Enabling the Opponents of Reform

A promising performance-pay program is under attack in the Boston public school system, which is trying out some new and innovative school reforms. The plan was to allow Advanced Placement teachers to receive $100 bonuses for each student who passes an AP exam, and teachers could be rewarded up to $3,000. But the Boston Herald reports that the Boston Teachers Union is trying to put an end to the innovative plan:

Grinchlike union bosses are blocking at least 200 of Boston’s best teachers from pocketing bonuses for their classroom heroics in a puzzling move that gets a failing grade from education experts.

The Boston Teachers Union staunchly opposes a performance bonus plan for top teachers – launched at the John D. O’Bryant School in 2008 and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Exxon Mobil foundations – insisting the dough be divvied up among all of a school’s teachers, good and bad.

The union responded this way:

There’s no one solely responsible for the development of these students. They should all share in the money,” said Richard Stutman, head of the Boston Teachers Union.

Stutman’s sentiments are nothing new. Teachers unions contend that even the worst among them should receive pay equal to that of the best and brightest in their field. To do otherwise would mean jeopardizing membership rolls.

Teachers unions do little to improve teaching, or improve academic achievement overall. Yet there are those who still refuse to acknowledge the negative impact of organized labor on American education. Worse even are those who carry the banner of “education reform” while simply propping-up the failed status quo.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Ford Foundation has decided to enlarge the pockets of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The WSJ writes:

The biggest headline in education circles last week was that the Ford Foundation is making a whopping $100 million grant ‘to transform secondary education in the nation’s most disadvantaged schools.’

Our eyes raced to see which piece of the vibrant school-reform movement Ford was going to support. Would it be America’s 4,600 charters schools, many outperforming their traditional school peers and some even closing the race gap? Maybe it would be Teach for America, busting at the seams and turning down Ivy League applicants by the hundreds. Or, who knows, maybe Ford’s really on the leading edge, and would want to support voucher programs in cities like Washington.

Would you believe the recipients of Ford’s largesse are the teachers unions? Yup. The folks at Ford are giving new meaning to the word ‘retro’.

University of Arkansas education researcher Jay P. Greene probably put it best:

The Ford Foundation might as well give $100 million to the city of Las Vegas to address gambling addiction.

The Ford Foundation could have made a real investment in the lives of the nation’s children by supporting one of the most effective education programs in the country: the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The small $12 million program, which is currently on life-support due in large part to the slings and arrows of teachers unions, has provided more than 3,000 children the opportunity to escape the underperforming and unsafe D.C. public schools, and attend a private school of their choice. The Ford Foundation’s grant would have saved the embattled scholarship program for nearly another decade instead of propping-up unions that work tirelessly to deny a bright educational future to thousands of children in the nation’s capital and across the country. That would have spurred real reform.

The Obamacare Rationing Threat To Your Mammograms

Last week, the United States Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines recommending that women in their 40s no longer have annual mammograms and that women ages 50 to 74 have them only every other year, instead of annually. The recommendations were highly controversial, and by week’s end most health insurers and the federal Medicare program said they would ignore the panel’s recommendation and continue covering annual mammograms. This is as it should be: the federal government collects information and makes recommendations, and Americans are then free to consult their health care providers, ignoring the government if they so choose. The problem is that Obamacare would forever change this relationship.

Both the House and Senate versions of Obamacare create detailed new federal regulations that micromanage all health insurance decisions. Specifically, Section 2713 of the Senate Health Bill would give the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force the force of law by requiring all health insurance plans to provide coverage (with no patient co-pays) for “items or services that have in effect a rating of “A” or “B” [recommended] in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force.”

Conversely, under Obamacare, last week’s Task Force decision to give annual mammograms a “C” rating (not recommended) will henceforth be viewed by insurers and employers as a justification for discontinuing coverage. This move to give the evidence-based medicine determinations of health experts the force of law is not incidental to Obamacare: this cost control rationing is the very heart of Obamacare’s promise to control health care costs. Trying to convince wayward moderates that Obamacare would control health care costs, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag wrote in the Washington Post last Friday:

An independent Medicare commission … will ensure that reforming the health-care system is not a one-time event but an ongoing process that implements the most recent progress in medical science with the goal of improving care and lowering costs.

In other words, when the Obamacare health experts conclude that the “medical science” dictates that your mammograms must be cut to meet “the goal of … lowering costs,” then you’ll be out of luck.

The left is now desperately claiming that by raising this mammogram rationing issue, conservatives are politicizing health care. For example, Obamacare supporter Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told ABC News that Republicans have “Politicized Breast Cancer.” But the left has it exactly backward: it is Obamacare that is guaranteed to politicize every single medical decision between you and your doctor. When the government becomes responsible for providing everyone’s health care, everyone’s health care becomes everyone else’s problem. President Barack Obama once pitched his version of health care as “Everybody in. Nobody out.” In reality, this will mean “Everybody in your health care business. Nobody out.”

