David Trinh

This article from the Star Tribune provides a great example of why it’s bad to write policy into constitutions.  Essentially, Minnesota passed a “Legacy Amendment” in 2008 that dedicated a portion of the state’s sales tax revenue to projects concerning the arts and the environment.  While the amendment was certainly well meaning—what self-respecting liberal doesn’t like clean water, parks and orchestras?—it has  created a whole host of problems for lawmakers who are trying to pare down a gigantic budget deficit without slashing programs that provide things like healthcare for homeless people.

While we might all like to have more parks and art museums, I think we can all agree that it’s probably better to prioritize saving peoples’ lives over trail maintenance.  When well-meaning citizens write spending policy into the state constitution they prevent well-meaning legislators from effectively triaging during an economic downturn.  Any constitutional amendment which mandates specific levels of spending or a particular program, be it a liberal Legacy Amendment or Pawlenty’s ill-conceived budgeting amendment, should be kept off the books.

I’m generally not such a fan, but Governor Pawlenty is right about this:

Gov. Pawlenty cut $1.9 million in state ethanol producer payments. From his detailed budget proposal (emphasis mine):

This proposal reduces the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s (MDA) program and grant spending by 6.7 percent. The largest reduction is a one-time decrease in ethanol producer payments ($1.931 million), with the remainder making up reductions in grants to county fairs, livestock breeders, agricultural research and education organizations and Second Harvest Heartland. Mental health grants, farm-to-school grants, livestock investment grants and MDA’s dairy development and profitability enhancement program are also reduced.

Hear, hear.  These programs deserve much more than a one-time decrease but this cut is better than nothing.  Polinaut notes that this probably won’t gain Pawlenty many accolades in Iowa, but hey, if Arnie Vinick can win the Republican nomination after taking a strong stance against such a foolish policy, I’m sure Pawlenty has a fighting chance to do so as well.

People are real dumb:

Most Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students, according to a new study. And the proportion of people who hold that view has increased to 60 percent, from 52 percent in 2007…

The study, a joint project of Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, also found that most Americans believe that colleges could admit a lot more students without lowering quality or raising prices, and that colleges could spend less and maintain a high quality of education.

This is bizarre.  If colleges really cared more about their bottom lines than educational outcomes, presumably they would leap at an opportunity to admit more students—especially if the marginal cost of each extra student was so low that they could do so without lowering quality or raising prices.  There are a lot of people out there that need to take an intro econ course.

That said it’s worth noting that American universities consistently top the charts as the world’s best educational institutions.  It’s possible some of these lists might be a little busted but you can’t deny that American colleges and universities do most of the world’s leading research and are the most desired places of study for most of the world’s population.  Gotta think we’re doing something right.

Collin Peterson is at it again, via the Wonkroom:

Speaking before a gathering of coal-powered executives, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO) announced Tuesday that he, Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), and Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) were introducing yet another piece of legislation to roll back Clean Air Act action on global warming pollution. Skelton’s Dirty Air Act comes on the heels of similar legislation by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Rep. Jerry Moran (R-KS), and Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND). At the Missouri Rural Electric Cooperative State Legislative Conference, Skelton argued that because Congressional action on climate has “stalled” in the Senate, he “cannot tolerate turning over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to unelected bureaucrats” at the Environmental Protection Agency:

It goes without saying that this is terrible policy; real environmental damage is going to occur because Peterson has decided once again to sell out to the energy industry.  The puzzling thing about this deal though, is that it’s largely unclear what Collin Peterson stands to gain by helping out the coal industry.  The 7^th isn’t exactly coal country, so I can only assume that there’s some sort of backroom deal here between Peterson and coal lobby.  I wouldn’t be surprised if next time there’s some sort of movement to make the true environmental consequences of ethanol known that big coal and their allies in Congress will step in to block this change.

On a different note, I have to say that Skelton is actually right on one thing: the institutional failures in the Senate have begun devolving a bit too much power to unelected portions of our government.  I’m all for more stringent environmental regulations but it really would be nice if they were codified into law instead of being subject to the whim of bureaucrats inside the EPA.  Everything’s all well and good now, but when the Republicans eventually take power, these will undoubtedly be some of the first rules to go.  Sure would be nice if we could entrench them with some sort of statute and provide some stable rules that businesses could plan around.

Fresh off of new polling that Rep. Mark Kirk is leading Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias in the race for President Obama’s former Senate seat comes even more devastating news for Illinois Democrats:

Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL) has now declared that the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, businessman Scott Lee Cohen, should consider withdrawing from the race in the wake of publicity surrounding a 2005 arrest for domestic violence…

The big problem Quinn has here is that while Cohen is technically his “running mate,” in the sense that they will be listed together on the general election ballot in the same way that we vote for president and vice president, Quinn did not pick him. Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor in Illinois are nominated in separate primaries, but then run together as a ticket.

