Government Unfunded Pensions

Coyote Blog harps on one of my favorite issues that no one else seems to notice; unfunded pension liabilities by governments. Private company owners go to jail for shenanigans that the government routinely gets away with. The New York Times uncovered the latest fraud by a government in New Jersey. These cases are the rule, not the exception, for the public sector and nothing will be done about it until it's a full blown crisis.

I have written more on unfunded/underfunded pensions here, here, here and here.

Baseball Season

Well baseball season has begun pretty well for the Indians. Great game yesterday afternoon even though Larry Vanover's strike zone was about the size of a quarter. I'm sure the fans braving the snow and 30 degree weather really enjoyed that. I hope today's game featuring Dice-K vs. Greinke is umped a little better because I'll be there. It's going to be all of 40 degrees at game time but this is a premiere matchup that I wouldn't miss for anything.

Some thoughts and predictions at this early stage in the season. The White Sox have shown this week that they are in danger of being in more of a battle for last place than they will be in for first place. But, I don't think the Royals have the pitching to make that battle very interesting. The Tigers are going to learn how difficult it is to repeat but still may get the Wild Card in a battle between the A's, Angels and Blue Jays.

The Nationals are hands down the worst team in the league this year, it's not even really a battle. I think the Red Sox are a Schilling injury away from being irrelevant this year. The Mariners will be the least interesting and worst team in the league, not a great combination.

Are the defending champions going to come in last in the NL Central this year? I wouldn't rule it out; they're old, don't hit well, don't have a good rotation and looked to not be major league ready against the Mets. The NL Central will be as even as any division has been. I don't think any team will win less than 70 games or win more than 90 games. The team that plays the best in the division will win it. I think it will be the Brewers, Sheets was very impressive on opening day and the addition of Suppan gives them the best 1-2-3 of any team in the division although Harang, Arroyo and Bailey may be the best by year's end. I think the Pirates have a legitimate shot at beating the Cardinals this year, alas in the battle for 5th place, but Bucs fans have to enjoy the little victories.

The Phillies are the class of the National League, meaning they would win about 80 games in the AL. The Mets aren't far behind but Milledge has got to be traded for a front line starter, maybe Buerhle or Garland when the White Sox throw in the towel, because they're not going far with Oliver Perez taking the ball on a regular basis. An August rotation of Glavine, Martinez, Pelfrey, Buerhle or Garland, El Duque or Maine could give them a good chance at 100 wins. The first team to 100 wins, I think it will be the Phils.

The NL West is a mess with only San Francisco out of the hunt. I don't think Colorado or Arizona are quite ready for prime time but they will be exciting at times. San Diego and LA will battle in a blah-fest, the winner of the division will have about 88 wins.

As I wrote earlier, the A's and Angels will be competitive in the West, whoever doesn't win it will be in the Wild Card chase. I give the edge to the Angels unless the Sarge Jr. and F-Rod controversies bring them down. Hopefully, Chone Figgins will get back on the field quickly and the Angels find a way to get Brandon Wood and Erick Aybar and Kendry Morales to the major leagues, whether with the Angels or not. If those guys are playing somewhere the Angels will be better.

The AL East, wow, could it be less stellar. 25% of major league payrolls reside in this division and the most interesting team, the Devil Rays, has a low payroll. But they have the best positional talent in the division. Unfortunately, they're going to be in a lot of 9 - 8 games because they don't have any pitching. The Yankees will buy their way into a good pitching staff and they have a great lineup. I think they take this division with 95 wins and no opposition in site. The Blue Jays will come up with about 88 wins and challenge for the Wild Card. The Red Sox will be done by August when Schilling goes down and decides to become a full-time blogger. Beckett's blisters will reappear, Dice-K will be an interesting 15 game winner, Manny will be Manny and Ortiz will mash. They'll probably be pretty fun to watch, but have mid-level talent in the bullpen, Varitek is on the decline and JD Drew will suck all the fun of the '04 team out of the clubhouse. Big disappointing season on the way.

The Indians are going to win 100 and show that the Central isn't as even as believed in spring training. The Twins are going to miss Liriano and Matt Garza will have the growing pains that Santana and Liriano didn't. The Twins just don't have the pitching to compete in this division. The Tigers are going to be good, just not as good as they were in the first half of last year. The Royals are going to steal some of the White Sox's wins from last year putting them on par with the White Sox in the division.

Playoffs: Indians, Yankees, Angels, Tigers (wild card), Phillies, Brewers, Dodgers, Mets(wild card)
World Series: Indians, Mets
Champion: Indians

The day after Hell will freeze over.

Home Ownership and Unemployment

Greg Mankiw has a nice post asking whether getting rid of subsidies for home ownership would reduce natural rates of unemployment. I answer, yes, as well as say eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction would have 18 other beneficial effects.

