The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson explains how, through the idiotic No Child Left Behind law, the Bush administration wrecked public education. Decades from now, conservatives will look back on the past eight years and wonder what the hell we right wingers were smoking from 2001-2008. You read this NCLB stuff, and you can't quite believe that it's the product of a purportedly conservative administration, and a Republican Congress. You expect liberal Democrats to go for this sort of thing, because it suits their philosophical preference for leveling. But conservative Republicans?
How Dubya wrecked education
Saturday September 22, 2007
Categories: Republicans
Filed Under: Andrew Ferguson, No Child Left Behind
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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If you are 45 or younger, I strongly suggest you start socking away... well, yesterday
Hey! Easy now.
I don't want the truth. Number guys are simply no fun. No, I want soft nothings whispered in my ear.
And I'm sure the next president will more than be happy to oblige. Whoever it is, they will wince whenever they even think about how much that nasty third rail hurts.
Invented a crisis? Please. There must be changes in SS to balance the books as the population ages. That's a fact.
Changes!=crisis
SS is not going to run out of money in any foreseeable amount of time. The 'crisis' is that the government keeps borrowing from it, which, I would have to suggest, is more a problem of government overspending than of SS.
At some point in the future, SS taxes may have to be raised slightly, but that's neither here nor there. And, as SS taxes are already slightly too high (As evidenced by the fact the government can borrow from it.), that point in time is decades in the future.
And, at that point, we can trivially make SS work for everyone by raising the Social Security Wage Base. (This is amount above which you pay no SS taxes on.) Right now, only the first $100,000 of income is taxes, in twenty years all we have to do is double whatever it is at that point.
The 'crisis', OTOH, was purely invented, based on lies that SS is almost broke. It is 'almost broke' in the same way that a person with their money in the bank is 'almost broke' in that they have almost no cash. The government does, in fact, have to pay SS back the money it borrowed. (And, until SS needs it, I'd rather the government borrow from that fund than to borrow from the Chinese, although I'd really prefer it stop borrowing at all.)
Some information about how Social Security works.
The current wage base (2007) is $97,500. The calculation for each year is defined by law, explained here: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/cbbdet.html
A very common misconception is that the taxes you are paying have anything to do with the benefits you will receive. The calculations are determined entirely separately; during my career (1974 to 1990), I witnessed not one discussion that came even close to suggesting that they are or should be connected. Political processes created and maintain both of them. It should be noted, also, that benefits far outstripped the taxes collected during a recipient's working life, this being why the revenue base (a combination of the wage base and the rate) had to be increased nearly every year.
DavidTC, SocSec has always been a pay-as-you-go model. Current revenues went almost entirely to paying current recipients. Only in recent years have they worked toward creating a reserve fund (from which Congress idiotically borrows*) to mitigate changes in the revenue base, that being the total wages being taxed, not the rate. It has always been technically correct that SocSec was on the brink of bankruptcy, even while that description was of no value other than to make people afraid.
A reserve is based on sound actuarial science, and all private plans are required to have a reserve. I'll spare you the technical details, but I will point out the glaring hypocrisy of it all: under federal law, it is illegal for a plan sponsor of a qualified pension plan to "borrow" from it or in any way use its funds for purposes other than paying benefits to participants. Congress essentially thumbed their noses at this very fiscally responsible restriction, even while tightening the rule and increasing the penalties for violations.
* They cover their asses by using SocSec reserve funds to buy government bonds. Puts me in mind of the cliche: an IOU is worth about the same as the paper upon which it is written.
It has always been technically correct that SocSec was on the brink of bankruptcy, even while that description was of no value other than to make people afraid.
Yup. I was just pointing out that the engineered 'crisis' was because, politically, the Republicans couldn't implement their plan of destroying it. I was just pointing out that even if it was going to be insolvent (Which it isn't.), there's an obvious and trivial fix: Raise the wage base.
Anyone who has ever suggested there is a crisis in social security and thus we will need to reduce benefits in the future is a) misinformed, or b) lying. Maybe in some sci-fi future where everyone's immortal or something, but not in any foreseeable future.
As I've said before on this site, and will continue to say, the American people are amazingly 'left wing' and will not accept any reduction in social services, and in fact would like to expand them. So, to get rid of them, it basically takes dirty tricks and lies, because anyone who walks into a Congressional or Presidential debate and says 'I want to get rid of social security' would never get elected.
It's the same with Medicare, FEMA and public education and everything. The only way to get rid of them is to lie about them and/or wreck them from the outside using laws like NCLB or the inside using fifth columnists.
NCLB is a misguided attempt to repeal the laws of biology. When NCLB specifies that "every" child will attain "proficiency," this automatically ignores the fact that schools are also required to admit and teach severely mentally handicapped children - as well as those emotionally disturbed, or challenged in other ways. If there are more than a certain target # of these children in a school, their data will be dis-aggregated and examined separately.
Leaving race aside entirely, this is automatically a set-up for a no-win situation.
What a lot of middle-class / upper-middle class parents simply don't see about NCLB is that it also does the exact opposite of what it professes. It doesn't "empower" parents or "get them involved." NCLB at bottom uses the stick of removing the duly-elected local school board from the school governing process. Parents who attend school board meetings, run for the board, volunteer at their schools, etc. are going to have a rude awakening when they find that their three-years-in-a-row "failing" school loses its school board and comes under state control.
I don't believe the middle- and upper-middle classes are going to abandon public schools. There are too many people invested in the two-income lifestyle to adopt homeschooling, and many are not interested in parochial/religious education. What they ARE going to drop-kick are Republicans.
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