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Ideas for the agenda

trapdoor

Governor
We have certainly broadened education. We've gone from widespread illiteracy and a situation where half of Americans didn't even get a high school education, to a situation where illiteracy is almost unknown and a great share of the population gets college degrees.
I doubt that's true. What we've really done is increase the statistic showing that we have more literacy -- but I meet functional illiterates, all high school graduates and some well beyond that -- every day.

As for the idea education shallower, I'd need to see evidence of that to believe it. If you compare apples to apples (e.g., the most well-educated 10% in 1940 versus the most well-educated 10% today), would there be any sign the former was better educated, overall? Certainly, knowledge of some things has faded -- ask a top-10% 18-year-old today to translate Latin and, on average, you'll get a worse response than asking a top-10% 18-year-old from 1940. But I guarantee today's version will do vastly better in a test of computer science knowledge, or relativity physics, or quantum mechanics.
Yes, and Babe Ruth couldn't hit a slider -- because sliders didn't exist when Babe Ruth played baseball. Dragging in subjects that didn't exist and attempting such an apples to oranges comparison is irrelevant. The top 10 percent in the U.S. in 1900 didn't know anything about computers -- but it knew a lot about steam engines, and was much more conversant in the classics than a top 10 percent graduate in the 1990s. Its a difference of kind, not of degree.

There's only so many hours in the day, so as education takes new topics on board, some less relevant ones fall by the wayside. All the time that's spent, these days, on teaching, say, the history of WWII and the Civil Rights Movement, or about DNA, plate tectonics, and black holes, is time that, in 1940, would have been spent learning something else, like Greek..
Would that students were even learning the topics you suggest shunted aside Greek and Latin. They aren't. The typical U.S. student can't find Germany on a map. I once asked a putative college student from Independence, Mo., who was the U.S. president after FDR and before Eisenhower. He couldn't answer Harry S Truman, even though he was from a town where a high school, a road, a courthouse, and a presidential library are festooned with the man's name. He couldn't have explained plate tectonics if you gave him the hint "geology" and his only knowledge of a black hole came from a Disney movie. And he was a sophomore in college. OK, I admit it's only one example, but I seem to have a lot of encounters like that one, and I find it frustrating, as I myself have all of the knowledge you mentioned, and no college degree at all. I don't think we're doing a superior job of education students, federal program or not. And I don't think it is best addressed at the federal level, but at the local level where people actually know the students, the teachers and the problems they face.
 

Arkady

President
I'll accept your data if you adjust it for inflation and population growth.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cb/U.S._Federal_spending_per_capita,_nominal_and_inflation_adjusted.png

As you can see from that chart federal spending was pretty flat since 1980, and even declined in the 90's, before jumping 20+% in to 00's and staying there. That's a pretty big jump in historical terms, if you ask me...
I appreciated this post, since it identified a genuine problem with my analysis: the government spending growth rates in different eras may largely be a result of inflation, rather than real growth, or population growth (when the more relevant question, for purposes of this analysis, is relative growth, which shows how big the government is relative to the population it is serving). So, I was happy to recrunch the numbers.

Most of the data was already in the link I already provided, which indicated population. However, I also had to use this link, for inflation index:

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/consumer-price-index-and-annual-percent-changes-from-1913-to-2008/

Using that method, comparing 2013 to 2001 (a twelve-year change), total government spending growth was 2.511%, after adjusting for both population growth and inflation. In the prior 70 years, the average was 5.420%. So, using this new method, the answer is still the same: in the last twelve years, government spending growth has been well below half of the normal rate.

If you compare to the period with the best run of prosperity increase and excellent economic performance, from when the New Deal was under way, in 1934, through the end of the Johnson administration, in 1968, the numbers are even more interesting. During those 35 years of Democratic domination (Democratic presidents for 27 out of 35 years, mostly Democratic control over both houses of Congress, and a liberal Supreme Court), government grew by an inflation-and-population-adjusted 5.587% annualized, even as poverty and unemployment plummeted, incomes for most Americans soared, and the American Dream became a reality for most people.
 

