Clearly a large number of the critics of the food stamp program have never actually lived in conditions which necessitate the program.

I'm a 19 year old full time college student and my mother and brother rely on the food stamp program. Without this program, they would literally not be able to afford food.

A little background:

My mother is mentally ill and cognitively impaired. She suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, severe depression, and minor brain damage caused by incorrectly administered Electroconvulsive therapy.

My brother is 16, and my parents share joint custody of him. They switch off every two weeks.

Between child support and social security, my mother recieves $10,000 per year to live off of. After paying rent, the cost of which is mitigated through a great program known as Section-8, and her bills(power/phone/HEAT), she is left with a marginal amount of money for her own use. I'm currently living at home for the summer. This month she has $20 to split between gas for her car, which is extremely fuel inefficient, and whatever else may arise. In the winter she often lets bills pile up in favor of paying for heat, as Vermont winters are frigid.

She receives a base of $75 per person in food stamps. She receives around $38 per month for my brother, as he spends half his time at her house, the full $75 for herself, and a small amount($20?) for me, as I'm only at home during college vacations. That comes out to $133 per month in food stamps. She has $20 in discretionary spending this month.

To the critics of this program: try growing up in that household and then get back to me. As another insight as to why the poor purchase food that is unhealthy: unhealthy food tends to taste better than healthy food. Potato chips vs celery. When you have no pleasures in your life, no luxuries, you're damn well going to pick the food that tastes better.

I also have a major criticism of this program. So long as I live at my mom's house while I'm not at college, I cannot feasibly get a job. If I were to get a job, my mother would loose her food stamps because there would be a "provider" in the household. I'm exploring alternate possibilities, but without a job, I don't even know if I'll be able to afford to continue my college education. I'm literally playing it by ear right now - there is no better option. I'll know whether or not I'll return to college in a few weeks, when I get my new financial aid letter.

How are the poor supposed to rise from poverty if they can't afford an education?

I think this illuminates several aspects of the debate over food stamps:

1) The poor really are not living lives of joyous leisure on their frantabulously lavish benefits.

2) People who are cognitively disabled--mentally ill or retarded--need more supervision and help from the government, not less.

3) As I've said before, I think the non-cognitively-disabled poor need more wage top-ups and less government decisions about what they should spend their money on.

4) The system is set up so that poor people face ludicrously high marginal tax rates--they can literally exceed 100%, as benefit loss outweighs the additional income. People with fabulously expensive and disabling diseases who can't hold down a regular job are barred from doing any work at all, lest they lose their Medicaid, disability, and food stamps. They also cannot have any assets. Surely preventing people from cheating the government does not actually require forcing people with obviously debilitating chronic conditions to have less discretionary money per month than most middle class kids get in allowance.

This is one of the reasons I'm so gung-ho on a negative income tax to replace most benefits--it doesn't have this ugly feature of sudden benefit loss, but it also doesn't require us to subsidize a hundred middle class people for every poor person we help. It won't work for people who are disabled, of course, who would need a separate system. But for most poor people, and for the rest of us, I think it would be a vast improvement.

5) His point about potato chips versus celery point was made by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

I have nothing to add.

Frankly, it's a miracle unemployment is as low as it is.

I love Cato. I love school choice. I read their stuff all the time, and I think a lot of it is great. I cite it and use it.

But any movement is prone to groupthink. Yea, whenever two or more libertarians are gathered together, you have at least three opinions. But those opinions almost never extend to "You know what America needs? A single-payer national healthcare system." Likewise, I'm pretty sure the break room at EPI never hears the words "Right-to-work laws are awesome!" Groups extend to their own less scrutiny than they extend to those who disagree with them. They form their own domains of knowledge that tend to exclude sources of disconfirming data. Agreement on core principles like "Society should maximize individual liberty" means a lot of questions never get asked.