Quick Hits:

• Explaining the Heritage Foundation’s overcriminalization project, former U.S. Attorney General and Heritage Foundation fellow Ed Meese tells the New York Times that the “liberal ideas of extending the power of the state” are to blame for an out-of-control criminal justice system.
• According to the Pew Research Center, 10% of adults younger than 35 have moved back in with their parents because of the recession.
• According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, thanks to the recession, 34.5% of young African American men are unemployed.
• According to Rasmussen Reports, just 38% of voters now favor Obamacare.
• The drug industry group PhRMA is now running television ads calling on Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to support Obamacare.

For Abortion Supporters, A Lesson in Federal Control of Health Benefits

Ironically, the very first group to feel the effects of the pending federal government takeover of the health care system are among the closest political allies of President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—those who strongly support the cause of “abortion rights”.

Opponents of the latest House restriction on taxpayer funding of abortion are trying to argue that they merely desire to preserve the status quo. They apparently failed to grasp what conservatives have been warning them, and everyone else who will listen, all along—the status quo cannot, and will not, continue to exist. Change, as the President likes to say, is coming. Big Change.

When government is put in the position of making decisions about what will be funded and what will not be funded, that is exactly what it will do—decide what and who gets the funding. It is not a personal decision anymore; its not a market decision, nor even an economic decision. It’s a political decision.

Chances are that someone on the receiving end will not like those decisions. Today, millions of Americans in every other sector of the economy- with the notable exception of health insurance – can vote with their feet, taking their business elsewhere, and buying and owning a different policy. Tomorrow, there will be fewer and fewer choices. The authors of the House and Senate health bills will make sure of that.

Abortion was the first political decision on government funding of a “medical procedure”; it will not be the last. Want treatment for erectile dysfunction? Medicare and Medicaid will not pay for those drugs. Will the “public option”, the new government-run health plan? Who knows? The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services will ultimately decide. Patients will get what the federal government gives them.

Government will be making all sorts of treatment decisions for millions of Americans. Half of the people to become insured will be through Medicaid. Government has nothing to say about you using your own money for cosmetic purposes, but Medicaid will not pay for it. Will the public plan pay for cosmetic surgeries? What about expensive fertility treatments? Not covered by Medicaid. Medicaid will not pay for mental illness treatment for adults in an institution for mental diseases. What happens if your family physician does not take Medicaid because of low reimbursement rates? Can you pay extra out of your own pocket? No, not allowed.

Like the “abortion rights” supporters, many Americans will ultimately realize the health care legislation is not the change they were expecting.

Two More Inconvenient Voices at the EPA

via: Heritage

In the alleged new era of transparency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is making quite a name for itself as being the agency of opacity. The latest is the EPA’s suppression of a video entitled, “The Huge Mistake” by Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, two lawyers currently working at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – a video that says cap and trade will not work. From the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered two of its attorneys to remove a video they posted on YouTube about problems with climate change legislation backed by the Obama administration or face “disciplinary action”, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The couple had received clearance for posting the video but EPA took issue with its content following publication of an op-ed piece by the two in The Washington Post on October 31.”

PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch remarked, “EPA is abusing ethics rules to gag two conscientious employees who have every right to speak out as citizens. EPA reversed itself because someone in headquarters had a tantrum about their Washington Post essay.”

In their Washington Post column, Williams and Zabel rightly criticize the carbon offset measure in cap and trade, arguing that past experiments with offsets have led to nothing but fraud with no reduction in carbon dioxide. They also stress that likening the carbon cap and trade program to the acid rain cap and trade program is comparing apples and oranges because minor modifications and low-cost alternatives aren’t available for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels – as they were to address sulfur dioxide emissions linked to acid rain.

This comes after the EPA suppressed an internal report from one of the agency’s own, 35-year analyst Alan Carlin – a scientist who specializes in climate change. His report warned that the science of climate change was dubious and that we shouldn’t pass laws that will raise energy prices, hurt American families and hobble the nation’s economy without a full understanding of climate change.

We spoke to Dr. Carlin when the story first broke in June and he said, “I’ve been involved in public policy since 1966 or 1967. There’s never been anything exactly like this. I am now under a gag order.”

Once the Competitive Enterprise Institute released some of the EPA’s back-and-forth emails with Dr. Carlin, it became blatant that report had been smothered for political reasons: “One of the e-mails is from Dr. Al McGartland, director of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics reads, “The administrator and administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. … I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

This also comes after Senators Boxer and Kerry produced a ‘semi-final draft’ version of their cap and trade bill, which included the billions of dollars worth of emission allowance permits to different industries and released it only to the EPA to model the economic impacts. The draft was unavailable to the public until after the Environment and Public Works committee voted on it. The Heritage Foundation is one of few organizations to have modeled the economic effects of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill. Bill Beach, the director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, wrote a letter to Senator Boxer (CCing Senator Kerry, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Senator Inhofe) asking for a copy of the semi-draft legislation to model the economic effects of the bill but did not receive a copy of the bill.