Lukey

Senator
I appreciated this post, since it identified a genuine problem with my analysis: the government spending growth rates in different eras may largely be a result of inflation, rather than real growth, or population growth (when the more relevant question, for purposes of this analysis, is relative growth, which shows how big the government is relative to the population it is serving). So, I was happy to recrunch the numbers.

Most of the data was already in the link I already provided, which indicated population. However, I also had to use this link, for inflation index:

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/consumer-price-index-and-annual-percent-changes-from-1913-to-2008/

Using that method, comparing 2013 to 2001 (a twelve-year change), total government spending growth was 2.511%, after adjusting for both population growth and inflation. In the prior 70 years, the average was 5.420%. So, using this new method, the answer is still the same: in the last twelve years, government spending growth has been well below half of the normal rate.

If you compare to the period with the best run of prosperity increase and excellent economic performance, from when the New Deal was under way, in 1934, through the end of the Johnson administration, in 1968, the numbers are even more interesting. During those 35 years of Democratic domination (Democratic presidents for 27 out of 35 years, mostly Democratic control over both houses of Congress, and a liberal Supreme Court), government grew by an inflation-and-population-adjusted 5.587% annualized, even as poverty and unemployment plummeted, incomes for most Americans soared, and the American Dream became a reality for most people.
That may well be, but another fact in this matter is that a) the early increases were coming off a fairly low base, and b) much of that early growth was investment and not welfare, which has flipped in the past 30 years or so. The nature of the spending isn't the same across the whole period so why would you think its effects would be?

Also, one might be tempted to ask the simple question, why does government have to grow net of inflation and population at a rate approaching 6%?
 

Arkady

President
I doubt that's true. What we've really done is increase the statistic showing that we have more literacy -- but I meet functional illiterates, all high school graduates and some well beyond that -- every day.
No doubt in 1940 you'd have met a whole lot more of them -- and not just "functional illiterates," but also a lot of people who literally couldn't read at all.
This isn't just about soaring graduation rates and soaring rates of people getting higher education. It's a matter of people doing better, over time, on just about any test of intellectual and academic performance you care to name. The effect is so strong, it's got its own name: the Flynn Effect. It shows up in IQ tests, military aptitude tests, and any other attempt to test broad-based populations. Because of it, they have to "recenter" such tests on a regular basis, because if you gave the old tests to new populations, you'd find that the average person was creeping up near "genius" level by the standards of older populations. Or, to put it another way, if you took a modern IQ test and gave it to a population in 1940, you'd find that the average person would score around 80. Essentially, a middle-of-the-road person in 1940 would have been bottom 10% today.... not quite mentally retarded, but certainly identified as developmentally delayed. And although this effect is stronger in the bottom and middle than at the top, it shows up throughout. A top-10% person of 1940 would likely have been unremarkable by today's standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Dragging in subjects that didn't exist and attempting such an apples to oranges comparison is irrelevant.

It's highly relevant. If the slider existed in the time of Babe Ruth, then surely he'd have learned to hit it. But, he'd probably also not have been as good at hitting the pitches that did exist in his time. There's only so many hours he's going to practice, and if more of that practice consists of hitting sliders, that's fewer reps hitting other pitches. And that's the point here. As we add new subjects that people need to learn today, there's less time to learn older subjects that earlier generations had the luxury to focus on.
 

Arkady

President
Also, one might be tempted to ask the simple question, why does government have to grow net of inflation and population at a rate approaching 6%?
It doesn't have to. We've just gotten better results when it does than when it doesn't. This is possibly because earlier eras had sub-optimal public/private economic mixes, so periods when government was growing more rapidly were periods when we were moving more rapidly to an optimal mix, and thus periods when improvements were more dramatic, whereas these days we're moving more slowly towards the optimal, with predictably less to show for it.
 