I don't think that think tanks fudge their numbers. I know Cato pretty well, so I know it's full of earnest, extremely smart people who genuinely believe what they write, and are scrupulous about doing high-caliber work. Most of them are smarter than me, and all of them are probably more likeable in person. But in any sort of policy debate, there's always the danger of asking yourself the question you want to answer.

Say you want to know whether Bush's tax cuts made the tax code more or less progressive. You can ask whether the gradient between brackets has gotten steeper, or you can ask whether the rich now pay a higher or lower percentage of the nation's tax bill than they did before. Those will give you different answers to the original question.

Hence the dueling factoids over whether Bush's tax cuts disproportionately benefitted the rich. The left likes to look at the average amount individuals got, which leads to the conclusion that the rich got a lot more. The right likes to look at who got a bigger share of the tax cuts, which leads to the conclusion that the poor and the middle class were the big winners. Neither of those ways to frame the question is obviously wrong.

It is easier to do this when everyone who works with you, and most of the people you socialize with, agree with you. They also influence who you consider reliable sources--the extreme version of this is Chomskyites, who reject any source that disputes The Great Man's lies more fanciful interpretations of events. But everyone does it. Liberals like Card and Krueger. Conservatives like Neumark, Wascher, and Murphy. The group acceptance of what are the "best" sources seriously influences work based on them.

I'm not saying academics are immune to this--indeed, the CK/NW divide is a good example of the tendency. But academics tend to ask narrower questions--not "Is the minimum wage a good idea" or "who benefits, rich or poor?" Instead they ask things like "what are the effects of the minimum wage on employment?" Now, often those figures get used as if they answered one of the other questions, either because the media needs a good lede, or because the professor has an axe to grind. But there's somewhat less room for choosing your data sources--and at least in economics, it will matter if your colleagues across the political aisle reject your approach. Cato loses little credibility with libertarians if CBPP publishes a withering critique of its work (I mean, it would if any such critique were possible.)

I certainly agree that academics and government employees are not some sort of objective priests who cannot be swayed by thought of politics. I wasn't, for example, very impressed when Kenneth Thorpe estimated that Kerry's healthcare plan would cost $900 million--then a few months later dialed down his estimate to very nearly exactly what Kerry was planning to raise from rolling back the Bush tax cuts. In that situation, I thought that AEI's estimate was probably much closer to the actual mark, and said so. Though to be fair, in part that's because I assume that every government health care plan is going to cost twice the most pessimistic estimate.

In an ideal world, we'd all assess the claims and check the numbers for ourselves.

But readers can't or won't do that. Without reading the studies, I need to rely on reputational credibility to assure them that the data are sound. Think tank numbers are totally useless in a cross-ideological debate. No one on the other side will accept them. And because the think tanks have usually chosen different questions that produce different answers, we bloggers end up in an extremely tiresome round of "dueling think tank studies". Unfortunately, everyone on the other side has a +3 anti-free-market shield on, and I never get through.

I imagine I will not be invited to Cato's annual dinner, and probably EPI has stricken me from the Christmas card list. But I didn't mean to malign Cato, or for that matter EPI, though we're a lot less ideologically compatible. Both are full of honest people who believe what they are writing. But when an institution gathers scholars together specifically to advance an agenda--even an agenda as broad as "Free markets and free minds"--that changes how you use their work, if for no other reason than that it makes a broad swathe of your audience mighty suspicious.

I do think Mr. Coulson is absolutely right about one thing: right wing, and particularly libertarian, think tanks get harsher scrutiny from the media than left wing, academic, or government figures--I once scratched a reference to the Manhattan Institute because the editor wanted me to label it "ultralibertarian" while pasting "nonpartisan" on some left wing group whose name escapes me. I ditched the paragraph rather than make the switch, which may be why they never commissioned work from me again.

The problem is, I don't think that the media are, in general, very good watchdogs about this sort of thing. Most reporters can't read a financial statement, don't know how to handle statistics, and would run screaming if you suggested a regression. That's why I think the most interesting work is the stuff that covers debates within the movement--things like net neutrality, or "libertarian paternalism", for example, or the internal debates on both sides about health care policy.

