Wednesday: Learn about alternatives to No Child Left Behind. Cato Institute scholars Neal McCluskey and Andrew Coulson are joined by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) for a discussion on Capitol Hill.

Wednesday: Explore the nexus between the world of the academy and the world of policymaking with Prof. Henry Nau and the Mercatus Center.

Wednesday: Find out how to rebuild and protect America’s infrastructure. The Center for the American Experiment hosts Robert Poole.

Thursday: Get John Bolton’s take on whether the United Nations is good for freedom. The former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations delivers a Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at The Heritage Foundation.

Friday: Examine whether reports of the Social Security trustees are too bleak. The American Enterprise Institute hosts a panel looking at the challenge of getting a true reading of Social Security’s long-term sustainability.

A bad tax. Santa Fe has joined the growing list of jurisdictions seeking to solve its fiscal woes with taxes that target unpopular items or groups. In Santa Fe’s case, the target is unhealthy food. Gerald Prante of the Tax Foundation identifies numerous problems with this idea, not the least of which is basic fairness: “Tax neutrality and fairness demand that people be taxed equally. Broad-based taxes adhere much more to this principle than a tax on a select group of items. Now if soda or snacks were dangerously unhealthy, the government might ban them. But in a free society that prizes individual liberty, why should the government tell adults what to eat or drink among safe products? Is it fair to force healthy people with good diets to pay more for a dessert or snack because other people eat excessively or don't exercise?”

Maybe Justice needs to have its own meetings now and then. The United States Department of Justice is cosponsoring a convention held by the Islamic Society of North America. But, as reported by the Washington Times, lawyers within the Department of Justice are objecting to the sponsorship because the Islamic Society of North America is an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist financing case.

Consolidation v. school choice. Maine has had a school choice program since long before school choice became a hot button political issue. But the long history of Maine’s Town Tuitioning program—in which residents of towns that do not provide a public school may send their children to the public or private school of their choice at taxpayer expense—hasn’t stopped opponents of school choice from devising plans to thwart it. Now, five towns, Arrowsic, Georgetown, Phippsburg, West Bath, and Woolwich, will lose their eligibility for the town tuitioning program under a plan for consolidating School Union 47 with the neighboring Bath school system. Says Stephen Bowen of the Maine Heritage Policy Center: “What the people of Arrowsic, Georgetown, Phippsburg, West Bath, and Woolwich are being encouraged to do would shock supporters of school choice across the nation, who are working diligently to win the very school choice rights that people of these communities are being told they must give up.”

Privacy laws trump common sense. Did federal privacy laws play a role in the slayings at Virginia Tech in April? The Washington Post reports that the student responsible for the slayings was diagnosed as a high school student with a condition known as selective mutism. Fairfax County, Va., schools had actually developed a program of therapy for the student that had seemed effective. But, “federal privacy and disability laws prohibit high schools from sharing with colleges private information such as a student’s special education coding or disability, according to high school and college guidance and admissions officials. Those laws also prohibit colleges from asking for such information.” (Via Open Market.)  

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released the report Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006, which includes an estimate of the number of Americans who lacked health insurance at any point during 2006: 47 million. As they have in the past, those who favor expanding the role of government in the health care sector will surely point to the Census figure as validating their position. As Heritage’s Robert Moffit notes, however, there are some key points to keep in mind:

First, the figure of 47 million includes 9 million on Medicaid, 7 million illegal immigrants, 3.5 million who are already eligible for government health programs, and 20 million from families with incomes at least double the federal poverty level.

Second, as noted, the Census figure counts anybody who lacked insurance at any point during 2006. For many of these people, not having health insurance is only a temporary situation. And often it’s a situation caused by federal tax policies that created the employment-based health insurance system we have today. When people lose jobs or change jobs, they often lose the health insurance that went with that job. Says Moffit: “For most of the uninsured, the problem is fixable if policymakers simply take steps to make health insurance portable, so the insurance policy sticks to the person, not the job.”

Third, the employment bias in the tax code, as well as excessive regulations, makes individual health insurance even more expensive, pricing out of the market families that do not have access to employment-based insurance. The fix, then is eliminate the bias in the tax code that favors employment-provided insurance over individually-purchased insurance.

Cato’s Daniel Ikenson:

While misguided (or disingenuous) politicians rail against the rising trade deficit, they fail to comprehend (or acknowledge) that U.S. producers are America’s largest importers. In 2006, 55 percent of all U.S. goods imports were industrial products and components, the kinds of purchases made not by consumers, but by producers.

That statistic supports the strong correlation between manufactured imports and U.S. manufacturing output, which has been observed for decades. Imports and output rise and fall in tandem. Thus, policymakers who seek to restrain imports are effectively advocating a manufacturing recession. If their mercantilist worldview prevails, and imports decline, reports of idled factory equipment will not be far behind.

Twenty percent of all workers today need a license to do their jobs, according to a new Reason Foundation study that ranks the states according to how many jobs require a license. In the 1950s, that figure was only 4.5 percent. That’s not good news. Study author Adam Summers says: “These laws are created under the guise of ‘helping’ consumers. In reality, the laws are helping existing businesses keep out competition, restricting consumer choice, destroying entrepreneurship, and driving up prices.”