Lukey

Senator
It doesn't have to. We've just gotten better results when it does than when it doesn't. This is possibly because earlier eras had sub-optimal public/private economic mixes, so periods when government was growing more rapidly were periods when we were moving more rapidly to an optimal mix, and thus periods when improvements were more dramatic, whereas these days we're moving more slowly towards the optimal, with predictably less to show for it.
I think I was also trying to make the point that with the flip to more welfare over investment, we are moving further toward the sub-optimal (lately). You seem to be trying to suggest that because we had success with investment earlier, we should have the same success with the kind of transfer payments & left wing boondoggles that the Obama "Stimulus" failed to produce results with. Pardon my abject skepticism...
 

Arkady

President
I think I was also trying to make the point that with the flip to more welfare over investment, we are moving further toward the sub-optimal (lately). You seem to be trying to suggest that because we had success with investment earlier, we should have the same success with the kind of transfer payments & left wing boondoggles that the Obama "Stimulus" failed to produce results with. Pardon my abject skepticism...
The Obama stimulus was noteworthy for being a right-wing boondoggle, not a left-wing one. A vast portion of the stimulus took the form of economically ineffectual tax cuts, with much of the rest taking the form of hand-outs to giant corporations, at a time when a shortage of private capital simply was not an issue. That was a far cry from the liberal approach to stimulus. The liberal model is what FDR did in the New Deal, when the government vastly expanded its payrolls in order to hire countless people directly, to do all sorts of things from building trails in public parks to recording the stories of elderly former slaves. That boosted employment greatly, benefited the public more directly, and set us up for stronger future growth. Quite the opposite of cutting taxes to stimulate the economy, FDR boosted taxes a great deal, especially on the rich.
 

trapdoor

Governor
No doubt in 1940 you'd have met a whole lot more of them -- and not just "functional illiterates," but also a lot of people who literally couldn't read at all.
This isn't just about soaring graduation rates and soaring rates of people getting higher education. It's a matter of people doing better, over time, on just about any test of intellectual and academic performance you care to name. The effect is so strong, it's got its own name: the Flynn Effect. It shows up in IQ tests, military aptitude tests, and any other attempt to test broad-based populations. Because of it, they have to "recenter" such tests on a regular basis, because if you gave the old tests to new populations, you'd find that the average person was creeping up near "genius" level by the standards of older populations. Or, to put it another way, if you took a modern IQ test and gave it to a population in 1940, you'd find that the average person would score around 80. Essentially, a middle-of-the-road person in 1940 would have been bottom 10% today.... not quite mentally retarded, but certainly identified as developmentally delayed. And although this effect is stronger in the bottom and middle than at the top, it shows up throughout. A top-10% person of 1940 would likely have been unremarkable by today's standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Dragging in subjects that didn't exist and attempting such an apples to oranges comparison is irrelevant.

It's highly relevant. If the slider existed in the time of Babe Ruth, then surely he'd have learned to hit it. But, he'd probably also not have been as good at hitting the pitches that did exist in his time. There's only so many hours he's going to practice, and if more of that practice consists of hitting sliders, that's fewer reps hitting other pitches. And that's the point here. As we add new subjects that people need to learn today, there's less time to learn older subjects that earlier generations had the luxury to focus on.
Well, in that case our schools were not only just fine, but showing improvement, before there was a federal involvement. Either way, there was no need for that involvement.
 

Arkady

President
Well, in that case our schools were not only just fine, but showing improvement, before there was a federal involvement. Either way, there was no need for that involvement.
Before federal involvement, there was still mass ignorance and educational failure. It was, as you'll recall, the era of "separate but equal" schooling in much of the country. Things have gotten vastly better since the federal government stepped in.
 

trapdoor

Governor
Before federal involvement, there was still mass ignorance and educational failure. It was, as you'll recall, the era of "separate but equal" schooling in much of the country. Things have gotten vastly better since the federal government stepped in.
The federal involvement of which I speak debuted during the Reagan administration. Do you really think there was worse "mass ignorance and educational failure" in the U.S. circa 1980 than there is today? Is so, I'm sorry but I find that unsupportable.
 