Anyway, Cato . . . what I'm trying to say is, I adore you. And EPI, I don't know any of you, but I'm sure you're all pretty swell folks too. Even if you don't invite me to your annual dinners, y'all are welcome at my place any time.

With a carbon tax, there would be a number of second order rebound effects(People buy more fuel efficient cars, and then proceed to drive more) that could actually increase emissions in the long term.

Because of this, the effects of a carbon tax on carbon production are uncertain, and the tax would have to be adjusted frequently if we were to meet any sort of international targets. Megan herself frequently posts about the wisdom of frequently changing taxes.

With a Carbon credit scheme, we not only make international carbon trading and hedging strategies far simpler, but we also have complete predictability about the effects.

1) There are no rebound effects with a tax. Rebound effects come from fuel efficiency standards. Those standards raise the price of the car, while lowering the price per mile driven. The result is that people drive more, which claws back some of the gains from fuel efficiency--estimates range from about 10% to 30%. Meanwhile, the added expense of new cars keeps older, less efficient cars on the road longer. If I recall correctly, it took about a decade for cars built under CAFE to reach half the national fleet.

2) True, but as things go, ratcheting up excise tax rates on a commodity of which we are trying to discourage consumption is pretty anodyne.

3) We don't have complete predictability about the effects of international carbon credits. If we did, they'd be a fabulous idea. As things stand, it is very unclear that they do more good than net environmental harm.

The benefit of cap and trade is that you know where you're going. The problem with cap and trade is that it is more vulnerable to gaming, and there are threshold effects. The problem with a tax is that you don't know the price you need to get to the goal you want. But the benefit is that it starts working from dollar one, and it's harder to evade by, say, purchasing dodgy offsets.

Furthermore, the commenter assumes that we actually know the optimal level of carbon. I don't think we do.

The President has expressed dissatisfaction with the proposed Farm Bill wending its way through Congress. He wants farmers whose annual incomes exceed $200,000 to be denied subsidies; the present cutoff is $2.6 million and Congress will not go below $950,000. The President's concern with farm subsidies cannot be taken very seriously, since in 2002 the Republican Congress with Administration connivance greatly increased these subsidies and at the same time repealed some of the modest reforms that the Clinton Administration had introduced in 1996. The Administration's current proposals would, if enacted, be a step in the right direction, but they will not be enacted, and, judging from the 2002 legislation, they are intended I suspect merely to embarrass the Democratic Congress.

What I don't get is why the Democratic Congress is letting itself be embarrassed this way. Of all possible reforms, this would seem to be a no-brainer. How many fabulously wealthy Democratic farmers in swing states can there be?

Nor will miracle teachers make up for the deficits of deprived homes. Teachers in inner city schools are dealing with marginalized kids, many of whom have parents who can't or won't cope. This is the hardest teaching their is, and it's no wonder so many give up. Especially since we can't take the obvious step of paying them more and the bureaucracy less.

I don't agree with Phillip Howard on everything, but in this I think he's right: the vast tangle of rules we've erected to ensure that our public servants don't ever make a mistake has instead ensured that they never get to do anything quite right.

As a practical matter, I agree with the economist I lunched with yesterday that cap and trade is doomed as long as it includes offsets and doesn't price the carbon cost of foreign goods. Otherwise, all we do is displace consumption of fossil fuels to China--an excellent, though thoroughly inefficient, charity program, but no good for the environment. In fact, the net environmental result might well be negative. China and India use fossil fuels in a much less efficient, much more polluting way, because clean technology has a higher capital cost; a ton of coal or a barrel of oil consumed in China produces less output and more pollution than the same ton or barrel consumed here.