Here are the worst 10 states and the number of jobs they require to be licensed:

1. California (177)
2. Connecticut (155)
3. Maine (134)
4. New Hampshire (130)
5. Arkansas (128)
6. Michigan (116)
7. Rhode Island (116)
8. New Jersey (114)
9. Wisconsin (111)
10. Tennessee (110)

(Via Club for Growth.)

Politicians breaking promises is pretty much a dog-bites-man story, but apparently it’s a story that still offers lessons to voters. Two years ago, Colorado voters gave lawmakers permission to spend more money, but on the clear understanding that new spending would be split between K-12 education, higher education, and health care. According to a new report by Colorado’s Independence Institute, however, state lawmakers simply engaged in a shell game so that they could spend more money on other priorities. They’ve done what the Independence Institute terms “the Ref C shuffle.”

Referendum C suspended for five years the spending limits created by Colorado’s Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights and permanently increased the limits thereafter. A state report on spending under Referendum C has concluded that while programs other than health care and education “may have received funds that would not have otherwise been available, they did not receive funding directly from Referendum C.” This carefully worded passage should alert readers familiar with wiles of fiscal policymaking as to what has really happened: Referendum C allocations for education and health care have simply replaced general fund allocations, and those general fund monies have been shifted to other priorities. Since passage of Referendum C, Colorado’s spending on health care and education has increased 11.9 percent, but spending on everything else has increased 28.7 percent. “Put another way,” says the Independent Institute, “education and health care comprise nearly two-thirds of the general fund budget but received just 55 percent of new spending. Forty-five percent of new spending went into the remaining one-third of the budget.”

The lesson for voters: When politicians tell you they are not asking for a blank check, don’t turn around a give them a blank check.

New Jersey’s poor fiscal performance in the past year provides another illustration of the adverse consequences of high tax rates—and not just for the economy, but for state coffers, too. Last year, the state raised its cigarette tax yet took in less revenue from that tax than the year before.

And that outcome was not unforeseen. As Gregg Edwards notes in a recent op-ed for the Asbury Park Press, last year when the hike in cigarette taxes was proposed, the Center for Policy Research of New Jersey predicted the increase would yield less revenue.

The tax rate, the center reasoned, had reached a tipping point; even a slight increase likely would cause revenues to fall. In order to increase revenues, the tax rate had to be reduced.

The center’s statements, in part, relied upon a clear pattern in cigarette sales. As New Jersey increased its tax, cigarette sales declined. The financial impact of the decline, however, was masked by higher revenues resulting from the tax increases.

So, in spite of increasing cigarette taxes by 17.5 cents (to a U.S.-leading $2.575 per pack), New Jersey took in only $764 million in cigarette taxes in 2007—$23 million less than in 2006. Smokers responded to the hike by smoking less, but mainly they responded by buying their cigarettes across state lines. All of the states surrounding New Jersey have lower cigarette taxes.

Edwards also notes that while New Jersey increased its sales taxes and its income taxes, the corporate business tax was cut. Revenues from sales taxes and from income taxes have failed to meet projections. But revenues from the corporate business tax have exceeded expectations—by $240 million.

Milton Friedman once said: “If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven’t cut taxes enough.” But tax cuts that increase government revenues would certainly be a good start.

Monday: Learn what the new Census numbers do and don’t say about poverty in America. Both The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute will hold panels to discuss the new data.

Monday: Attend the Independent Women’s Forum’s Energy Summit, featuring speakers from both sides of the political aisle. The event will be moderated by John Stossel.

Tuesday: Take in a review of the worst thugs in world history. Author Micah Halpern discusses Hitler, Hussein, Napoleon, Pol Pot, Alexander the Great, Idi Amin and others at The Heritage Foundation.

Wednesday: Assess the role of labor unions in a competitive economy. The Mackinac Center hosts Dr. Bill Conerly in Lansing, Michigan.

DDT still needed. If environmentalists have a favorite chemical, it’s the one that hasn’t yet been invented to replace the mosquito killer DDT. It seems there’s always something new—and environmentally safer—on the horizon. But new insecticides, however potent at first, lose effectiveness over time because mosquitoes develop resistance. A new study by Donald Roberts, a professor of tropical medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, identifies DDT’s advantage over newer agents: DDT is a repellant as well as an insecticide. Roberts found that mosquitoes don’t enter or immediately leave rooms that have been treated with DDT. That means that most mosquitoes don’t even come into contact with DDT, which slows the development of resistance. And, says Roberts, DDT remains effective as a repellant even against those mosquitoes that have developed resistance to it. What it all means is that DDT is still an essential weapon in the fight against malaria.