Arkady

President
The federal involvement of which I speak debuted during the Reagan administration. Do you really think there was worse "mass ignorance and educational failure" in the U.S. circa 1980 than there is today? Is so, I'm sorry but I find that unsupportable.
As with all such questions, I like to look for actual evidence, rather than just trusting my gut. So, let's look at that. Since 1980, status dropout rates have fallen from around 14.1% to somewhere in the 8.1% range. Event dropout rates for 15-24-year-olds have dropped from 6.1% to 3.4%.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012006.pdf

NAEP scores support the idea that test performance has also risen. In reading, scores for 17 year olds are up from 285 to 287, for 13 year olds from 258 to 263, and for 9 year olds from 215 to 221. Math also shows gains for all three ages (the test was in '82, not '80, but close enough): from 298 to 306, 269 to 285, and 219 to 244, respectively.

As you can see, the biggest gains were for the youngest people. This is to be expected when you remember the big drop in status dropout rates (14.1% to 8.1%), meaning that with the oldest age cohort, you were testing a more elite segment of 17-year-olds back in 1980 than you are today, since less elite students are more likely to still be in school to take those tests, these days. That's what makes the numbers even more amazing: despite testing a less elite population segment than before, there's still across-the-board improvement.

Of course, dropout rates and standardized test performance are only two indicators of the quality of our schools and we could look for others. For example, how safe are our schools? That, too, shows a gigantic improvement since 1980.

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/schoolviolence/data_stats.html
http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/410437.pdf
http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/410437.pdf
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/crimeindicators/crimeindicators2011/tables/table_01_1.asp

The improvement has been particularly dramatic since the start of the Clinton years. Here's the number of homicides by students on school grounds during the school day, by year:



The rate of serious violent crimes in school has declined, too:



http://curry.virginia.edu/research/projects/violence-in-schools/school-violence-myths

What other indicators could we look at for quality of education? Well, we could look at what share of students are going on to college. There's been a dramatic improvement there, too:



So, schools have lower drop-out rates, higher test results, less violence, and a greater tendency to send kids on to higher education. Those were the only stats I could think of to test "mass ignorance and educational failure." Did you have other ones in mind?
 

trapdoor

Governor
Oh please -- tests scores have risen because they dumbed down the tests -- which they had to do because people protested when their test scores were keeping them out of college. Enrollment in college has increased, but graduation levels are flat, at best, and mostly this reflects the "Phoenix University" phenomena, in which people enroll in one or another sub-par for-pay school, and never finish. This enhances the school's bottom line at the taxpayer's expense (usually) but not much else.
 
Who ignored it? Payroll deduction was the result of a inside decision in FDR's first term. It's designer was a "dollar a year man" from the JC Penny corporation who suggested some form of time-payment system for income tax, so that taxes could be raised without a taxpayer revolt. As the IRS falls under executive control and can change its rules without consulting congress, the change was made with a simple executive order from FDR.


You appear to be conflating federal income tax with FICA. They aren't the same thing.



This squares with my earlier statement-- you are confusing federal income tax with FICA. If you want to discuss Social Security, and its history, I'm happy to do that so long as you realize that almost none of the promises made to the American public at the creation of the Social Security Act have been kept.
Why don't you lead the discussion, since you seem to believe you are an expert on it and the promises "not kept" by the man who ushered in Amendment XXII
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-
Perhaps because he was so "unpopular" and kept no promises.
second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
 
Nice argument but to no purpose. I'm not arguing for NO taxes. I'm arguing that gov't. collectivized health care has a far better alternative.
"Government collectivized heath care"? How so?
"Far better alternative" to the privatized health care system, few, if any argued was not headed for collapse? What's your solution and some example of proof to its success?
 
Your link didn't work (it appears to be incomplete). Happy to respond if I can see your source.
Look up Amendment XXII of the Constitution of the United States of America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

I was a Republican for a long time, grew up in a Republican family, saw it split when the neo republicans came in with their twilight zone sense of reality and those who bought into it, perhaps out of greed and selfishness. Now some remain Republicans (who don't kowtow to the neo republican mantras) some of those who bought into the neo republican memes still buy into them, some have slowly come back down to earth and reality wondering how the hell they believed what the neo fantasies were telling them and some, like myself, became independent of strict party alignment and adherence to any and all things tossed out by any political party. I have always voted for what I believed was plain old fashioned common sense, intelligence, consideration for others and an ability of any candidates to see and weigh all sides of an equation, not just their own (the sign of justice and of hearing and weighing all sides with no prejudice for or against those wanting to tell and have their side of the story told and explained to make a case for it. While BS and alternative realities may still be a possibility in a court room, the requirement to back one's case up with evidence, most times based in reality, make it harder for what might fly in the courts of popular opinion, Goebbels like "marketing" and hearsay, to flourish in places where justices is less about taking sides and more about what will apply to all, regardless of what "side" an issue or dispute, they fall into.
 
