» Craig Westover

President’s Speech to School Children Exposes Danger of Education Monopoly

Craig Westover — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:06:50 +0000

This commentary was first published in the Minnesota Free Market Institute Weekly Update. For your free subscription, click here.

Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute ("Feds in the Classroom") alerts us to a truly disturbing consequence of the federal government's intervention in education. The U.S. Constitution provides no grant of authority for federal involvement in education. As the founders recognized, a government that has no moral authority to mandate how people worship has no moral authority to indoctrinate people as to how or what to think. The commonality of freedom of religion and freedom of education, blurred by the No Child Left Behind Act, is about to be obliterated by President Obama's September 8 address to the nation's school children.

Health care: Life and death and substance

Craig Westover — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:06:50 +0000

It's unfortunate that some opponents of federal government-directed health care jumped on the 'Death Panel' metaphor instead of the substance of the proposed legislation. Whether the federal legislation intends it or not, a government-directed plan necessarily requires bureaucrats to make life and death decisions that are more far-reaching and more complex than the hyperbolic 'pulling the plug on grandma.' Say you were tasked with managing the cost of newborn-care under the proposed "public option" health care plan; What would you do? Should the public health plan allow spending billions of tax dollars on technology and treatment attempting to save low-birth-weight infants when that practice has a high probability of complications yielding a relatively low survival rate with a high probability of ongoing medical and other expenses associated with survival?

DFL spins tax talk away from the real issues — tradeoffs and reform

Craig Westover — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:16:03 +0000

The headline in the Pioneer Press seemed to tell the story: 'DFL budget plan would have cost fewer jobs, state economist says.' Indeed, before the Legislative Advisory Commission, state economist Tom Stinson estimated Gov. Tim Pawlenty's spending cuts will cost Minnesota 3,000 to 4,700 jobs. He also modeled the impact of a tax increase on job loss. The Pioneer Press reported "the $1 billion income tax increase that the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed and Pawlenty vetoed in May would have cost the state an estimated 1,000 jobs over the next two years." Unfortunately, in eagerness to report or spin Stinson's numbers, the press, progressive think tanks and DFL legislators misunderstood the purpose of Stinson's work and didn't get the basic story straight. In the measured terms of a professional, Stinson confirmed to me that the coverage of his testimony was "not entirely accurate" and interpretation of his data was somewhat "simplistic."

Fisking Dane Smith: “If taxes are bad for us, how did we get so healthy, wealthy and wise?”

Craig Westover — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:29:42 +0000

Dane Smith's most recent Legal Ledger column “If taxes are bad for us, how did we get so healthy, wealthy and wise?” provides the most vivid example of strawman abuse since the Wicked Witch of the West plucked the Scarecrow. Dane is a pretty reasonable guy, so when he resorts to calling those who disagree with him “anti-government” and “anti-tax,” you know he’s on shaky ground. It is not “anti-government” to be concerned when government consistently exceeds its constitutional authority; it is not “anti-tax” to uphold the constitutional principle of the sanctity of private property and think it wrong for the state to tax for programs and projects that exceed its constitutional authority. That said his column is made for fisking, and that just what I’ll do.

Single-Payer Model Actually Inhibits Improved Health Care

Craig Westover — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:55:56 +0000

MinnPost recently ran an interview with Dr. Oliver Fein supporting single-payer health care. Dr. Fein did a good job laying out the principles of a single-payer system. However, logically and practically looking at each one of his principles, bringing visibility to the unseen consequences of his proposal yeilds a conclusion that Dr. Fein would certainly not be fine with: Well-intentioned as is his desire for universal health care, the single-payer model can't get us there; it actually inhibits improved health care — and, ironically, to establish a manufactured "right" to health care a single-payer system destroys the unalienable right of individuals to make their own health-care decisions.

