The federal department dates from 1980 and was established by President Jimmy Carter as a reward to the National Education Association, the teacher cartel that endorsed Jimmy Carter for president. As Vicki Alger noted in 2019, the department receives $38 billion for K-12 programs, yet performs poorly and shows little accountability. Defunders should be aware that the department maintains an enforcement division that conducts armed raids, breaks into houses, and carts people off in handcuffs. That makes a stronger case to, as Alger contends, “abolish the U.S. Department of Education once and for all.” 

In the Golden State, the unelected California Coastal Commission overrides the elected governments of scores of cities and counties on issues of property rights and land use. The elected governments of those cities and counties are entirely capable of handling their own affairs. It therefore seems unwise to continue funding an unelected body of regulatory zealots that runs roughshod over the property rights of Californians. 

California also maintains its own Environmental Protection Agency plus a California Air Resources Board (CARB), ruled by Mary Nichols, a lawyer and activist, not a scientist. With a budget of $956,370 million, CARB would seem to be the better candidate for defunding. So are California’s 58 county offices of education, another level of bureaucracy through which taxpayer dollars must trickle down before reaching the classroom. 

Funding for police is a local issue, and police forces could stand reform in their procedures and finances. On the other hand, if police forces are fully defunded, local residents might wonder who will arrest murderers, armed robbers, rapists, looters and so forth. It won’t be the U.S. Department of Education, the California Coastal Commission, CARB, or the county offices of education. 

The post Are Police Forces the Best Candidates for Defunding? appeared first on The Beacon.

The New York Times

Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.

The government support—which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require electric customers to pay higher rates—largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come. The beneficiaries include financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, conglomerates like General Electric, utilities like Exelon and NRG—even Google. . . .

As NRG’s chief executive, David W. Crane, put it to Wall Street analysts early this year, the government’s largess was a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and “we intend to do as much of this business as we can get our hands on.” NRG, along with partners, ultimately secured $5.2 billion in federal loan guarantees plus hundreds of millions in other subsidies for four large solar projects.

“I have never seen anything that I have had to do in my 20 years in the power industry that involved less risk than these projects,” he said in a recent interview. “It is just filling the desert with panels.”

As the Times further notes:

“The private sector really has more skin in the game than the public realizes,” said Andy Katell, a spokesman for GE Energy Financial Services, which like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other financial firms has large investments in several of these projects.

But there is no doubt that the deals are lucrative for the companies involved.

G.E., for example, lobbied Congress in 2009 to help expand the subsidy programs, and it now profits from every aspect of the boom in renewable-power plant construction.

It is also an investor in one solar and one wind project that have secured about $2 billion in federal loan guarantees and expects to collect nearly $1 billion in Treasury grants. The company has also won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to sell its turbines to wind plants built with public subsidies.

For a refutation of “green” and any form of corporate welfare and neo-mercantilism, please see the following:

Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts, by Vern McKinley

Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Failure, By Randy T. Simmons

Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close

The post More “Green” Energy Cronyism and Corporate Welfare appeared first on The Beacon.

[audio:2011_05_14_higgs_indianapolis.mp3]
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Please also see the following books:

Plowshares & Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture, by E. C. Pasour, Jr., and Randal R. Rucker

Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close

A Poverty of Reason: Sustainable Development and Economic Growth, by Wilfred Beckerman

Cutting Green Tape: Toxic Pollutants, Environmental Regulation and the Law, edited by Roger E. Meiners and Richard L. Stroup

Here also are related articles:

“Big Ethanol Push in U.S. Is Pork Barrel Boondoggle,” by Ernest C. Pasour, Jr., and Randal R. Rucker (Modesto Bee, July 14, 2007)

“Corny Politics,” by Alvaro Vargas Llosa (Washington Post Writers Group, July 18, 2007)

“The Ethanol Alliance,” by Alvaro Vargas Llosa (Washington Post Writers Group, April 4, 2007)

“Farmers’ Harvest a Bumper Crop of Subsidies,” by William F. Shughart II

The post Robert Higgs Speaks on the U.S. Government’s Ethanol Scam appeared first on The Beacon.

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services. This suggests the possibility that, in absence of the ARRA, many government workers (on average relatively well-educated) would have found private-sector employment had their jobs not been saved. Searching across alternative model specifications, the best-case scenario for an effectual ARRA has the Act creating/saving a net 659 thousand jobs, mainly in government.