Only happy doodles allowed. Zero-tolerance policies have claimed another innocent victim, this time an eighth-grade boy in Arizona who doodled an image resembling a gun in the margins of a test he was taking in class. He was doodling because he had finished the test early. Officials at Payne Junior High School in the Chandler Unified School District, suspended the boy for five days, but then reduced the suspension to three days. Officials actually told the boy’s father that they were concerned about the possibility of another Columbine. According to the boy’s parents, the doodle resembled a laser gun and showed no bullets, blood or victims. What’s next for zero-tolerance, not letting kids say the word gun? (Source: East Valley Tribune, via First Friday Collective.)

Nature v. Nature. A grown moose produces as much carbon dioxide in a year as does a car driven 13,000 kilometers (about 8,000 miles), according Norwegian researchers. The researchers are concerned that Norway’s national animal might be harming the environment through belching and farting. (Source: Speigel Online.)

Islamic rule threatened by haircuts. Iranian police, reports BBC, have launched a crackdown on barbers that offer western-style haircuts. Authorities claim that the haircuts promoted un-Islamic behavior. Also under scrutiny as part of the campaign to discourage Western influences: makeup, tattooing, and eyebrow plucking.

A hopeful assessment from John C. Weicher of the Networks Financial Institute:

Despite popular consensus to the contrary, house prices in general have not fallen over the past year, and few markets are experiencing a substantial decline. Lenders and regulators are both taking action to reform subprime lending, and the foreclosure problem is likely to be limited to the 2004-2006 books of business. Meanwhile, there has been a long-term homeownership boom, extending broadly across American society and including minority groups with high immigration rates. This boom has been facilitated by the revolution in information technology, making it possible for lenders to measure risk more accurately, and by the growth of financial literacy initiatives and counseling. For these reasons, the subprime foreclosure problem is likely to be short-term.

Is Europe’s cap-and-trade carbon regime a model for the United States? Not according to the data, which, as Kyle Wingfield observes in the Wall Street Journal, show that the United States is already outperforming Europe in terms of limiting growth in emissions:

Since 2000, emissions of CO2 have been growing more rapidly in Europe, with all its capping and yapping, than in the U.S., where there has been minimal government intervention so far. As of 2005, we’re talking about a 3.8% rise in the EU-15 versus a 2.5% increase in the U.S., according to statistics from the United Nations.

What’s more, preliminary data indicate that America’s CO2 output fell by 1.3% from 2005 to 2006. If these numbers hold up, it would mean U.S. emissions growth is nearly flat so far this decade. Europe hasn’t yet released figures for last year, but it did report in June that emissions from the participants in its carbon-trading scheme, which account for almost half of Europe’s CO2 production, rose slightly in 2006.

The news gets worse for Europe when you consider that during this decade, the U.S. population has grown at roughly double the rate of the EU-15 while the American economy has been expanding about 40% faster. It seems Europe is becoming less efficient in its carbon production while U.S. efficiency is improving.

So what’s the deal? How is the United States, with no carbon-limiting regime at all, outperforming Europe?

In Europe … the “market” consists of demand that government has created artificially and – more important – supply that the state distributes arbitrarily. Not surprisingly, companies lobbied hard to ensure favorable allocations when trading began in 2005. The number of permits exceeded actual emissions and prices plummeted. Today, allowances for 1,000 tons of CO2 are priced at about 11 euro cents, hardly high enough to prod a company to cut its carbon instead of just buying more permits. If you think the U.S. Congress – whether led by Democrats or Republicans – would be more likely to shun special interests in the name of environmentalism, then I’ve got some tariff-free Brazilian ethanol to sell you.

A teachers union contract in Columbus, Ohio, has forced a unique public school to hire teachers that don’t fit its mission, reports the Columbus Dispatch. Ecole Kenwood is a French-language immersion school.  

Now parents are justifiably upset by the news that four teachers assigned to the school for the coming academic year don't speak French.

Two are math and science specialists and one is at the middle-school level of the K-8 school. Parents are most upset, though, about a third-grade classroom teacher, because at that level, students are supposed to receive 70 percent of their instruction in French.

Kenwood’s principal will try to make do by having the new third-grade teacher split her time with another third-grade teacher who is a native of France, but that leaves neither classroom with more than half of its instruction in French.

How can parents be confident their children are immersed in the language, as the school’s philosophy promises?

Superintendent Gene Harris’ explanation is simple: Living within the district’s budget required teacher layoffs for the past two years, and the teachers’ contract requires that any vacancies be offered first to teachers who were laid off.

(Via Buckeye Institute Blog.)

Parents beware: If your kids are taking any college classes in peace studies, they are probably being taught to hate America and its ideals. As Bruce Bawer describes it in the latest issue of City Journal, peace studies isn’t primarily a field of scholarly investigation. Nor is it even primarily concerned with peace. Peace studies programs around the country are being run by activists espousing an anti-American, anti-freedom ideology. The peace that they want is “the kind of peace found today in Havana or Pyongyang.”  And they are proselytizing college students:

Take the case of Brett Mock, who writes in FrontPage Magazine that a peace studies class he’d taken in 2004 at Ball State University—“indoctrination rather than education,” as he puts it—had been “designed entirely to delegitimize the use of the military in the defense of our country.” The teacher, George Wolfe, “would not allow any serious study of the reasons for the use of force in response to an attack,” and students were expected to “parrot . . . back views we did not agree with.” To get full credit, moreover, Mock reports, students had to “meditate at the Peace Studies center,” “attend Interfaith Fellowship meetings,” or join Peace Workers—a group that Wolfe founded and that, according to Sara Dogan of Students for Academic Freedom, “is part of a coalition of radical groups that includes the Muslim Students Association . . . and the Young Communist League.” Kyle Ellis, another Ball State student, added that “Wolfe has required students to attend a screening of the antiwar propaganda film Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the War in Iraq, without material critical of the film and representing the other side.”