I have to say, the system that Illinois uses to select lieutenant governors is completely insane.  It’s one thing to expect people to actually pay attention to a down-ballot race for an office that has little-to-no real power, but if you’re going to insist that the people select the candidates individually in the primary, you should probably let them make the same choice during the general election.  These sort of mandated shotgun political weddings are a disaster in governance waiting to happen.

On a broader note, I think this story only emphasizes an element of American democracy that Matt Yglesias is rightly fond of harping on—namely the fact that our electoral system forces voters to select way too many candidates.  The fact that Scott Cohen was able to slip through the scrutiny of the media and the voters to earn a spot on the ballot line of a major party to potentially become the Lt. Governor of the nation’s fifth most populace state is absolutely astounding.

It’s not like Illinois voters are particularly inept either.  This sort of miscarriage of democracy happens all the time.  My favorite example from Minnesotan politics is the 1994 Attorney General’s race when Sharon Anderson, a very crazy self-proclaimed witch and pagan worshipper, managed to win the Republican primary.  Republicans ended up having to endorse the Democratic nominee; I’m a pretty partisan Democrat, but I’ll concede that the process was hurt by a lack of real electoral competition for the office.

Voters don’t want to make these types of terrible choices but when they’re forced to choose candidates for upwards of sixteen different offices, they prioritize some races and vote solely on the basis of Scandinavian last names in others.   This is a bad way to run a democracy and until we fix it we’re going to keep seeing more Scott Cohens and Sharon Andersons.

I’ve secretly been an admirer of Tim Pawlenty for a long time.  Not because any of his politics resonate with my own beliefs, far from it in fact, but because I was under the impression that he belonged to the ‘grownup wing’ of the Republican Party.  As a strong proponent of a competitive two-party system, I thought our good ‘ol boy from Minnesota was poised to become a leading figure in the effort to remake the Republican Party.  Oh boy, was I wrong.  Recently Governor Pawlenty sat down for an interview with the Washington Post and gave some pretty devastating answers on a wide variety of questions:

After starting off with a pretty weak self-deprecating joke, Pawlenty tried to pivot to typical conservative budget fluff:

FINEMAN: How would you propose to balance the federal budget?

PAWLENTY: Rather than looking to raise taxes, we should pass an amendment to require a balanced budget with exceptions for war, natural disasters, and other emergencies. Congress should reduce discretionary spending, with exceptions for key programs such as the military, veterans, and public safety. (Bold mine, DT)

Err, nevermind the fact that outside of such ‘key programs,’ there isn’t really much discretionary spending left to cut.  Few things annoy me more than when politicians treat defense spending as if it belongs in some magical realm where dollars for extravagant weapons programs materialize out of thin air.  Contrary to this line of reasoning, a dollar spent on an unnecessary plane is a dollar that can’t be spent in some other portion of the budget.  What’s more, there’s plenty of fat to cut in the defense budget!

FINEMAN: How do we pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

PAWLENTY: We have to push for more fiscal responsibility elsewhere. Congress should cut current domestic spending and reject costly new proposals like a government takeover of health care. (Bold mine, DT)

Said ‘government takeover of health care’ reduces the deficit– ’nuff said.

FINEMAN: Was the TARP a good idea?

PAWLENTY: No. I had numerous problems with it. The goal was to ensure that we didn’t have a lending freeze. [But] there was no requirement that lending would occur, and it hasn’t. No. 2, there were no criteria for who would get the money and under what circumstances and for what. I also thought it was too large. (Bold mine, DT)

Excessively generous lending by financial institutions is what caused the financial crisis!  Pawlenty would have preferred a recovery plan that required banks to make the same risky investments which precipitated the crisis to begin with– really?  The key objective of TARP was to provide the banking system with enough capital to restore balance sheets back to relatively sane levels– not to permit the same kind of foolhardy lending to continue unabated.

FINEMAN: Let me ask you about social issues your party has been dealing with. In her book, Palin claims that McCain’s handlers wanted her to be silent about her belief in creationism. How would you describe your view?

PAWLENTY: I can tell you how we handle it in Minnesota. We leave it to the local school districts. We don’t mandate a curriculum or an approach. We allow for something called “intelligent design” to be discussed as a comparative theory. It doesn’t have to be in science class. (Bold mine, DT)

Uh… that’s actually not how the Minnesota school system operates.  I dunno what state Pawlenty has been running for the past seven years but I am reasonably confident that evolution is mandated at the state level and that teachers don’t have the power to teach intelligent design.  After all, if they did have this flexibility, I would have learned nothing but intelligent design in my hometown.

Tim, what happened?  You’re turning into a joke.