Conley and Dupor further note that:

A large fraction of the Federal ARRA dollars was channeled through and controlled by state and local governments. . . . Upon acquisition of ARRA funds for a specific purpose, a state or local government could cut its own expenditure on that purpose. As a result, these governments could treat the ARRA dollars as general revenue, i.e. the dollars were effectively fungible. . . . Federal aid arrived when state and local governments were entering into budget crises. . . . The deterioration of the non-Federal government budget position occurred concurrently with an increase in Federal grants . . , mainly due to the ARRA, of approximately the same amount. In fact, a substantial component of the ARRA was authorized specifically to cover states’ tax losses (through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund) and the most dramatic cost increases (through support for state Medicaid programs).

These federal policies were inspired by the similarly harmful policies of FDR in his New Deal of the 1930s. However in his book, Depression, War, and Cold War: Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity, Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs has shown that federal stimulus measures then were responsible for prolonging and deepening the Great Depression which did not end until after such policies were ended in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The post Obama “Stimulus” Protected 450,000 Government Jobs, Destroyed One Million Private Jobs appeared first on The Beacon.

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The post <i>The Jason Lewis Show</i> Interviews Emily Skarbek on the Government Cost Calculator appeared first on The Beacon.

[audio:2010_08_27_higgs_antiwar.mp3]
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Please also see the following books by Dr. Higgs:

Depression, War, and Cold War: Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government

Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government

Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society

Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism

The post Robert Higgs Interviewed: The Expanding Pork for Military Pay and Towns appeared first on The Beacon.

[I]nstead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed. Even if read, many articles that are not cited by anyone would seem to contain little useful information. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication. Then, once it is published, it joins the multitudes of other, related publications that researchers must read and evaluate for relevance to their own work. Reviewer time and energy requirements multiply by the year. The impact strikes at the heart of academe.

I think this assessment is generally on target, for my own field at least. What percentage of the articles in the typical academic journal does anybody read, let alone remember? How much of the research in any scientific field really adds value? Of course, search tools make it easier to find relevant information, so I’m not sure the point about writing literature reviews is all that compelling. Still, it does seem increasingly difficult to sort wheat from chaff.

I’m less impressed with the authors’ proposed solutions—limiting the number of publications that can be considered for promotion and tenure, making greater use of impact factors, and enforce tighter page restrictions. These strike me as superficial fixes. The main problem is the vast increase in the scale and scope of the “scientific” enterprise itself, almost all of it due to public funding. There are simply too many universities and institutes, too many research faculty, too many granting agencies, too much research money. It’s a self-perpetuating process, almost exclusively driven by supply-side considerations (who on earth “demands” the output of most English departments?). Some academic readers will be shocked by the claim that there’s “too much” research money, particularly in today’s austere climate. But I mean too much relative to some social optimum, not too much relative to what university professors want.

Why would we expect this kind of system to produce high-quality research? Perhaps it’s a miracle that any good work gets done at all.

The post Too Much Research appeared first on The Beacon.

Gleckman highlights several points from the Treasury Department’s report that would otherwise be comical if not so costly:

• 1,295 prisoners received $9.1 million in credits for houses they claimed to buy while incarcerated, 241 of which were serving life sentences at the time

• 67 different people claimed the tax break for the same house

• More than 2,500 got almost $18 million for homes they bought before the credit was effective

• A total of 14,132 people received erroneous credits, totaling $17.6 million

So here is what the federal government accomplished. It succeeded in increasing home sales in April at the expense of those same home sales in May, injecting distortions into a relatively stable pattern of home sales. In addition to these immediate distortions, arbitrary rule changes increased the uncertainty facing consumers which undermines economic recovery. Maybe a few people purchased homes they otherwise wouldn’t, but that in itself is poor policy because it encourages individuals to take on more risk than they can afford. The tax credit created no permanent jobs, but it did increase the expected value of cheating on your taxes, thereby incentivizing tax fraud. All of this with a price tag of more than $12.6 billion, on which taxpayers will pay about 3% interest ($378 million) per year!

The real stench of the waste comes from the knowledge that this type of policy is systemic. The complete inefficacy of the Homebuyer tax credit will not prevent similar schemes from emerging from a democratic process through which benefits are handed out while the costs are billed to future generations.

Governments do not bear the full costs of the policies they pass in legislative sessions. Even the most myopic consumer, because he bears the costs of his actions, would consider postponing consumption if faced with a similar deal. And if he tossed prudence aside and made the purchase anyway, he would be forced to curtail consumption on other margins to pay for his preferences. For the individual, if it turns out he could not afford the costs of his decisions, he would eventually be forced to reconcile the reality of his resource constraints with his desires. At present, no such mechanisms of constraint tie the hands of our policy makers.

HT: Edward Lopez

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