America's drinking problem
For
obvious reasons, I'm a huge fan of Glenn Reynolds'
policy suggestion for Barack Obama:
I will make one policy proposal. Some of my fellow libertarians hope
that the Obama administration will put an end to the drug war. I hope
so too, but I'm not too optimistic. Instead, I propose a smaller step
toward freedom -- eliminating the federally mandated drinking age of
21. This mandate was a creature of Elizabeth Dole (who is no longer in
the Senate to complain at its abolition), and it has unnecessarily
limited the freedom of legal adults, old enough to fight for their
country, to drink adult beverages.
What's more, as the 130 college presidents of the Amethyst
Initiative have noted, rather than promoting safety, it has largely
created furtive and less-safe drinking on campus. As a former professor
of constitutional law, President Obama knows that the Constitution
gives the federal government no legitimate role in setting drinking
ages. Returning this decision to the states would be a step for
freedom, a step toward honoring the Constitution, and a step away from
nannyism. It would also be a particularly fitting act for this
administration. Barack Obama received enormous support from voters aged
18-21. Who better to treat people that age as full adults again?
A drinking age of 21 is an embarassment to a supposedly liberty-loving nation. If you are old enough to enlist, and old enough to vote, you are old enough to swill cheap beer in the company of your peers.
The problem is, the main constituency of this initiative is small. I remember sitting through the alcohol education class that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania required me to sit through in exchange for clearing my sentence. The lawyer teaching it allowed that the drinking age might well be--indeed, probably was--unconstitutional in various ways. So why did the law still stand?
"Because when people turn 21," he explained patiently, "they stop caring."
It strikes me that this might be a golden opportunity for the Republicans, though. The news post-election was filled with commentators pointing out that the first few times a person votes tend to seal their political identity. Well, a president coming out strongly against the drinking age could put the next generation in Republican pockets for decades.
Whitehouse.gov gets a makeover
In addition to the sun rising in the west, and my dog declaring his intent to become a vegan, Whitehouse.gov has gotten a facelift. Naturally, I immediately went to the Office of Management and Budget, a site I use very often, and which is nearly legendary in its ability to hide any piece of information that anyone outside the OMB might want to lay their hands on, like fr'instance historical budget data. The ability to quickly lay hands on OMB information is a skill that has taken me years to hone, and provides substantial professional advantage.
The site was also uglier than a warthog in velour.
You'll be pleased to know that the new site is
very smart looking. Unfortunately, that sleekness has been achieved by tucking even more of that unsightly information out of the way, where it won't mar the vista.
Why is government IT so awful? It seems like the first thing people are going to want, when they go to the Office of Management and Budget, is, like, to look at the Budget. Yet the budget isn't even on the OMB servers, apparently--it's hosted at the GPOaccess site. I have, to be sure, seen private websites that were this awful. But not that many, and the companies that had them usually either redesigned them right quick, or went out of business. Instead the government has preserved all the problems with the old site, added new ones, and given us in exchange . . . a glossy photograph of Barack Obama looking solemn.
I am sure that there is some stupid bureaucratic logic behind putting the budget information elsewhere. But I'm not sure my heart can stand finding out what it is.
EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM: Substitute Inauguration Poem
The poem is as bad as the speech was good. I humbly offer a substitution for those who are in need of an uplifting, good poem:
| I HEAR America singing, the varied carols I hear; | |
| Those of mechanics--each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong; | |
| The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam, | |
| The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work; | |
| The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat--the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck; | 5 |
| The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench--the hatter singing as he stands; | |
| The wood-cutter's song--the ploughboy's, on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown; | |
| The delicious singing of the mother--or of the
young wife at work--or of the girl sewing or washing--Each singing what
belongs to her, and to none else; | |
| The day what belongs to the day--At night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, | |
| Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs. |
Speech! Speech!
Will Wilkinson
liveblogs so you don't have to.
I was disappointed by the beginning of his speech, which seems to have consisted of saying: "There
are no tradeoffs, and the people who tell you there are are just big fat HATERS, okay?" He is delivering it beautifully, as he always does, but the words do not really say much about how we will weather the dark storm on the horizon.
The second half, on the other hand, is beautiful. I do not know that glad embrace of the duties of citizenship, as well as the benefits, will fix our economy, but it might fix many other things that are wrong with our country. If he means it.
The libertarians will hate it, I predict. But
voluntary embrace of duty is the health of a small state--it's when people won't care for the collective that the government starts making them do it.
Only the lonely
The big reveal is spectacular on HD, as Obama walks out of the darkness into the full light of the sun and the adulation of a massive crowd. All I can think of is how
lonely it must be to become president--to reach your dream and suddenly realize that no one can share either the honor or teh burden with you.
Cui Bono?
Barack Obama is promising an increase in government grants for college education, presumably to help people like Tracy Kratzer, who was interviewed by
Forbes about her crushing student loans:
Tracy Kratzer, 27, enrolled in the International Academy of Design
& Technology in Orlando, Fla. in 2003. With visions of making big
bucks as a Web designer, she didn't give much thought to the interest
rate on her loan from Sallie Mae
(nyse:
SLM -
news
-
people
), the Fannie Mae
(nyse:
FNM -
news
-
people
)
of student lending. Kratzer didn't know it at the time, but she was
part of an experiment that has proved disastrous for borrowers and
shareholders of Sallie's parent, SLM Corp. It's called "nontraditional"
lending.
"That's not a sociological term," Albert Lord, chief
executive of SLM Corp., told an audience of financial analysts last
fall. "It's basically kids and parents with poor credit who are at the
wrong schools."
