David Boaz

A headline in the Washington Post (print edition):

Midshipmen Face Tougher Rules and Less Liberty

More than 250 people were killed in four coordinated truck bombings in northern Iraq, in the villages of Qataniyah and Jazeera. The victims were adherents of the Yazidi faith, which predates Islam in the Middle East. Public radio’s “The World” interviewed Dutch scholar Philip Kreyenbroek, who has written books about Kurds and the Yazidi faith. He explained that Muslims and Christians sometimes denounce Yazidis as Satanists, claiming that they worship evil. But that’s not true, Kreyenbroek said; they don’t worship evil, they just don’t think it exists.

I wonder if they do now.

Mary Winkler is out of jail. She served 67 days after her conviction for shooting her husband in the back as he lay in bed and killing him. Now she’ll go back to work at the dry cleaners in McMinnville, Tennessee, and seek to regain custody of her children.

Meanwhile, Will Foster was sentenced to 93 years for using marijuana to relieve the pain of his acute rheumatoid arthritis. An appeals court reduced the sentence to 20 years, and Gov. Frank Keating made him serve more than four years before granting him parole.

A few miles from Mary Winkler in Tennessee, 57-year-old Bernie Ellis has been confined for the past 18 months to a halfway house. His crime? Growing marijuana to treat a degenerative condition in his hips and spine. A public health epidemiologist specializing in substance abuse, he also provided pot to some other sick people.  10 officers of the Tennessee Marijuana Eradication Task Force swooped in to put a stop to that, and to try to seize his farm as well.

In a more just world, Tennessee would set up a Murder Eradication Task Force, leave Bernie Ellis alone, and give Mary Winkler a tad more than 67 days for shooting her husband to death.

The Treasury Department reported Friday that federal revenues reached $2.12 trillion ($2,120,000,000,0000) for the first ten months of fiscal year 2007. In both current and inflation-adjusted dollars, that puts the federal government on course for the most revenue it’s ever collected in a year. Indeed, it’s the most revenue any government in the history of the world has ever collected. And yet it’s not enough to satisfy the voracious appetites of the spenders in Congress and the administration. Spending was $2.27 trillion for the same ten months.

It seems that the deficit problem in Washington is not a result of insufficient tax revenue but rather the inexorable growth of spending on everything from earmarks to entitlements to war.

To be sure, the U.S. economy is the largest national economy in history, and that’s the main reason for record tax levels. And tax revenues are not at their peak in terms of percentage of GDP–though they’re getting close. Earlier in the year OMB estimated that revenues as a percentage of GDP would reach 18.5 percent in 2007. But as of a month ago that figure had reached 18.8 percent, approaching the levels that typically produce popular demand for relief. But as spending interests become stronger and more widespread in Washington, popular demand for lower taxes faces more resistance. It seems safe to conclude that George W. Bush will go down in history as the biggest taxer and the biggest spender ever.

By now it’s old hat that President Bush, who remains inexplicably popular with conservatives, is the biggest spender since LBJ. Now it turns out that the Conservative government elected two years ago in Canada is trying to match him.

John Williamson of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation notes in the National Post that “the Conservatives’ two budgets boosted spending by $24.4 billion over two years.” OK, it’s not Bush’s trillion dollars. But Canada is a smaller country, and “as a result the size of the federal government has grown by 14%.”

It looks like Patrick Basham was all too prescient when he predicted, to much consternation in Canada, that Harper would become “Bush’s new best friend.” 

Speaking of Casey Lartigue’s speaking truth to power, as we just were, here’s his recent Washington Post column on how he got fired from his XM radio show. He was sacked after devoting a show to exposing a conspiracy theory about government plans to undermine black leadership that has received widespread credibility in the African-American media.

Here’s hoping a more entrepreneurial station manager will see an opportunity to hire a courageous and insightful host who’s suddenly available.

The Washington Post reports:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said yesterday that most of the District’s public schools will start the academic year this month stocked with required textbooks, although more than half of the schools lack the requisite number.

Most of the schools will have textbooks when they open. Cool. A few years ago the school superintendent was boasting that most of the schools would open on time. So this is an improvement. Not only will they open, most of them will have textbooks.