Intellectual Welfare

Coyote blogs about another instance of the government limiting a market to protect people from themselves. Let's get this straight, people should be free to make bad decisions. Outlawing bad decisions is the opposite of freedom.

Splainations

My previous post about borderline racism inspired some comments that I wasn't engaging properly in the debate. Point taken, but it took a little bit of snark to get me back in the game so the last post wasn't entirely wasted. Anyway, Megan McArdle who started this whole debate amongst Yglesias, Drum and herself has nice post explaining her thoughts on vouchers. I'm going to riff off of these because she's mostly right, just want to clarify some differences I have with her.

1) The American educational system sucks.

I would say it sucks for the poor.

2) It particularly sucks for poor and minority kids

See my #1, I don't think middle class kids have it that bad unless they're in some rich enclave of an inner city school district with a large proportion of poor kids.

3) It has sucked in approximately the same way for at least forty years.

Mostly agree, but I think the Great Society has increased the number of unemployable therefore increases the number of kids who have no real incentive to get an education.

4) The institutional barriers to not sucking are apparently insurmountable with the current interest groups in place. 5) It is extremely segregated by class, race, and income 6) It is extremely hard to recruit and keep good teachers 7) As a result, the schools with the most attractively upper middle class parents and children get almost all of the good teachers

Right on!

8) The main reason that it is hard to get good teachers (outside of rural areas where it is hard to get good anyone to move there) is that their pay, unlike that of other union workers, is at the bottom of the distribution for their education level.

I don't think this one is true at all. Teachers are paid close to the same amount as other occupations requiring a 4 year degree, especially if you pro-rate based on the hours teachers work in a year. Coyote did a nice post about this several years back.

9) Given that the pay is at the bottom of the distribution for educated professionals, one of the primary attractions of the job is its short workyear and near-ironclad job security. Short of molesting the students or screaming racial epithets at them, it's awfully hard to get fired from a teaching position.

A lot stuffed into this item, but it is hard to get fired which screws with the incentives.

10) Jobs whose primary attraction is short hours and the difficulty of getting fired rarely attract the cream of the crop. The best teachers are either those few gifted passionate souls who want to teach, or women who are trying to match their schedule to that of their children. The latter group is shrinking; the former group has always been small.

Not much more to build on, this is a fairly minor point.

11) Any meaningful reform of the school system that actually improves them will need to pay teachers much more.

I don't agree at all with this. I think many people would teach for the amount of money paid to teachers now. The system is what decintevizes teachers (I know I just made up a word).

12) Paying the current group of teachers much more will improve their standard of living immeasurably, but will do absolutely nothing for the students.

Wholeheartedly agree.

13) Therefore, coupled with higher teacher pay must come the ability to get rid of substandard teachers.

Must be able to clear dead weight easily.

14) This is not remotely feasible within the existing system

True!

15) The programmes which have been shown to work best with disadvantaged kids are the ones that are heavily scripted, involve lots of repetition and rote learning, and otherwise make life no fun for the teacher.

I don't agree with this one, I think a market system would bring many ways of learning into the education world, some would be fun for teachers others wouldn't, but kids would be matched to a system in which they could learn.

16) These programmes are rarely implemented, implying that teaching disadvantaged kids to read and do math are somewhere well down the priority list of your average school district.

Agreed, there's no reward for innovation.

17) Monopolies are rarely responsive to their customers.

Ask me about Time Warner cable!

18) School board elections are not a particularly good way to gather feedback on school performance, but other than lawsuits, it is the single mechanism currently available to school districts. School board elections are a particularly bad way to gather feedback in very large, dysfunctional polities like cities.

This is one that slips by most folks. There is no good way to get rid of bad school policies, especially when only a minority see the harm in a particular policy (ie. no music education).

19) A school where parents may pull their children at any moment is a school that worries about pleasing parents and children.

A very important point.

20) The government cannot hand out money without making sure schools meet basic requirements, like having a building, teachers, and some students. Any voucher programme will also have to periodically test kids to ensure that they are making progress.

Here's a big disagreement between McMegan and me, parents would be the feedback mechanism for vouchers. If the school can continue to get enrollment, that school is successful. We don't need government testing to verify kids are learning in a private school.

21) This is not the same thing as imposing the same set of elaborate regulations on everything from teacher hours to eraser purchasing that currently hamstring public schools, and then complaining that voucher schools don't do any better.

Agreed, I guess.