Meanwhile the most optimistic hope for the global offset market is that it will pay a fair number of companies to do things they would have done anyway. The darker possibility is that it will encourage developing-market companies to keep polluting facilities open longer in the hopes of selling the offset. Indeed, they might even build new ones so that westerners can pay to shut them down.

The results from Europe's scheme have so far been pretty underwhelming, though everyone keeps assuring me that they're going to take off any day now. Theoretically, cap and trade is indistinguishable from a tax provided that you know either the true externality cost of emissions, or what level of emissions is socially optimal. Since we know neither, and cap-and-trade so far looks pretty weak, I vote for a tax instead.

Of course, I'm the only one so voting, so probably we'll get cap and trade, and probably it won't do very much good. I just wanted to lay the ground for a triumphant "I told you so" later.

Not that this makes me happy; quite the reverse. I think we should do something serious about global warming. I just don't know how to overcome the political and technical problems to do so.

I should probably clarify that I'm talking about twenty, maybe thirty failing urban school districts/agglomerations in the United States. I could care less whether Scarsdale has a powerful teacher's union that negotiates triannual ten month paid leave in Hawaii. And the problem in rural areas is not the teacher's unions, it's the geographic fact of no possible competition, and often the net outmigration of educated people who might make good teachers.

But in those urban areas, the teacher's unions are a big honking problem. This is not some crazy right wing opinion about unions in general; it is a specific problem with public employee unions. The cops and firefighters have their own issues, about which I will happily wax lyrical some other day, but in the end most of them boil down to getting paid ridiculous amounts of money to do no work. If the laziest ten percent of New York's teachers spent all day drinking coffee and doing "literature review", this would be a fiscal problem, but not a desperate one. The problem is, we stick the teacher's union's problems in our classrooms.

But getting rid of the teacher's unions would not lead to some happy paradise where all the students were Doogie Howser. The teacher's unions are one cog in an enormous dysfunctional system. The school boards, the education bureaucracy, the principals, the other "political stakeholders"--precious few of them poor parents--also factor in. If you got rid of the teacher's unions and left the rest of the institutions in place, I would be shocked if the schools noticeably improved.

But while taking away much of the teacher's union's power is definitely not sufficient, it does seem to be necessary. They resist changes to their work practices that the best evidence (see Ayers, Supercrunchers) seems to show works with disadvantaged kids: rote memorization, and phonics. These replace the tools that upper middle class give their kids earlier--even if you went to a whole language school, if you're reading this blog it's a safe bet you had phonics, too, when your parents taught you to "sound it out".

Instead, they agitate for things like smaller class sizes. It is true that schools with smaller class sizes tend to do better--but this is not surprising, since they tend to be more affluent. Pilot programs with disadvantaged kids also seem to show a benefit, but these suffer from the same problem that I discussed in a previous post about the Perry Pre-School: who's staffing your smaller class sizes? If smaller class sizes means employing more marginal teachers, it's far from obvious that this is a net boon. To the kids, I mean. It's an obvious win for the union.

This is why almost all educational ideas fail: they don't scale when you take the highly motivated grad students and gifted teachers out of the equation. That's why I'm tepidly gung ho about Direct Instruction: it has been proven to work with ordinary teachers using ordinary resources.

I don't care if the teachers have unions to negotiate over salary and benefits. But I think the power to block terminations and set work rules should be entirely stripped from them.

But this will not do anything unless you also take on the principal's union, prune the rapidly multiplying deadwood in the educational bureaucracy, get someone who knows their way around a regression analysis to pick your curriculum, and get serious about accountability for the schools. I don't want to defang the teacher's unions for the fun of it; unless you're planning to do these other things, you might as well leave it alone, too.

The trick to overcoming procrastination is even simpler. Ready? Here it is:

Get off your fat badonk and stop procrastinating. Right now. No, not after the Gilmore Girls rerun ends. Now now.

Will you do this? No. You will not. You will dabble at the crossword for a while. Later, you might get a yogurt. Eventually, you'll start reading pointless crap on the Internet. You see, you're doing it as we speak! Because: You are lazy.