Zabel has first hand experience with cap and trade, overseeing California’s cap and trade and offsets programs. Apparently, this was the problem according to the Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson. He writes, “One EPA official said that the agency’s response wasn’t due to the content of the attorneys’ writings, but to the way they highlighted their EPA experience in making their arguments.”

But isn’t Zabel exactly the type of person who should be warning us about the inefficiencies of a cap and trade system. Wouldn’t you want to utilize his highly specialized knowledge and experience?

President Obama, in his memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies, wrote that “Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use.”

Given Obama’s propensity for hiring czars, maybe the solution to the EPA’s cover ups is a transparency czar.

The Cap and Trade YouTube the Obama Admin. Does Not Want You To See

The New York Times reports:

The Environmental Protection Agency has directed two of its lawyers to makes changes to a YouTube video they posted that is critical of the Obama administration’s climate change policy.

The EPA lawyers did take their video down. But not before others reposted it. Watch:

You can read an op-ed the lawyers wrote for the Washington Post here. The Heritage Foundation does not endorse the couple’s call for carbon taxes, but their analysis of the futility of cap and trade is dead on.

Read about how the economists who first thought up cap and trade, do not believe it can control carbon, here.

Read about how carbon credits are an absolute fraud here, here, here, here, and here.

The Real Fiscal Cost of Government Run Health Care

via: Heritage

The Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation, have produced videos explaining why Keynesian economics is wrong, presenting the evidence that big government hurts economic growth, explaining how big government hurts economic growth, and making the case against the Value Added Tax.

Now Mitchell is back talking health care with a new video title, A Red-Ink Train Wreck: The Real Fiscal Cost of Government-Run Healthcare. Watch:

 

10% Unemployment Shows Objective Failure of Obama Stimulus

Last week the Obama administration issued a report purporting to show that the President’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan had saved or created exactly 640,329 jobs. Such a precise number for such a fuzzy concept as jobs “saved or created” immediately raised doubts about the veracity of the report in any honest American’s mind.

And since that report was issued, a once compliant press has filed story after story tearing the credibility of the Obama administration’s job creation claims to shreds. Just enter the words “stimulus”, “jobs”, and “report” in a Google News search and these are just some of the headlines you will receive:

• Stimulus Job Report Filled With Errors
• Stimulus Watch: Salary raises counted as saved jobs
• White House Tally Appears to Overstate Stimulus Jobs
• Reports Show Conflicting Number of Jobs Attributed to Stimulus Money
• Stimulus Watchdog: job counters confused, need guidance
• Why stimulus jobs aren’t here to stay
• Many California jobs ’saved’ by stimulus funds weren’t in jeopardy

Luckily the American people do not need to count on phony new jobs studies to provide the objective data necessary to hold President Barack Obama accountable for his economic policies. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics has been collecting accepted and standardized data employment data since the 1940s. When President Obama was selling his $787 billion stimulus to the American people he promised unemployment would never rise above 7.8% and that by 2010 the U.S. economy would employ 138.6 million jobs.

Today, BLS released its monthly jobs report and the numbers speak for themselves. The economy shed another 190,000 jobs in October, bringing the number of jobs lost since Obama was sworn in to 3.8 million. Worse still, the unemployment rate rose from 9.8% to 10.2% percent. With only 130.8 million jobs in the U.S. economy, President Obama is now 7.8 million jobs short of what he promised the American people. That makes President Obama’s stimulus an objective failure.

The Obama stimulus failed because it was based on faulty Keynesian beliefs. Heritage fellow J.D. Foster explains:

The Keynesian stimulus theory fails for the simple reason that it is only half a theory. It correctly describes how deficit spending can raise the level of demand in part of the economy, and ignores how government borrowing to finance deficit spending automatically reduces demand elsewhere.

Fortunately, the economy’s natural recuperative powers may be ending the recession. Last week the Commerce Department reported that the economy grew at 3.5%. But if this recovery is going to include job growth along with GDP growth, then job killing initiatives like Obamacare and cap and trade will have to be abandoned.

Quick Hits:

• Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has confirmed she will break her pledge to put the final language of the health care legislation online for 72 hours before a vote.
• On just seven days notice, Tea Party protesters organized well over 10,000 people for a rally against Obamacare at the Capitol yesterday.
• Taxpayer funded abortions and free health care for illegal immigrants are the two major obstacles Pelosi must overcome to pass Obamacare this Saturday.
• Leftists in Congress are now writing personal bailouts for favored constituents.
• The American Medical Association’s decision to endorse the House reform bill before its members had a chance to weigh in has dissenting doctors threatening to split the group.

