Throw Money at Higher Ed?

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano want to spend more money on higher education according to Matthew Ladner from the Arizona based Goldwater Institute.

“We must recognize that higher education is something that all Arizona children will need to succeed,” stated Governor Napolitano.

The governor wants to increase funding to double the number of college graduates in Arizona by 2020.  But others think that the supposed “dire need for an ever increasing number of college graduates is a myth.”

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, only 29 percent of all jobs actually required a degree in 2004. The Bureau projects that of the top ten occupations with the largest growth from 2004 to 2014, seventy percent won’t require a college education.

Already 40 percent of people get a two or four-year college degree.  So we are already graduating more college graduates than we need.

Of course, Arizona’s university system performance isn’t exactly something to write home about.  According to Ladner:

The National Center for Education Statistics lists Arizona State’s four year graduation rate as 28 percent, the University of Arizona at 30 and Northern Arizona University at 27. The six year graduation rates for these three schools stand at 56%, 56% and 47% respectively.

How about improving the current performance of the under-performing Arizona university system?  One way of doing that would be by giving college student higher education vouchers so that the state university system would have to compete for student dollars.  Arizona already has such a program.

Because no good deed goes unpunished, Governor Napolitano recommended that the Arizona legislature cut funding for the voucher program.

Governor Napolitano is a Democrat.

"Mansfield Park" Mis-Priced

Enough of politics and race cards. Let’s talk about real issues, like a disastrous TV production of Mansfield Park.

In the golden age of Hollywood the culture snobs like you and I would always sneer at the costume dramas: Marie Antoinette, Queen of France presented with a hairstyle and small talk right out of 1930s popular culture.

There was one comfort.  The BBC would never stoop to that sort of thing.  Nor would Masterpiece Theater.  At least, not when dramatizing Jane Austen.

But as my sister and I watched the one episode production of Mansfield Park last night on PBS we felt that we were watching a Hollywood costume drama.

Of course, it is ridiculous to attempt a vast novel like Mansfield Park in one episode.  A novel of relationships cannot be crammed into two hours like an action drama.  Still, it doesn’t hurt to try.

But to make the prim Fanny Price into a bit of a pouting slut with flashing eyes, when the whole point of Fanny is that, as the poor relation, she cannot afford even one lapse from irreproachable behavior; to make Lady Bertram, the indolent and self absorbed mother of four wayward rich kids easily tempted by the false intimacies of a rashly conceived project of amateur theatricals, into something of a shrewd judge of character who knew all along that Fanny was in love with her cousin Edmund; to show the characters of a comedy of manners cavorting around an English country house without manners and without decorum; this is to miss the whole point of Jane Austen.

Fortunately, there is still the book.  And there is also the 1983 BBC production available on DVD, “faithful to the novel and soooooo booooooring,” thank goodness.

Party Splitting Time

Everyone is accusing everyone else of splitting the party. On the Republican side it started with Mike Huckabee, who seemed to be splitting the evangelicals off from the economic and national-security conservatives. Then it was John McCain splitting national-security conservatives off and seeming to diss the economic conservatives and the social conservatives.

Then the Clinton tag team started playing gender cards and race cards within the Democratic Party by ridiculing and then polarizing Barack Obama.

Then the great Rush Limbaugh said that he might sit the election out if certain candidates won the Republican nomination. They know who they are.

Now Peggy Noonan says it’s all Bush’s fault. It was he that split the Republican Party.

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Look fellas, let’s cool it a little. This is primary season. This is the time when the parties are supposed to tear themselves apart. This is when the candidates try to get the 51 percent of the party that they need to win the nomination. This is beneficial. We get to find out what the party factions really think and what they are ready to vote for—or more likely vote against.

But we won’t really know if permanent damage was done until after the general election.

If the Democratic Party splits over Clinton v. Obama we’ll know about it in November. If the Republican Party splits over McCain, we’ll know it in November.

Things change. Great political coalitions form and then they break up. I’d say that, if anything, we are overdue for a major party split. And like earthquakes, you expect a big one when things have been quiet for too long.

I’d say that the Democrats are more vulnerable to a split. The fact is that blacks and Latinos don’t like each other. Something’s got to give as the animosity between blacks and Latinos starts to bite.

But what do I know?

Stimulus Plan Could Be Worse

Helicopter Money. That’s what Larry Kudlow calls it. The economic stimulus deal between the White House and House leaders announced today primarily amounts to a plan to borrow money from investors and give it to taxpayers. Up to $600 per person and more if you are married with children.

But if you want economic stimulus instead of the satisfaction of “doing something” then the way to stimulate the economy is to lower the marginal cost of doing business. You could lower the marginal tax rate on corporate profits. Or you lower the marginal tax rate on capital gains.

There is also to be a “temporary” increase in the maximum size of mortgages bought by Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae. So that means we are going to increase the subsidy on home ownership.