Sallie Mae was set up by the government in 1972
and began privatizing its ownership in 1997. It began nontraditional
lending in the easy-money heyday of 2002, when it cut deals with dozens
of trade schools to become their preferred subprime student lender.
Over the next four years Sallie doled out about $5 billion to people
like Kratzer, waiving the credit scores and cosigners formerly required
for its loans.
The bill arrived last year after nontraditional
borrowers began entering the workforce. Of the half no longer studying,
Sallie had written off 15% of loans by last June, the most recent
period for which it has released figures; another 24% were delinquent.
Among traditional loans for four-year universities, writeoffs ran 2%
and delinquencies 4.9%.
SLM set aside $884 million to cover these
bad loans in 2007 and posted its first loss. It expects
nontraditional-loan writeoffs to peak this year. SLM's stock has lost
80% since the beginning of 2007, wiping out $15 billion in value. Lord,
who was unavailable for comment, is a 28-year company veteran. He made
$72 million as chief executive in 2007 by unloading SLM stock before it
tanked. Sallie largely abandoned nontraditional lending last January.
That's
little consolation to Kratzer. Shortly after graduating with an
associate of arts degree, she discovered that the high-paying jobs
she'd hoped to qualify for go to people with bachelor's degrees and
years of experience. After a bout of unemployment, when she lived off
credit cards, Kratzer recently found an hourly job as a clerk at a
magazine, where she earns less than the average high school grad. In
the meantime her $14,000 student loan has mushroomed to $27,000--more
than she makes in a year--and continues to accrue interest at 18% a
year. She says collection agents for Sallie and others hound her to hit
up relatives for the money she owes.
"My mom works in a
restaurant. My stepdad is in prison," says Kratzer. "There are so many
people like me out there. They don't get seen. They don't get heard."
The question to contemplate is who benefitted from making it easier to pursue degrees that don't get you very far? Not Ms. Kratzer, obviously, but not the "greedy" loan company, either. No, the beneficiaries are the schools that take peoples' money in exchange for worthless degrees.
Back in my day, Sallie Mae wasn't so free with her money, but I nonetheless had a substantial brush with the seamy world of gray market education. Having been laid off from two jobs (in my twenties I had a pretty remarkable gift for picking companies that were just about to go out of business), I ended up, miserably, as a secretary at a nonprofit. Shortly thereafter, I decided to learn to be a network administrator, which I'd enjoyed doing briefly at my previous firm, before the venture capitalists had shut off the money spigot.
I don't know how I ended up at Career Blazers (yes, I cringe myself at the name). It was like one of those plucky, poor-but-honest people you read about in Victorian novels--everything clean, freshly painted, and nonetheless falling apart. But I was too desperate to get out of that secretary's chair to be picky. I gave them something like $5,000, in 1995, to teach me to be a Certified Netware Engineer--an administrator of Novell's corporate networking software.
The technies in the audience are wincing, and believe me, I am too. As I found out after I'd wasted thousands of dollars and three months, a CNE was a necessary, but not sufficient, credential to get a job in IT. The minute anyone tells you that he has one (or an MCSE, the Microsoft equivalent), any seasoned professional will bar that person from touching his equipment. Anyone who would actually mention his CNE is definitionally too ignorant to be useful, and just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous. Of course anyone competent usually had the credentials--but all the credentials proved, by themselves, was that you could breathe and answer a multiple choice test.
As far as I know, out of my class of fifteen people, a lot of whom were harder up than me and using the last of their severance to "retrain", two ended up with jobs after "graduation". I was one of them, lucking into a half-administrative, half-technical position. When that company too, was shut down four months later, I was now blessed with just enough experience, in the booming mid-1990s, to get a job and a 30% pay rise.
At any given time, that company was running two or more of these classes. And we were the ones at least arguably learning marketable skills. Downstairs, day and night other less fortunate people labored over Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, "computer" classes, typing--all financed by a combination of credit cards, much-needed personal savings, and government subsidies. The best off of them were having their useless lessons paid for by the taxpayer, merely wasting valuable time they might have spent finding a real job. I have no reason to believe that their placement rates were any better than those of my class.
It's easy to be horrified by these fly by nights--but what's the difference between these classes and half of what goes on at many campuses with libraries and gyms? It is perhaps not quite so blatant, and some of the kids do all right. More of them, however, waste a few years and then end up doing something that doesn't require a college degree. They are, of course, better off if the taxpayer picks up the tab. But then the taxpayer isn't. Tuition has still been wasted. And no one ever yells at the schools--or the presumption that we should shoehorn every eighteen year old into college, rather than structuring an economy that comfortably accomodates those who are not academic.
Stimulate us!
A few days ago, Obama was promising that 95% of working people would get a tax cut. The House has
scaled that back to make it more affordable. It will be interested to see how the burgeoning young professional class that disproportionately supported Obama--the folks who are making good money, but living in expensive cities and still struggling with rent and loans--will take this.
The rest of the bill is about what you expected--a lot of probably useless green energy spending that I fairly confidently predict will come to nothing, some stuff we should have done anyway, and a bunch of pandering, porky highway spending. The better the projects are, the less likely they are to be stimulative, because they're complicated and time consuming, like healthcare IT and high-speed rail. If we do them on a stimulus timeframe, we'll screw them up, waste an enormous amount of money, and likely make American voters worse off in the long term by locking them in to bad solutions--we won't get a
second bite at high-speed rail between LA and San Francisco. Mostly, Democrats took their wish lists, called them "stimulus", and look set to inflict them on the American people in badly done drag.
Now, what does that remind me off? Rhymes with Whoosh Max Butts, I think . . .