Cap and Trade: Deja Vu All Over Again

Craig Westover — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:36:58 +0000

In a recent post drawing a comparison between potential speculation in carbon credits and the meltdown of the subprime mortgage industry, “Cap and Trade Draws An Ace – Rebuilding The House of Cards” Doug Williams quoted Rachel Morris.

You’ve heard of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. Are carbon default swaps and subprime offsets next? If the Waxman-Markey [that's the main Cap and Trade legislation - ed.] climate bill is signed into law, it will generate, almost as an afterthought, a new market for carbon derivatives. That market will be vast, complicated, and dauntingly difficult to monitor. And if Washington doesn’t get the rules right, it will be vulnerable to speculation and manipulation by the very same players who brought us the financial meltdown.

In a one-minute speech on the floor of the House, Democrat Peter DeFazio puts a populist spin on that idea and affirms the point of Doug’s article.

National School Standards? Can’t. So, Ought Not.

Craig Westover — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:58:25 +0000

I am completely convinced of two things: That the greatest advances in Western civilization have been lost somewhere between the third and fourth beer for want of a dry napkin; and that the more widely a public policy is heralded as something we ought to do, the less likely it is we actually can do it. Case in point is the sobering announcement by Minnesota Education Commissioner Alice Seagren that Minnesota is joining the Common Core Standards Initiative, a state-led process to develop nationwide English-language arts and mathematics standards for K-12 education.

Interest-Group liberalism — Root, Root, Root for the Home Team

Craig Westover — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:19:42 +0000

Weary of watching the Twins' futility in the home of those damn Yankees last week, I looked for a winner on my bookshelf. I seized upon the optimistically titled 'The End of Liberalism.' Although its predictive value is somewhat depreciated by its 1969 copyright, the classic text by political scientist Theodore Lowi is as insightful today as in the heyday of 'The Great Society.' The "end of liberalism" comes about when the appeasement process evolves the perfect storm of unrestrained bureaucratic growth, an unmanageable web of conflicting regulations and an unsustainable skyrocketing budget. Are we there yet, at the end?

Taxing the Rich to Compensate the Rich

Craig Westover — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:09:53 +0000

In Part 2 of its series on the University of Minnesota, the Star Tribune writes “Being a world-class research institute requires top-notch faculty and facilities.” In its effort to be among the top-three research universities, the U has focused on hiring superstar researchers who require "compensation, plus facilities, plus support staff, plus instruments," the STrib quotes professor Judith Martin, chair of the University Senate Finance and Planning Committee. "This isn't a local market," Martin said. "Particularly in the sciences, it's an international market.” An inference from the STrib story that will certainly be made by the tax increase crowd, is that the state needs to generate more tax dollars so it can spend more on higher education to keep the University of Minnesota competitive. The state needs to provide more tuition aid so that students aren’t faced with tuition increases. And of course, those tax increases must be paid for by “the rich” – you know, like those highly sought after college professors that the University is paying well over six figures to attract and keep. There’s an ironic circularity in all this: The state, we are told, needs to raise taxes on the state’s highest earners so the state has the money to invest in higher education and student tuition aid to compensate for increased costs of attracting star-power professors – who require salaries that put them among the state’s highest earners.

Craig Westover: Sunday morning sound bites vs. an honest debate

Craig Westover — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:18:15 +0000

I just heard the sound bite again on a Sunday morning talk show: “The wealthiest Minnesotans pay only 9 percent of their income in state and local taxes while middle-income wage-earners pay 12 percent.” Those numbers are accurate. They come right out of the Minnesota Tax Incidence Study, a biennial report of who pays how much in state and local taxes. And the Minnesota report even earns the kudos of center-right economists for its intellectual rigor and clear statement of assumptions and limits — a rigor and integrity lacking, however, when tax burden percentages are tossed out as disembodied “facts.” Bottom line, there are tradeoffs between a tax system based on economic principle, tax burden and efficiency objectives and a tax system motivated by distributional effects and equity objectives. The public would be better served understanding and debating those tradeoffs than by class-baiting Sunday morning sound bites.