That’s just one of many examples provided by Bawer. He concludes:

What’s alarming is that these students don’t plan to spend their lives on some remote mountainside in Nepal contemplating peace, harmony, and human oneness. They want to remake our world. They plan to become politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, teachers, activists. They’ll bring to these positions all the mangled history and misbegotten ideology that their professors have handed down to them. Their careers will advance; the Peace Racket’s influence will spread. And as it does, it will weaken freedom’s foundations.

Looser credit, says Brian Wesbury, isn’t the fix for financial markets right now:

Populism is in the air these days, and the threat from tax hikes, trade protectionism and more government involvement in the economy, is rising. This reduces the desire to take risk. Congress is working on a legislative response to current mortgage market woes as well. And as with the savings and loan industry (forcing S&Ls to sell junk bonds at fire-sale prices), and Sarbanes-Oxley, the legislative response almost always compounds the problems.

The interaction of an uncertain regulatory and tax environment with a highly leveraged, illiquid market for risky mortgage debt creates conditions that look just like an economy-wide liquidity crisis. But it’s not. A few rate cuts will not help.

What can help is more certainty. Tax cuts, or at least a promise not to raise taxes, and immunity—or at least a safe harbor from criminal prosecution for above-board institutions in the mortgage business—could help loosen up a rigid market in a more permanent way than sending out the helicopters to dump cash in the marketplace.

The best the Fed can do is to stand at the ready to contain the damage. In this vein, their decision to cut the discount rate and allow a broad list of assets to be used as collateral for loans to banks, was a brilliant maneuver. It increases confidence that the Fed has liquidity at the ready, but does not create more inflationary pressures. It was a helping hand, not a bailout.

Bill Beach, director of Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, has shared with me his view that monetary policy was in fact an underlying cause of the problems in the mortgage market: “The credit expansion has created an asset bubble that was compounded by massive increases in risk from really bad loans. The liquidation needs to take its course.”

Private investment in transportation infrastructure is not such an exotic idea as the gas-tax raisers would have you believe. In fact, reports Investors Business Daily, private infrastructure is booming everywhere except the United States:

By some estimates, specialist funds and private groups have raised about $200 billion worldwide, not counting credit lines, to invest in infrastructure deals.

The government, reports the New York Times, has decided that Medicare will no longer reimburse hospitals for treating conditions caused by errors that the hospitals themselves made. Here’s what a spokesperson for Consumers Union, as quoted by the Times, had to say about the decision:

Medicare is using its clout to improve care and keep patients safe. It’s forcing hospitals to face this problem in a way they never have before.

One might conclude from this comment that patients need Medicare’s clout to protect them from hospital errors. Cato’s Michael Cannon has a better interpretation:

That’s right.  For the past 42 years, the federal government has paid hospitals to give grandma an infection, drop her on the floor, or leave a sponge inside her—and then paid the hospital more to put her back together again. That is, if the infection didn’t kill her.

Does anyone really believe that if each patient controlled the health care dollars that employers and the government now control, that it would take patients 42 years to stop rewarding hospitals for medical errors?

Wednesday: Learn how women are being given incomplete information about the risks of putting off having children until later in life. Miriam Grossman of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute speaks at the National Press Club.

Wednesday: Hear Bruce Caldwell discuss The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents—The Definitive Edition at The Heritage Foundation.

Thursday: Explore the myths Christians believe about wealth and poverty. The Acton Institute hosts Dr. Jay Richards.

Heritage in Focus: Ernest Istook examines whether expanding SCHIP will really help children … Matt Spalding assesses yet another immigration plan from the White House.

At Heritage: Rowan Scarborough looks at the enemies within the CIA.

Subsidized food aid turned down. It’s not often that people turn down free money from the government. Indeed, many people see government money as just another form of charity, and who’s against charity? So it’s noteworthy indeed that a major international charity organization has decided to turn down $45 million per year in federal food aid—on the grounds that it doesn’t accomplish anything except make poor Africans dependent on food aid. As the New York Times reports, the group CARE believes that providing subsidized U.S. food assistance to Africa makes it difficult for African farmers to make a livelihood. One official explained: “If someone wants to help you, they shouldn’t do it by destroying the very thing that they’re trying to promote.” Other charity organizations contest CARE’s position. One group told the New York Times that it agrees that food aid has destructive consequences, but said it will continue to accept and deliver the aid anyway. Selling the subsidized food to Africans brings in revenues that the group can use to provide other services to poor Africans.