Although I can attest this was not a problem at my school in rural MN, there is apparently a glut of honors programs in many American high schools.  Overall, I agree with the thrust of this article; it’s important to keep honors programs selective so that they actually mean something besides another tassel at graduation.  I would only add that there is an even further harm from the proliferation of honors programs at top-tier high schools that the piece fails to mention, namely, that because many lower-tier schools, like the one I attended, have only NHS, applicants from these lesser schools are at a serious disadvantage during the college admissions process. It’s awfully difficult to compete against students who can spruce up their resumes by choosing from a smorgasbord of honors programs.

Now I’ll concede that I was never in an honors society at my high school–there’s a long tale here to be told, but the short of it is that my name was vetoed by a faculty member who took issue with some of my political opinions–and still managed to make it through the college admission gauntlet relatively unscathed; however, I do remember my lack of departmental awards (non-existent at my high school) and my complete lack of honor society membership cards did cause my interviewer to raise his eyebrows while he was paging through my papers.  This is, of course, just one more advantage that students who go to comparatively better high schools have over others but it seems like one that could be eliminated relatively easily by imposing more stringent requirements on membership or by actually making an effort to introduce these programs in lower-tier schools.

As a future law-school student, scholarships like this should make me swoon:

Costs are rising rapidly throughout the University of California system, but its newest law school, at Irvine, announced this week that the 80 students chosen for the second entering class will get privately financed scholarships covering at least half their tuition for all three years…

Most of the scholarship money, Mr. Chemerinsky said, comes from Southern California lawyers. Just last week, Mark Robinson, an Orange County trial lawyer who had donated $1 million for the inaugural class, made an additional $400,000 contribution.

However, I can’t help wondering if it’s a good idea to so aggressively subsidize legal education.  By all indications, there’s currently a glut of lawyers in the United States, a surplus that’s only expected to swell as more and more people enter law school to escape the economic downturn.  Further, it’s not entirely clear to me what the marginal benefit of adding another lawyer to our society is.  Do we really need more litigation in our society, our worthy cases being missed because of a dearth of lawyers?  If the marginal benefit is low and if there are few jobs for newly minted lawyers to take, then it seems as if we’d want to encourage fewer people to attend law school rather than providing a huge incentive to pursue a legal education.

After all, if the status-quo holds, most of these new lawyers are going to have wasted three years of their lives and thousands of dollars on tuition (if they go to a conventional law school, unlike UC: Irvine) by the time they discover that they can’t find a job.  Even worse, a surplus of lawyers means that the cost of litigation will fall and a whole host of marginal lawsuits that would otherwise be unprofitable to launch will enter the legal system, further gumming up our legal system. I think SoCo lawyers could find a better cause with which to commit their dollars.

Glad to see that some grownups are getting real about nuclear energy:

Ramping up the pressure to repeal a 15-year-old ban on building more nuclear power plants in Minnesota, union officials, business leaders and politicians — including U.S. Reps. Tim Walz, a Democrat, and Erik Paulsen, a Republican — urged the Legislature on Tuesday to lift the moratorium.

“Everything must be on the table,” Walz said.

Hear hear.  Honestly, one of the most nonsensical positions taken by the environmentalist crowd has been their rigid opposition to any expansion of nuclear energy in Minnesota.  It’s all well and good to talk about harnessing wind power (a la Matt Entenza) but if we’re actually going to take real measures to curb global warming—without knocking our standard of living down a few decades in the process—nuclear power is really our only option.  I’m not a huge fan of Erik Paulsen for obvious reasons, but I have to commend both Representative Walz and him for taking this sound policy position.

I’m getting sort of sick of Tim Pawlenty’s new-found affinity for stupid gimmicks:

The state’s general fund budget would be frozen in line with revenue received during the previous budget period under a constitutional amendment proposed today by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

The amendment, if placed on next year’s ballot by legislators and approved by voters, would limit government spending and force legislators to set firmer priorities, Pawlenty said.

This is really stupid idea.  For one, any sort of policy that forces the government to slash spending during an economic downturn is necessarily going to lead to some pretty perverse cyclical consequences. Further, on a more philosophical note, I’m extremely uncomfortable with putting checks in the State Constitution that are not needed to ensure a functioning democracy.  What I mean by this is that Pawlenty’s proposal, while debatable on its meager merits, is a policy proposal, not a constitutional matter.  It’s important to constrain the powers of the legislature when it comes to issues like freedom of speech and other fundamental rights which are necessarily to ensure a healthy democracy; it is very dangerous, and frankly a little bizarre, to limit the power of legislature when it comes to policy measures.

Policy should be debated and voted on by the state legislature, not by the voters.  Let too many referendums pass and too many constitutional constraints slip into place and you’re looking at the prospect of Minnesota devolving into a Californiaesque quagmire.  I think that’s something we would all like to avoid.  Pawlenty’s silly constitutional amendment should fall on that point alone.