Understand that this will never, ever change. You will always be lazy, and you will always procrastinate. I know it's tough for you to hear, but it's a harsh truth that you need to internalize.

I'm serious about this. It's bad enough that you're so damn lazy. People like you can't afford to be delusional on top of all your other problems. Oh, I'm sure you imagine yourself growing out of this silly procrastination phase. In the future, you'll get an early jump on projects, work at a steady pace, and always finish ahead of schedule. You'll take the time to do things right—instead of nipping under the wire in a rush of half-assed, flailing chaos.

It's a beautiful dream, my indolent chum. And I'm here to shatter it. Again, I speak from experience in these matters. When I was young, my procrastination was merely debilitating. As I age, it gets far worse.

Take, for instance, this assignment. I first learned of it two weeks ago and, since then, I've gotten really, really superb at Guitar Hero III.

The good news is, I will get really good at Guitar Hero III. Because right now, I'm amazingly terrible. It took me an hour to get through the first song.

(Note to any Atlantic editors who may be reading: this post written at midnight and responsibly scheduled to run first thing in the morning.)

1. The point of environmental management isn't to denounce sin, it's to get prices right. The problem with GHG-emitting activities is that they are artificially underpriced due to the lack of a carbon tax (or equivalent mechanism, such as cap-and-trade, for internalizing the external costs of those activities). With the right prices, the cost of conferences with physical attendance will rise, improving the competitive position of alternatives such as high-quality teleconferencing, which allows people to meet virtually rather than physically. But if people want or need to confer in person, and are willing to pay the full price including the price of the environmental damage their travel does, they can do so with a clear conscience.

2. Rich people use more goods and services than poor people. That's what "rich" means. Of course multi-millionaires have larger gross GHG footprints than you and I do. So what? If Tierney wants to work on decreasing income gradients, I'm all for it. But of course he's not. He just hates the idea that some rich people use their wealth to promote ideas he dislikes.

3. A large gross carbon footprint doesn't imply a large net carbon footprint. That's what offsets are about. Once GHG contributions are priced appropriately, there won't be any need for private offset purchases. But in the meantime someone who wants to be personally GHG-neutral can get there by writing checks for the activities necessary to offset his or her footprint.

1. We don't have an accurate price. We don't know how much the planet will warm. We don't know how much economic damage this will cause, or upon whom it will fall. We have not settled upon a way to price the interests of future generations in a cooler climate and a ready supply of fossil fuels. We have not even established an irrefutable argument for our status quo bias.

We will almost certainly establish the "correct" price by observation: does it make people do a lot less flying, driving, and power consumption? It therefore seems reasonable to me to evaluate whether your attendance at a conference actually leads to less flying, driving, and power consumption. An academic or journalist who flies for work five or six times a year spews more carbon than an SUV loving Texan who vacations at Grandma's.

2. Many wealthy environmentalists emit not merely much carbon, but tons of moral outrage. If they moralize about other peoples' cars, other people are entitled to moralize about their private jets.

3. Offsets are not the moral equivalent of indulgences--but they are just about as effective. I have no doubt that many who use them devoutly believe that they work, but I don't think many of them care to investigate the matter too closely. In some sense it's a technical question, but as far as I can tell, that technical question is not solveable.

Tree planting is risible unless you commit to keep the land planted forever. Shutting down third world pollution creates a rich market in polluting factories, and also does a lot of things that would have been done anyway. Other projects are even more questionable. None of them, as far as I can tell, attempt to account for rebound effects. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but as far as I can see any cap and trade system that isn't global, and/or includes offsets, will do (to a first approximation) basically nothing to halt global warming.