Taxes are the problem, not the solution. The tax burden on the American household over the past 30 years has grown faster than any other category of expenditure—by 140 percent. The typical family today pays more in taxes than it spends on a mortgage, health insurance, and auto insurance combined. Columnist Todd Zwyicki: “… the most effective way of alleviating the household budget crunch would be to adopt lower and flatter tax rates that would reduce the government's take.” (Via Cafe Hayek.)

It’s not the neighbors fault. Moving to a better neighborhood has little discernible impact on student performance. That’s the finding of a new study that tracked 4,248 families randomly given or denied federal housing vouchers to move out of high-poverty neighborhoods, reports the Washington Post. The researchers caution, however, that the lack of evidence doesn’t disprove the hypothesis that neighborhoods matter. In order to make a difference, they say, a neighborhood might have to be much better than the ones to which the study’s subjects moved.

Vacations as human rights missions. Vacation for most people is a time to unwind and recharge the batteries for whatever lies ahead in life. The German government, however, has appealed to its citizens to augment relaxation with some hectoring of their foreign hosts over human rights abuses, reports the Financial Times. Günter Nooke of the German foreign ministry held a press conference in which he urged German travelers to speak to people in authority at airports, museums, or hotels about human rights abuses in the countries they visit. He also encouraged airlines and travel agencies to get involved by providing information on human rights conditions to travelers. But, says Nooke, he doesn’t want to ruin vacationers’ fun. So, a healthy mix of griping to the hosts, while appreciating their culture will make the best itinerary.

Yesterday’s Washington Post takes a look at the business of selling carbon offsets and finds some dodgy aspects. For example, how exactly do carbon offset sellers know how much carbon is sequestered through planting trees? It’s complicated:

Researchers say that it’s hard to know what is being offset because the impact of a tree depends on species, location and other factors. If the tree burns or is chopped down, the benefit disappears.

Another problem: How can they verify that a carbon offset for renewable energy leads to additional renewable energy being produced that would not otherwise have been produced and that replaces non-renewable sources. How can buyers of offsets be sure they aren’t just enhancing the bottom line of for-profit companies?

For some, the answer is pretty straightforward: The carbon offset business needs to have standards set by the federal government. That certainly fits the regulate-first mind-set of many environmentalists.

Mark Steyn relates the story of how NASA discovered it had gotten its global warming data for the past decade all fouled up.

They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for US temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top Ten altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century—2000, 2002, 2003, 2004—plummeted even lower down the Hot One Hundred. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and Oughts has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top Ten hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.

And yet we survived.

Turns out that a Canadian had found a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. Somehow, it’s all connected to people hating America. For that part of the story, you’ll have to read the rest of Steyn’s column.

The turmoil in subprime lending, says Sebastian Mallaby, is a replay of a familiar story:

In Chapter One, a new financial instrument makes capital available to a new class of borrower, and the result is profits for the innovator along with gains for consumers. In Chapter Two, a group of not-so-smart investors misunderstands the novel instrument and bids its price up too enthusiastically; when the inevitable bust follows, the innovation is denounced as inherently dangerous. Then, in Chapter Three, the complaints blow over. The not-so-smart investors learn their lesson and the new instrument stabilizes. Financial innovation turns out to be beneficial without being scary, but by that time another newfangled instrument has emerged to frighten people, and finance is hauled before the court of public opinion—again.

Some people regard calamities in the marketplace as proof that government needs to do something—regulate!—in order to protect people from their own ignorance. But ignorance of how things work is the normal condition of most human beings most of the time (including those who work in the government). That’s actually a good thing. It means that consumers are benefiting from knowledge and talents that they do not themselves possess.

In the case of subprime lending, somebody figured out how to extend credit to households with a history of poverty or less than stellar credit. The result was a benefit to those households:

The homeownership rate, which had been stuck around 65 percent between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s, hit 69 percent. Some 12 million new homeowners emerged, roughly half of them members of racial minorities. The American dream had been extended as never before.

The real lesson of the subprime meltdown, according to Mallaby, is not that such loans are bad, but that investors in subprime securities need to do a better job of scrutinizing what they are buying.

Tuesday: Find out why consumers don’t know the price or the quality of medical care. Georgia Public Policy Foundation hosts John Goodman.

Tuesday – Thursday: Explore issues in transportation and energy. The Mercatus Center offers a Capitol Hill briefing exclusively for full-time, congressional, agency, and Library of Congress employees.

Thursday: Hear Jeb Bush address the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s 2007 Freedom and Opportunity Luncheon.

Thursday: Listen to Goldwater discuss Goldwater—at Goldwater. The Goldwater Institute hosts a screening of Mr. Conservative and a discussion with C. C. Goldwater (granddaughter of Barry), and Barry Goldwater, Jr.

Thursday – Sunday: Discover the moral foundations of personal and economic liberty. The Acton Institute offers four-day seminar, Toward a Free and Virtuous Society Conference, for future religious leaders.  

Friday – Saturday: Learn how to fight command-and-control energy policies at the Heartland Institute’s Energy Summit for state elected officials.