Don’t mind me, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to start moderating the subsidies for home ownership? If you want someone to blame for the mortgage mess then it starts with the Home Loan Bank started in the Great Depression. Then there were the politically-connected Savings and Loans with their 30 year fixed rate loans. Then there was the government-insured FHA loan. Then there were Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae. And every time there was a blip in home prices the subsidies were cranked up another notch.

I have a dream of an America in which house prices were not sky high. It would really help young people. A good way to do that would be to slowly reduce the amount you can borrow against your house. And another way would be to slowly unwind the government-sponsored mortgage giants like Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae.

When you subsidize something you get more of it and you jack up the price for it. The folks who owned the “something” before the subsidy get a windfall. The rest of us just end up paying more for less.

Don’t mind me. I bought home construction stocks a month or so ago, so increased subsidies for housing will just crank up the value of my investment.

The Economy: Now What?

Last week Wall Street was calling for a cut of 50 basis points in the Fed Funds rate. And just to get the Fed’s attention international markets tanked over the MLK holiday weekend.

So what did the Fed do? Well we all know now. It topped Wall Street and made a 75 basis point cut, reducing the Fed Funds rate to 3.5 percent. A “panic” cut, according to the British media.

Well, yes, but if you look at other short term rates, not out of line.

But we ordinary mortals must wonder: Is this 1929 all over again, or what? The simple answer is that nobody knows.

But there are a couple of good signs amidst the gloom and doom. First of all, the Libor rate has come down from being about 50 to 75 basis points above the Fed Funds rate. A month ago the 3-month Libor was at 4.86 percent. Today Bloomberg has the 3-month Libor at 3.33 percent. That means that the banks are lending to each other again. Maybe the credit crunch is over.

And the housing construction stocks are up sharply since Tuesday. Why would that be? Well how about the 15-year mortgage rate coming down below 5 percent. Six months ago it was at 6 percent; now it’s at 4.8 percent.

No doubt we still have a leg or two to go in the bear market, and maybe a full-blooded recession. But maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Why Republicans Don't Appeal to Blacks

In an article about the identity politics now playing at a Democratic presidential debate near you Lisa Schiffren lays out the simple reason why Republicans have never succeeded in attracting black votes.

In my bleeding-heart conservative youth, I once complained to Spencer Abraham — then the head of the Michigan GOP — that Republicans didn’t try hard enough to attract black voters. He repeated the then-current wisdom of the great, hard-bitten GOP strategist Lee Atwater. Atwater was convinced that the very process of attracting urban black voters would cost votes from the GOP base — not because the base was racist, but because white non-urban voters opposed the big-government programs that typically won black voters’ allegiance. There simply weren’t enough black votes to make it worthwhile for the GOP to court them and risk losing their base. It would be a net loss if it worked. Case closed.

What that means is that Republicans will start appealing to blacks when blacks decide that the politics of government programs is not for them. And right now there is hope on that front.

In City Journal Steven Malanga writes that blacks are suddenly waking up to find that Hispanics are elbowing their way past blacks for a seat at the government trough.

What’s the point, they say, of these quotas and set-asides if they don’t benefit us? What indeed?

Identity politics cuts both ways. It can give and it can take away.

MLK, Roe, and Conservatism

A week ago presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got herself into hot water by making the point that it is presidents like Lyndon Johnson that write the laws and not activists like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

She has a point. Politicians do tend to come along at the last minute and suck up all the oxygen in the room when they take credit for movements that have been decades in the making.

In my view it is not politicians that count. It is the people who think thoughts and the actors who lead movements and activist organizations.

But never mind. Maybe we want people like Hillary Clinton to believe that it is politicians that count, not ordinary people and not extraordinary people like the Rev. King.

This day is not just Martin Luther King Day. It is also the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. And it is also a day to think about the importance not of changing the law but of “changing hearts and minds.”

When the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade it changed the law of the land. But it did not change the culture. Initially, the pro-life movement that arose in opposition took the same road. It worked on changing the law.

But we can see now that the important work for the pro-life movement is not changing the law, it is changing hearts and minds. When you have changed hearts and minds the work of the politicians in writing new laws is merely an afterthought.

And anyway, in my view the important thing is not to make abortion illegal, but to make it “safe, legal, and shameful.”

As conservatives face a rebuilding year, it is important, as John O’Sullivan wrote ten years ago in National Review, that conservatives work to reduce the amount of law in society. For the intensive law and bureaucracy regime is inherently anti-conservative. All that law, he asserts,

[I]t discredits the dispersed moral sentiments of traditional society — such virtues as duty, fidelity, and chastity — which enable that society to work spontaneously without too close a bureaucratic supervision.

That is what liberals don’t understand. When you kick away the props of society, the virtues of duty, fidelity, and chastity, then you have to do everything with expensive law and bureaucracy. And the truth is that there just isn’t enought bandwidth to do that successfully. The social emotions, shame, guilt, love, and generosity, are much more efficient in ordering society.

So we don’t want women to fear doing something illegal when they have an abortion. That is so liberal and so bureaucratic. We want them, and the fathers of their children, to fear the shame of it: killing the fruit of their union.