I'm not saying this makes them wrong about climate change: hypocrites can speak the truth as easily as the virtuous. But I do think that if you are deeply committed to combatting climate change, you have to actually do your best to reduce your carbon footprint, not attempt to offset it. No one in Mark's or my demographic wants to hear this, because we like flying places, and we get to do a lot of it for work. No criticism of Mark implied--I'm just as guilty, or not. But we shouldn't get mad at Tierney for pointing it out, whatever his motives.

Things in New Orleans have improved. But they remain terrible. What’s more, too many institutional factors changed for us to have a good idea what generated the improvement. And statisticians out there might note that when tracking changes over time, it helps to keep the sample constant. For an economist to look at a city’s educational system, subtract a quarter of a million poor people, then look at it again and suggest that destroying the teachers’ unions made all the difference is…well it’s not exactly a rigorous analysis.

For my money, the best new research on this subject emphasizes the role of parental skill levels in achievement and the importance of investment in disadvantaged children when they’re young. Union busting is a waste of time; it’s like changing the oil on a car missing a wheel and hoping for huge performance improvements.

I agree that there's a sample problem, but it also seems that more kids in New Orleans now are qualifying for free lunch than did before, so I'm skeptical that this explains the change. Also, the test scores improved from 2007 to 2008. And the pattern of improvement--strongest in the younger grades--is what you'd expect if the school were the major factor rather than the demographics.

I'm familiar with the research on parental skills and early childhood intervention. I just don't know what to do with it. So far I have not seen a single successful early childhood intervention that is even arguably scaleable: you're talking about intensively monitored programs using top-notch personnel, all of whom are deeply committed to the project's goals and procedures. The longest data set we have is, AFAIK, the Perry Pre-School Project, which produced exceedingly modest gains for a pricetag of more than $20,000 per child per year in today's dollars. Again, that's with a small program of highly committed staff.

What we got instead was Head Start, which produces small gains that most evidence suggests disappear a few years after the kids exit the program. Even if we wanted to do Perry Pre-School, or something even better, nationwide, where would we find the staff? Pre-K sounds great, but it's very likely to be slightly glorified baby sitting outside of affluent school districts that don't need it in the first place.

Since we're not (I hope) going to take kids out of the disadvantaged homes they are born to, the schools are what we're stuck with. And there are programs that work--at least, better than what we have now. They just bore the hell out of the teachers.

I'm not against early childhood intervention, if it works. But it's not going to save us from having to teach the kids better in grades 1-12.

I hate it. I am terrible at it. As a consequence, I bought nothing in Turkey other than tickets to various things, room, food, and a poster of Ataturk. And I overpaid for all of these things, I’m sure, which has left me a bit bitter about the place. Surely this is inefficient overall, no? I understand the price discrimination argument for haggling, especially in a country with a lot of poverty and tourism. But probably hundreds of my dollars stayed in my pocket because I didn’t have good information about the quality of products and I knew the retailer is better at bargaining over the surplus than I am, so… there was no transaction and no surplus.

I can't help but hear the voice of Tyler Cowen echoing in my head:

It is you people, you who resent Coase (1972), you people who induce wage and price stickiness and widen the Okun gap. You people, who don't know what it means to sit back and enjoy your consumer surplus. You beasts!

I weep for Will's missed opportunity. I too have haggled in Turkey, and I have a feeling I'm pretty bad at it. I bought a rug that I am sure could have been obtained for less money if I were a sharper dealer. Who cares? The rug was good wool, had tight knots at the back, and I really liked the design. The important thing was not what it was worth to a Turk; it's what it was worth to me. Which is, a lot more than I paid for it. Most of what is bought in Turkey by tourists is cheap clothing and decorative goods that can be readily visually inspected.

It is only right and natural that we should want to maximize our consumer surplus. But as long as you are getting consumer surplus, you should make the deal. Besides, "one price" is no guarantee that you are getting a good deal. It saves time and lets you free ride on the judgement of others, but Consumer Reports, and America's livingrooms, are full of evidence that their judgement isn't always particularly good.

To be sure, I should not have bought a beige rug. But I still love it. And I'm still wearing the earrings I bought in Greece despite the fact that I know nothing about gold jewelry.