Sunday – Tuesday, August 21: Suss out the future of the digital revolution at Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit 2007.

Heritage in Focus: Christine Kim reviews the importance of family time.

At Heritage: Mart Laar on Estonia’s success … McCotter on assessing anti-insurgency campaigns … Bob Novak on politics and journalism.

No right to life-saving drugs. Patients seeking access to potentially life-saving drugs have been dealt a setback. A federal court has overturned a ruling from last year by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that had affirmed a right of terminally-ill patients to access drugs that have cleared FDA Phase I safety trials.

Good news on economic literacy. Seventy-nine percent of high school seniors are economically literate, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress. According to the Wall Street Journal, the test included the question “What, for example, is the effect of breaking down trade barriers between countries?” A majority of students selected the correct answer, saying that the prices would come down. They opted for this answer instead of “the quality of good would come down.”

Gitmo a better place than others. At least one inmate wants to stay put at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, reports the Associated Press. Lawyers for Ahmed Bel Bacha, an Algerian captured in Pakistan, have appealed the inmate’s release, saying he fears torture if he is returned home. Human rights groups says that as many as two dozen inmates who face similar threats.

Letting kids fight for family. In Washington State, a new law allows children to sue to have the parental rights of their biological parents restored, reports the Seattle Times. In the first use of the new law, twins Timothy and Jesse Wolcott have told courts that their family should be reunited because their parents have changed their ways.

Robert Poole Jr.:

The Federal Highway Administration’s latest biennial report on the conditions and performance of U.S. highways makes for grim reading. Just to maintain current pavement conditions and congestion levels we ought to be investing $79 billion a year; actual highway investment is $70 billion a year. And to improve on today’s dismal performance, to reduce freeway gridlock for example, could cost an additional $60 billion per year.

Those staggering numbers suggest we must rethink how we fund and fix our roads.

Unfortunately, the predictable, status quo responses to the Minneapolis tragedy have already begun: a new federal spending program to fix roads and much higher federal and state fuel taxes.

Both suggestions are off-target. The 2005 federal transportation bill doled out $286 billion, no small chunk of change. Before the feds hike the gas tax any further, government needs to prioritize spending, to focus on critical infrastructure projects instead of “bridges to nowhere” and thousands of other “earmarked” pet projects. If Congress fails to enact fundamental reforms, taxpayers will be justified in rejecting new gas-tax hikes.

Some members of Congress claim that earmarks are just a way of identifying local priorities. The Wall Street Journal points to some data that say otherwise:

A main problem with these earmarks is that they often supersede the more urgent repair and replacement needs identified by state and local officials. Earmarked funds in past highway bills would go unspent because the vanity projects were unwanted and typically require some state matching funds. A full five years after the 1987 transportation bill, for example, no less than 64% of its earmarked money was still unspent because states had more urgent priorities for their share of the spending. By 1997, 55% of the $6.2 billion in earmarks from the 1991 highway bill had gone unspent. We can't report the same numbers for the 1998 and 2005 highway bills because the federal Transportation Department stopped disclosing the figures, lest it embarrass Members of Congress.

The profit motive serves the consumer, even in the student loan lending industry:

Recently, there’s been a push in the loan industry to engage in “differential lending treatment” based on personal credit credentials and the institution a student attends. The government, too wrapped up in political wrangling over issues of fairness and equity, has rejected the plan. Yet, freed from bureaucratic constraints and fueled by profit-motives, private lenders have embraced it with remarkable zeal.

The results are undeniably favorable for private lenders. But what’s often overlooked is that the results are undeniably favorable for students as well. Why?

Students now receive loans that are actually tailored to their needs in terms of interest rates, repayment schemes and forbearance policies, thereby promoting greater flexibility in borrowing. This lesson shows that private institutions, even when pursuing their own-self interests, can generate positive spillovers in times when the government is unwilling or unable to do the same.

Talk radio is crazy, but a fairness doctrine is not the way to fix it. The way to fix talk radio is to get more people like Casey Lartigue and Eliot Morgan on the air. Earlier this year, on their June 23 radio show, Lartigue and Morgan thoroughly debunked a conspiracy theory known as “Memorandum 46.” Supposedly, Memorandum 46 “outlines a sinister 1970s government strategy to undermine black leadership in the United States and sow discord with Africans abroad.” According to the conspiracy theory, the author of Memorandum 46 was President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Lartigue and Morgan addressed many other conspiracy theories on the June 23 episode, as well. They write about the whole experience in the Washington Post. The rest of the story:

These are the airwaves in which the first president of the United States was a black man, in which AIDS was cooked up in a government laboratory to decimate the black population and in which major corporations lace their food with chemicals to make black men sterile.

Colleagues at the station accused us of performing “counter-intelligence.” Stalwart callers cried that the station was being “infiltrated.” Harsh words with a station manager were exchanged. And we found ourselves booted out of the talk-radio business.

Hopefully they’ll get a new gig from a new outlet that doesn’t specialize in telling people what they already believe.

How much do Americans depend on Social Security?