My former colleague Casey Lartigue told the sad story of the D.C. government-run schools five years ago. Then-School Board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz sharply rebuked him — without pointing out any errors in the study — at a Cato Policy Forum.

This morning on Marketplace Radio, there was a clear example of the bias toward government intervention that pervades so much of the establishment media. The story was titled

U.S. finishes last in fuel economy

Online, the introduction reads, “A new report reveals that the U.S. is at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to fuel economy standards. Turns out even China tops us. ” The reporter introduces the topic of a new study on mandatory fuel economy rules in different countries and turns to the study’s author:

Drew Kodjak: At the bottom of the heap is, unfortunately, the United States.

Study co-author Drew Kodjak says Europe and Japan already have high mile per gallon rules, and they’re gonna get even better.

Kodjak: Out to 2012, Europe is projected to have a 49 MPG passenger fleet. And Japan a 47 in 2015.

Even China’s better than the American 27.5 miles a gallon.

Kodjak: So certainly a very big difference between the leaders and the laggers.

Notice the drumbeat: the United States is “last,” “at the bottom of the barrel,” “at the bottom of the heap,” a “lagger.” Stricter regulation is “better.” And all because our regulations are slightly less intrusive and burdensome than those in other countries.  I think we’re better off letting the market determine how much fuel efficiency American consumers want. But my point here is not to argue the issue, but simply to notice that Marketplace Radio, heard on tax-funded radio stations, didn’t argue the issue either. It just indicated to listeners that stricter regulation was “better,” and the United States was a “lagger . . . at the bottom of the heap” for having less stringent regulations.The last time I wrote about a similar one-sided, adjective-laden story on Marketplace, I referred to it as “unconscious liberal bias.” But really, how long can I keep seeing only unconscious bias? I noted in my previous item:

So where’s the bias? Let us count the ways. First, of all the studies in the world, only a few get this kind of extended publicity. It helps if they confirm the worldview of the producers. For instance, I don’t believe Marketplace covered this Swedish study (pdf) showing that the United States is wealthier than European countries (perhaps most provocatively, that Sweden is poorer than Alabama — perhaps because Europe has the kinds of laws the Heymann study advocates). Second, Heymann was allowed to appear without a critic. Third, the interviewer never asked a critical question. He never noted that the countries that Heymann was praising are poorer than the United States and in particular that many are suffering from high unemployment brought on by such expensive labor mandates. Fourth, look at the language of the questions: “lags behind,” “falling short,” “picking up the slack.”

The unstated, perhaps unconscious, premise is that countries should have mandatory paid leave and other such programs. If we don’t, we’re “falling short” and someone must “pick up the slack.” Language like that, which is very common in the media, posits government activism as the natural condition and then positions any lack of a government program as a failure or a problem.

Do Marketplace’s reporters, editors, and producers–and the reporters, editors, and producers at other media outlets–really not recognize that this sort of language biases their coverage?

Chris Edwards writes below that the gap between federal pay and private-sector pay continues to widen, with federal employees now making more than twice as much as private employees. Meanwhile, a congressional committee is holding hearings on whether federal employees are underpaid or overpaid. Do you think they’ll hear testimony about why federal employees make twice as much as private-sector workers? Or about the fact that federal quit rates are far lower than private-sector quit rates, suggesting that most federal employees are pretty satisfied?

Robert Samuelson gets one thing wrong in his Newsweek/Washington Post column this week: Cato isn’t a conservative think tank. At least, I think it would be odd to call scholars “conservative” when they criticize the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, the growth of executive power, the war on drugs, the holding of American citizens without habeas corpus, the federal marriage amendment, the late lamented sodomy laws, and the general attempts by both right and left to impose their moral values on all Americans through government.

But he’s right on his main point: The growth of entitlement spending, especially for the elderly, is not only a looming fiscal disaster but a fundamental shift in the nature of American government. He proposes

that some public-spirited sugar daddy (the MacArthur Foundation? Warren Buffett?) sponsor a short book. A possible title: “Facing Up to an Aging America.” Six leading think tanks would be invited to participate: three liberal — the Brookings Institution, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Urban Institute– and three conservative: the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

We accept. We’ve been writing about the entitlements crisis since 1980 or thereabouts. We’d be glad to join other research institutions in a grand public debate about how big we want government to be and what its appropriate responsibilities are.