When they turn to fighting outsiders over, say, the minimum wage, the quality of their work sharply degrades. They have limited ability to change their policy position, because the donors will revolt; if they can't get an answer the donors will like, they don't ask the questions. They also only hire scholars who agree with them. That already biases their work, but then you have to contend with the groupthink problem: when everyone at the office agrees with you that your opponents are idiots, and you socialize mostly with other people in the movement, your thinking gets a tad lazy.

So if the only support for your positions comes from movement think tanks (plus maybe a few marginal academics), your position is probably extremely weak. Indeed, if someone from the other side were pulling the same trick, you would be the first to notice this. Independent studies commissioned by think tanks are especially suspect. You can't check their calculations, and survey design is easily manipulable to get the answer you want.

That's why I rarely grab, say, a Heritage or CEI study on the minimum wage and offer that as evidence for my claims. As it happens, on this issue I broadly agree with them. But even if I were willing to vouch for their numbers, it's pointless, because no one who disagrees with me would accept them. So I go to the BLS, the Census Bureau, the CBO, the JEC, the GAO, or an academic study instead. In cases where I can check some of their numbers, I'll use it as a secondary source. But it's never my primary source for a policy position.

We can argue back and forth about whether think tanks buy scholars who agree with them, or pay scholars to agree with them; I'd argue for the former. And in fact, I think many think tanks do very good work, and I take figures from everyone at one time or another. But EPI is not, on the minimum wage, a serious institution. It is funded by unions who want the minimum wage raised because it makes their labor more competitive, and because there are union contracts pegged to the minimum wage. The evidence against the minimum wage could be overwhelming, and EPI would still be publishing surveys showing that it raised middle class incomes by 300% and also, made workers 17% thinner without diet or excercise.

For example, saying that most of the benefit of a minimum wage increase accrued to adults is not a good argument. This is exactly what you would expect if it caused disemployment among teenagers.

The main thing to remember about the minimum wage is that it is trivial. If the minimum wage actually made a substantial improvement in worker's conditions at the expense of employers, it would also almost certainly cause substantial disemployment. But it doesn't, so it won't. Anyone who tells you anything different, on either side of the debate, is trying to sell you something.

I do not say that they are malicious, though certainly in many cases the union clearly recognizes that they are benefitting their members at the expense of the children. But more of it is that the entrenched institutional arrangements, many of them enshrined in union contracts, are extraordinarily impervious to change. When an entire system has grown up around union arrangements, tweaking any substantial part of it threatens to throw the whole system into disarray.

Unions also give teachers power to resist changes that make their jobs less fun. I think the teachers genuinely believe that these changes are bad; but I also think that they strenuously resist learning anything to the contrary. There is really good evidence for the benefits of direct instruction in teaching disadvantaged children. But direct instruction moves the teacher into being more of a technician and less of a creative professional. Ian Ayers talks about this in Supercrunchers, giving the example of bank loan officers, which used to be a skilled, prestigious jobs, and are now almost a clerical role. Doctors and teachers are resisting an attempt to do similar things to their jobs through, respectively, evidence based medicine and direct instruction.

But it's more than that. In New York, the principal's union resisted an attempt to attract the system's top principals to failing schools by giving them a substantial bonus payment in the tens of thousands of dollars. The union vetoed this because the extra pay wouldn't accrue pension. Huh? It was entirely voluntary, the system couldn't afford pension payments, and the principals would have gotten an extra $25 grand or so. But no dice. Any change threatens the union, because it puts the delicate balance of power between all the competing interest groups in play.

Liberals rejoinder that it isn't the unions--it's the funding/poor kids/infrastructure/class size/textbooks. This sort of thing is hard to disprove conclusively, of course. But here's a data point: New Orleans smashes it's teachers union; test scores rise dramatically, even though it's still ministering to poor kids testing substantially below grade level.