[E]ven high-wage workers depend on Social Security for a substantial portion of their retirement income and would significantly change their con­sumption and saving behavior in the absence of Social Security. Specifically:

• Social Security accounts for virtually all of the discretionary consumption of households with modest preretirement incomes (less than $50,000 a year for couples or $25,000 for singles).
• It is equal to about one-third of the consumption of the highest-earning households (couples with preretirement incomes of $500,000 and singles with $250,000).

The American Dream Coalition diagnoses our infrastructure woes, identifying three reasons that things like roads and bridges have been underfunded for decades:

First was the growth of an anti-auto movement. While that movement was initially based on concerns over air pollution and highway safety, those problems have been greatly reduced today, yet the movement is stronger than ever. Sometimes called “NIMBYs,” it would be more accurate to call anti-auto advocates “NAMFAEs”: no auto mobility for anyone else. These groups would rather see scarce transportation funds spent on light rail and streetcars that provide almost no transportation benefits than on things that provide congestion relief.

Second was the Vietnam-war-induced inflation that drove up construction costs but had little effect on highway revenues. Most U.S. highways are paid for out of gas taxes, which are fixed on a per gallon basis. After adjusting for inflation, the amount of tax people pay today for every mile they drive is less than half the amount their parents paid in 1960. This put highway agencies in permanent catch-up mode and allowed congestion to get continually worse.

Third was the tendency of Congress and state legislatures to sidestep transportation controversies by turning them over to urban planners. First with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and later with the Clean Air Act and various transportation bills, Congress constructed an elaborate planning process that allowed the NAMFAEs to delay projects for decades. As the anonymous lobbyist on Wonkette points out, it can now take more than two decades to replace a bridge once it has been identified as deficient.

Your editor has been a little under the weather this week, so blogging has been slow. Some posts coming later, though. Stay tuned.

Mass transit projects are invariably a huge waste of taxpayers’ money, but mass transit proponents never seem to learn. Stephen Fleming offers what may be a helpful analogy:

Basically, anything circuits can do, packets can do better. That's the lesson of the last 20 years of telecommunications, and it's why Cisco is now worth 20 times as much as Nortel, when it used to be the other way around. 

The analogy is obvious:  Mass transit systems are circuits. Automobiles are packets.  

Packet switching always beats circuit switching. 

Mass transit – heavy rail, light rail, trolleys and buses – means capital-intensive routes with minimal flexibility. The train stops at a station, not in front of your house. Perhaps you switch to a narrower-bandwidth circuit (in Atlanta, a MARTA bus) to get closer to your house. Then you switch to a yet-narrower-bandwidth circuit (your feet) to get all the way to your house. This is directly analogous to the digital transmission hierarchy where I spent 10 years of my life: SONET circuits are multiplexed out of T3 circuits which are multiplexed out of T1 circuits which are multiplexed out of individual 64 kb/s voice channels. 

With automobiles, on the other hand, every “packet” is dumped into the transportation network to be routed directly to its destination. This requires significant processing power. Luckily, most humans have more than sufficient processing power. (To those applying makeup/on a cell phone/munching breakfast while zooming down Georgia 400 at 80 mph:  There are limits to multitasking for any CPU.) 

The poor track record of mass transit systems around the country never seems to deter proponents from offering new plans. The new plan, they apparently think, will fix whatever was wrong in other cities. Fleming’s analogy is helpful, because it points out that there is a fundamental reality that no plan can change: people prefer modes of transportation that let them go where they want, when they want, and at their own pace. If, as Fleming says, packet switching always beats circuit switching, then we can expect that people (the packets) will always prefer automobiles and roads (packet switching) over mass transit (circuit switching). The conclusion, which should have been obvious anyway, is even more obvious: Cities should stop wasting money on such systems.

Monday: Discover how the international dimension of cyberspace adds to its insecurity and find out what can be done about it. The Hudson Institute hosts professor Seymour Goodman.

Tuesday: See illegal border crossings through the lens of documentarian Chris Burgard. Burgard’s film Border is the first in the Liberty Film Festival’s Screening Series.

Wednesday: Learn how Estonia transformed itself from a stagnant, state-driven, socialist system into one of the world’s most modern and dynamic free-market economies. The Heritage Foundation hosts former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar.

Thursday: Find out if nonprofit organizations should play an active role in elections campaigns. The Hudson Institute hosts a discussion.

Saturday: Celebrate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, and help plot the refounding of America. The International Society for Individual Liberty’s 26th Annual World Freedom Summit runs August 11 – 15, in Williamsburg, Va.

Heritage in Focus: Ernest Istook explains what the SCHIP debate is really about.

At Heritage: John Lott on Freedomnomics … implications of elections in Japan … Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman … Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) on what’s next for immigration reform and border security.

Corruption mapped. A new Web site maps the incidence of bribery in order to help businesses identify where corruption is heaviest. Financial Times reports that Bribeline, launched in July, has already received over a thousand reports from 89 different countries. The reports are unverified, but the operators of the Web site believe the risk of malicious false reporting is low, because the names of the officials are not identified.