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The fact is if you spend more money on education, you just drive up the cost (but not the quality) of education. Some transportation and R&D spending could have positive effects but usually it is politically motivated rather than market driven, and you end up with bridges to nowhere. Welfare spending is just base consumerism funded with other people's money. It does more for the China economy than it does for ours.
What happens when we spend more money on things like gasoline, food, weapons of war, housing, electricity, CEO and upper management pay?
 
How does term limiting the president have to do anything with our earlier conversation?
You suggested FDR's policies and signed into laws caused not only a lot of problems, but promises not kept. Why would people who felt so betrayed, elect the man to be their president four times? Why would something that has kept so few, if any promises (in your estimation), still be intact today? Payroll deduction is not just FICA or income taxes, but all deductions taken from one's paycheck and when one's income reaches a certain amount their payroll deductions are reduced by not having to pay the SS portion of FICA on income above the cutoff.

"Odd" isn't it, that those who introduced and passed Amendment XXII (which granted, still had to be ratified by the states) were the then Republican controlled Congress and those Republicans who called for its repeal called for it when Reagan was in the White House?

Not sure how you didn't connect the dots to term limits and FDR's policies and his popularity, but can see how that failure might affect your overall view of things and lack of consideration for more than a limited number of factors.
 
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Actually, both you and Eisenhower are wrong. Military spending, especially wartime spending, is usually stimulative. If you use up 20,000 tons of the specialized steel used in bomb casings, you have to buy up 20,0000 tons of that steel to make more -- and that means paying iron ore minors, steel refiners, etc., right down the line, pumping money into the economy. It's the reason Congressmen fight to have military bases in their districts -- they know the presence of such a base is great for the economy of the district.



But another way to look at it is that you've added a layer of bureaucracy that redistributes the money, meaning less is distributed. Somehow America managed to educate students without a federal Department of Education for more than 200 years -- a century in what most people would call the modern era. Now we have overhead to pay for that wasn't there before. Funding that was once all local now must be diminished to pay for the overhead -- less money is available in the economy.



By that reasoning, Congress could fix all the economy's woes simply by giving a $1 million payment to every adult, thereby driving consumer spending. Now, obviously you realize that would devalue the currency and wreck the economy -- and that is what most social spending does, too. It doesn't matter if you spend a million dollars one time, or one dollar a million times.
So what you're saying is that huge government expenditures and debt CAN stimulate the economy? Is that news? Perhaps to some neo-republicans who wish the world to believe tax revenues somehow disappear down a black hole never to be seen again. While jobs are provided during times of war, which in turn stimulate the economy (for as long as the war lasts), what the expenditures are used to purchase in the end and beyond the jobs needed to support a wartime economy WW scale effort, they are not long lasting, but for offshoots from the innovation and things like the Serviceman's Readjustment Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill that is perhaps the most forgotten or overlooked largest factor in the formation of the American middle class and its prosperity, allowing the nation to pay off HUGE amounts of government debt to fund this nation's part in WWII. This provides some indicative proof that government debt, in of itself is not deadly to the nation, but for the type of spending.

Perpetual massive spending on the machines of war is not productive long term spending, increasing opportunities for even more Americans to achieve higher levels of education and all forms of heretofore unseen "ownership" is, but all that has to be backed up by a population that puts it to good use, not ripping one another off or refusing to share the wealth that is a benefit of the wealth others shared with them (see pay it forward). Bombs and humongously over budget embassies in war torn nations like Iraq, are not domestic economy incubators.
 
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