flow of people we will have demonstrated the seriousness necessary to gain both the credibility and the leverage needed to implement the next steps. Fortunately, a bipartisan consensus has emerged that securing the borders is indeed priority number one. Three national leaders have it right in their shared view that border control is the first step. Senator Frist is exactly right when he wrote recently that “to build confidence among Americans and Congress that the government takes border security seriously, we have to act to help get the border under control right now.” Senator Clinton is also right when she recently recognized the need for a “smart fence” along the border to enhance security. And Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is also correct when he said last week that “the first thing we want is tough border control.”
It’s pretty clear now that some version of point 1, beyond what is provided for in the supplemental defense appropriation, is going to pass. If not, someone is going to pay dearly at the polls in November. Here are Gingrich’s points 2 through 4…
Second, establish patriotic integration and the primacy of English (English first, not English only) combined with a requirement that Americans can only vote in American elections and applicants for citizenship have to select where their loyalty is.
Third, establish real enforcement against unlawful employment by employers and especially against employers who are breaking both immigration and taxation laws. Make clear that the dishonest hiring and tax evasion of the last two decades are over and there will be expensive penalties for people who break American immigration law. Insist that cities enforce the law or lose their federal funding. All this can be done with the right incentives and without rounding up anyone.
Fourth, establish an outsourced worker visa program with a biometric identity card, a background check, and a 24/7 computerized real time verification capability so no business can claim ignorance. Permit businesses to send workers home to apply for their worker visa as a deductible business expense. Eliminate the fly-by-night subcontractor shams that are clearly set up to evade the law. Maximize the opportunity and the incentives for people who are here to return home and become legal.
It is not clear if the organizers of the immigration demonstrations planned for next week are interested in any of these aspects of an immigration policy, or if they are interested solely in establishing as broad an amnesty program as possible.
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