22) Current teacher certification standards are lunatic protectionism promulgated by education schools collecting fat rents for slapping a laminate veneer of professionalism on educators. Any one I have ever met who has done a real degree, and then sat through education classes, has attested to their utter lack of useful content. We have math teachers who are very good at making posters about race, and very bad at math. The way to teach someone to teach is to give them some elementary child psychology, and then have them practice on actual children, who will illustrate the folly of listening to professors of child psychology. "Teacher standards" are the absolute last thing we should be imposing on voucher programmes. Principals are pretty good at figuring out if a teacher can teach.

The big throwdown against education programs. I agree wholeheartedly that teachers need not be certified especially only certifying teachers with a degree in Education.

23) Any voucher programme will have to offer bonuses for educating difficult kids: poor kids, kids with emotional problems, kids with learning disabilities, and so forth. Otherwise, those kids will end up stuck in a ghetto. On the other hand, if you get the pricing right, you don't need to worry about lotteries and so forth.

A lot of room for debate here, I think that Democrats could certainly sign on to this as an Affirmative Action type program, but based on factors other than race. I'm on board with different voucher amounts for troubled kids.

24) To hell with rich people: if you're in, say, the top 5-10% of the income distribution, you ought to get the same help educating your kids as my parents got, which is to say none.

Certainly a little bit of income phaseout should be included.

25) Some people will be worse off under this system. There is no change ever that leaves every single person better off. This is not a reason to avoid change.

Important point.

On the whole I agree mostly with McMegan's explanations/thoughts. I have a really difficult time with those who think that public education doesn't have room for competition or that competition can't exist.

Borderline Racism

I know it's been a while since my last post, 4 months to be exact, but I've been busy. Anyway, I'd like to thank Kevin Drum for outraging me enough to get me to figure out my Blogger sign-in and posting a quick thought.

I'm not worried much about the standards at $15,000-a-year private schools, but I am worried about the standards at storefront operations in the inner city. The prospect of massive abuse is just too great.

To rephrase:

I'm not worried much about the standards at schools for rich white people, because they know how to spend their money, but I am worried about the standards at black schools because they don't know how to spend their money, they need rich OC white guys to look out for them. The prospect of massive abuse is just too great.

Democratic Leadership

I hope this isn't a harbinger of what to expect of Democratic leadership in Congress. Matthew Yglesias wants Democrats to not take any leadership on confirming or rejecting Bob Gates (he went to my high school, I can call him Bob).

My initial read -- subject to revision as we learn more -- is that they should take advantage of the presence of some hard-core wankers in their caucus. Blocking Gates is problematic. Giving Gates a seal of approval is also problematic. So, if Webb wins, let Gates come to the floor and let him be confirmed by 49 Republicans plus some combination of Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Dick Cheney. That way Bush gets to keep running Bush's war Bush's way on Bush's say-so and Bush gets to keep reaping the blame when things keep going poorly.

So rather than take the lead and vote the way they feel, Yglesias is promoting an avenue that allows Democrats to be unaccountable. Because Gates is almost assured of being confirmed, they take no risk by actually voting for confirmation and if Gates' Iraq strategy doesn't work, they will have no blame. If Gates comes in and does a wonderful job, they can say they voted against him because of Bush's record of nominating cabinet members. No pain either way. I don't really see how this approach could be considered working with the President.

Then there's this little piece of non-leadership from Kevin Drum before the election on Tuesday.

Golly. You mean the Democratic document didn't have a whole section about exactly which taxes Nancy Pelosi wants to raise and by exactly how much? I wonder why? Kinsley then follows up this faux bumpkinism with a complaint that the Democrats also fail to present a plan for crushing the Iraq civil war, even though he admits one sentence later that neither does anyone else. If it weren't for the 800-word limit on op-eds, I figure the next paragraph would have been a complaint that Democrats lack a plan for turning water into wine.

Once again, the Democrats are afraid to actually say how they're planning on paying for their plans. Isn't this what they've been criticizing Republicans for for 6 years?

I don't know how to feel. I'm glad the Republicans aren't in charge of Congress any more because a divided government that actually has oversight works better than one party rule. On the other hand, I disagree with just about everything the Democrats stand for on the economic side of the table and it appears they will show no leadership whatsoever. They'll just try to position themselves to win the next election, which is what the Republicans have been charged with for the past 6 years. I guess I don't get how anything really changed.

Smoking Ban and Gambling

While reading the link from Radley's post about smoking ban silliness, I came across this little piece:

The new smoking ban applies to bars that serve food and those that don't have keno licenses. Some bars have applied for keno licenses to keep their smokers happy, and a few decided to give up food instead of smoking.

The state/city is increasing it's customer base, it's not about public health, it's about more establishments getting keno licenses and increasing state/city revenue.

By the way, calling 911 to report a smoker is a dangerous activity that threatens dispatcher's ability to actually, you know, handle more important things, like immediate danger reports.