Shouldn’t debt come down in good times? State and local debt passed the $2 trillion mark sometime in the first quarter of 2007, according to data from the Federal Reserve. Cato’s Chris Edwards is troubled by the fact that state and local debt soared 68 percent between 2000 and 2006 because “strong tax revenue growth in the states should be allowing governments to pay down debt in a prudent fashion before the next recession hits.”

If you want socialized medicine, line up now! Britain’s National Health Service has informed a 108-year-old blind and deaf woman that she must wait 18 months before receiving a new hearing aid. The Daily Mail reports that Olive Beal, one of whose sons was killed serving in World War II, has great difficulty communicating with her family. Hope she gets it.

Amtrak: Competing too hard? Amtrak really, really wants passengers to try its new high-end sleeper car service. So it’s offering a very special inducement: $100 of free booze. According to ABC News, members of Amtrak’s guest rewards program can get the credit toward alcoholic beverages by buying a GrandLuxe ticket on certain routes between November and January. Before you laugh, dear taxpayer, remember that if Amtrak doesn’t do well, it’ll hurt you right in the wallet.

For the motherland. There’s good reasons to have kids, there’s bad reasons to have kids, and then there’s reasons of state. In Russia, patriotic youth organizations run by the Kremlin are encouraging members to get busy and … well … get busy in order to help raise the country’s birth rate. As the Daily Mail reports, a group called “Nashi,” meaning “Ours,” runs an annual camp where smoking and drinking are absolutely forbidden, young couples are married in mass weddings, and special tents are set aside for procreation. Critics call the groups “Putinjugend”—an allusion to the Hitler Youth movement of Nazi Germany—and contend that the Kremlin is using such organizations to further centralize its control over Russian society. Leaders in the youth groups are rewarded with top slots at Russian universities, from which they will likely go on to take top slots in government or state-run enterprises.

And in other historical-parallels-to-fascism news … A Russian scientific expedition to the arctic will look for evidence that the Lomonosov Ridge—a 1,240-mile underwater mountain range—is a geologic extension of Russia. If Russia finds such evidence, reports CNN, it will be able to claim, under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, that the oil and mineral wealth of the area belong to Russia. The United States has never ratified the Law of the Sea, but the Bush administration has been avidly pushing Congress to do so. Many conservatives object to the Law of the Sea Treaty because they say it would compromise U.S. sovereignty.

As the House of Representatives moves forward with debate on expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, here are some key facts to keep in mind, courtesy of a new paper by Heritage’s Robert Moffit and Cheryl Smith.

The original intent of the program was to cover low-income children who don’t qualify for Medicaid (those from families between 100 percent and 200 percent of the poverty level). The proposed expansion would transform SCHIP into another middle-class entitlement, and expand government influence over health care decisions.

• The House bill raises the threshold for eligibility to 400 percent of the poverty level.
• Four hundred percent of the poverty level is an annual income of $82,600 for a family of four.
• Some families that would be considered poor enough to receive SCHIP help, would also be defined by Congress as rich enough to have the pay the Alternative Minimum Tax. (This fact is from a paper by Heritage’s Rea Hederman.)

The proposed expansion is not a cost effective way to expand coverage. It is a waste of the taxpayers money.

• Eighty-nine percent of all children between 300 percent and 400 percent of the poverty level are already enrolled in private health insurance
• Seventy-seven percent of all children between 200 percent and 300 percent of the poverty level are already enrolled in private health insurance.

But expanding SCHIP will encourage many who already have private coverage to drop that in favor of the government provided benefit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the House proposal would shift 1.9 million kids from private health insurance to government health insurance.

Crowding-out the private provision of a good is usually an unintended consequence of increasing government provision, but in the case of the House bill, it seems to be an intended consequence. According to Moffit and Smith, the bill provides bonus payments for states to expand their SCHIP and Medicaid enrollments:

As enrollment above designated levels increases, the bonuses get exponentially larger. These state bonus payments are conditioned upon implementation of a combination of several provisions, each designed to maximize and expedite enrollment above specified baseline. The inclusion of such conditions, of course, would encourage state officials to actively seek and enroll persons in the government health programs, regardless of current insurance status.

As if that weren’t enough:

• “Children” between the ages of 18 and 21 are eligible for SCHIP.
• The expansion adds $58 billion in new spending over 10 years
• The bill is funded in part by an increase in cigarette taxes, a highly regressive tax. That means that the poor are paying for a new middle-class entitlement.  
• The bill eliminates a law requiring the President to submit and Congress to consider plans for reforming Medicare whenever Medicare’s finances deteriorate too badly. That trigger was enacted for the first time this year.

Proponents of the bill say that kids getting health insurance is the only issue that matters here. But that ignores the role that government policy has already played in making health insurance more expensive than it need be. Leaving aside the taxpayer interest in cost-effective assistance, everyone is a health care consumer and so we all want quality health care at a reasonable cost. As Heritage’s J. D. Foster has written recently, reforms based on refundable tax credits are the best strategy for expanding coverage and encouraging a consumer-friendly system.