Expanding Medicaid Means Reducing Education

In his September address to the joint session of Congress, President Obama stated he would be the last President to take on health care. Perhaps, but that may be at the cost of everything else, including education.

By expanding Medicaid in the health care bill, Congress will set off political tornadoes across the country that will leave governors and state legislators to clean up afterward. The math is simple. State revenues are still in a slump and will continue for a least a few more years. The two largest state and local expenditures are education and Medicaid. If you have a balance a budget, which nearly every state does, and you cannot touch the entitlement to Medicaid, where will you turn to fill the budget gap? There will be little choice than to go after education.

According to The Fiscal Survey of States, published by the National Association of State Budget Officers, 31 states cut higher education and 26 states cut K-12 education in 2009. Even with additional federal funding for Medicaid, 25 states still made reductions in Medicaid by cutting reimbursement to providers. Next year will be more of the same. Some states are already reporting higher Medicaid costs due not only to increased enrollment because of higher unemployment but also because of packed emergency rooms due to the swine flu. Governors of both parties are wondering whether Washington really knows what is going on around the country.

There are more former governors serving in the U.S. Senate than in the U.S. House of Representatives which means the Senate should be more aware of the Medicaid vs Education cage match. When legislation gets to the Senate floor, it will be interesting to watch whether the “former governor caucus” will work together across party lines to protect all states or only their own.

Congress and the President have incorporated all sorts of budget gimmicks to protect the federal budget. But they will be wrecking havoc on state budgets.

For more on Medicaid and Obamacare see:

Federalization of Medicaid: Health Reform Bill Would Reduce State Authority

Why Congress Wants to Force More Americans into Medicaid

The Baucus Medicaid Provisions: The Senate’s Massive Welfare Expansion

How the Pelosi Plan Kills Jobs

Today the Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported that despite all of the Obama administration’s job creation claims, unemployment has risen to 10.2%. Instead of focusing on job creation, the left in Congress continues to pursue other priorities like their $1.5 trillion health care plan which is partially finance by job killing employer mandates. See chart below:

A recent study by the Kaufman Foundation found that small businesses have led America out of its last seven recessions, generating about two of every three new jobs during a recovery. But as Heritage’s John Ligon explains, Pelosi care discourages small business hiring at a time when government should be getting out of the way:

Health care reform cannot ignore how such legislation’s employer coverage mandates would negatively impact small businesses. The Pelosi plan eliminates the exemption for businesses with 25-49 workers created in the Baucus plan, and it would also impose new marginal penalties on small firms with 25 or fewer workers. This creates a punitive cost for firms, which significantly raises the costs for businesses on the margin.

Establishing disincentives for small firms to grow would lead to a slower, less robust economy–and labor market. Altering these incentive structures is harmful to small businesses and the way they allocate labor. Federal health care reform legislation, therefore, should avoid creating steep new marginal costs relating to business growth–particularly in terms of wages and worker compensation.

What Superman and Barack Obama Don’t Have in Common

When Superman rescued a small boy who was plummeting toward the depths of Niagara Falls, it was pretty clear that the kid was in danger and that, but for Superman’s ability to fly, the boy would have faced certain death. It goes without saying that if the boy were not in danger, Clark Kent wouldn’t have donned his cape and flown to the rescue.

Well, back to the surreality of modern American politics, it appears that the purported success of President Barack Obama’s Super Stimulus is as fictional as the Man of Steel, but many of the jobs that Obama claimed to save weren’t in need of rescue.

That, of course, didn’t stop his administration from playing hero in California and taking credit for saving some 26,156 jobs, all at the cost of $268.5 million.

According to the Sacramento Bee:

In a required state report to the federal government, the [California State University] system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.

That total represents more than half of CSU’s statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.

“This is not really a real number of people,” CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. “It’s like a budget number.”

This story comes on the heels of latest reported jobs numbers, which we at The Foundry have said evidences the objective failure of President Obama’s stimulus. It’s not a pretty report card.

The economy shed another 190,000 jobs in October, bringing the number of jobs lost since Obama was sworn in to 3.8 million. Worse still, the unemployment rate rose from 9.8% to 10.2% percent. With only 130.8 million jobs in the U.S. economy, President Obama is now 7.8 million jobs short of what he promised the American people.

This week, President Obama noted that he holds his daughters to a high standard of academic success and said that, as parents, “You’ve got to set a high bar.”

Perhaps the president should set a higher bar of success for U.S. job growth, recognize the truth behind the failure of his stimulus, see a failing grade for what it is, and leave fantastical tales of dramatic rescues to the experts at DC Comics.