MORE PUBLIC PENSION PROBLEMS: “Get that, taxpayers and bond-market watchers: Government workers’ pensions alone will consume 20 percent of the city of Miami’s operating budget. For many states and municipalities, it is going to get a lot worse than that very soon.”
Archive for 2010
August 26, 2010
WEEKLY STANDARD: Is the IRS Discriminating Against a Pro-Israel Group?
In a lawsuit filed in federal court today, the pro-Israel group Z Street alleges that it has been discriminated against. Z Street says, in its complaint, that was “informed explicitly by an IRS Agent on July 19, 2010, that approval of Z STREET’s application for tax-exempt status has been at least delayed, and may be denied because of a special IRS policy in place regarding organizations in any way connected with Israel, and further that the applications of many such Israel-related organizations have been assigned to ‘a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.'”
In other words, Z Street was told by an IRS agent that it might not be granted 501(c)(3) status, which would allow the group to be tax exempt, because its position toward Israel differs from the Obama administration’s official policies.
Ordinarily, I’d find these allegations dubious. But in light of other stuff from this administration, not quite so much.
UPDATE: More at TaxProf. They told me if I voted for John McCain, we’d see thuggish attacks on people who oppose American foreign policy. And they were right!
DON SURBER: Lefty beats up cabbie; left blames the right. Yeah, for all the talk about the threat of Tea Party violence, the actual violence seems to come from the usual suspects on the left. It’s been that way for a while.
HARDLY A SURPRISE: Establishment Candidates Fare Poorly in Republican Primaries.
THE UNDER-COVERED STORY OF YESTERDAY IS THIS:“Rep. Russ Carnahan confirmed that former staffer Chris Powers was the individual who ‘firebombed’ his campaign office, not tea party activists as some in the local media had reported.” Much more from Jim Hoft here and here.
Plus, Moe Lane on the under-coverage.
UPDATE: Video Shows Carnahan Staffer-Firebomber Has History of Attacking Tea Partiers – Media Silent.
ANOTHER UPDATE: What is it with lefties and arson?
GOOD NEWS FOR TENNESSEE LAW: UT College of Law recognized for value.
The UT College of Law has again been ranked a Top 20 Best Value Law School by preLaw magazine. The magazine published by the National Jurist will release the final Top 20 rankings for 2010 in October. . . . Criteria for making the magazine’s Best Value rankings are: having a bar passage rate higher than the state average; an employment rate of at least 85 percent nine months after graduation; in-state tuition less than $35,000 a year; and average student indebtedness below $100,000.
Ours is considerably below $100K, but it’s kind of sad that $100K is considered low.
UPDATE: Reader Chris Fountain emails: “I enrolled at UConn Law in 1978 because it was tuition – free for state residents. Only had Yale moved me off its wait list would I have paid to go to another law school but back then, tuition at Yale was, at most, $10,000? Now I hear tales of UConn grads coming out with $100,000 debts and who knows what the Yalies pay. The latter, at least have a chance of earning enough to repay their debts. Most UConn grads stay in Connecticut, and they’ll never see a salary that will justify $100,000 in debt. What went wrong?” A bubble.
MISS UNIVERSE vs. Hugo Chavez.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The problem with bubbles is that they produce malinvestment:
Workers with specialized skills like electricians, carpenters and welders are in critically short supply in many large economies, a shortfall that marks another obstacle to the global economic recovery, a research paper by Manpower Inc (NYSE:MAN – News) concludes.
“It becomes a real choke-point in future economic growth,” Manpower Chief Executive Jeff Joerres said. “We believe strongly this is really an issue in the labor market.” . . . Since the 1970s, parents have been told that a university degree — and the entry it affords into the so-called knowledge economy — was the only track to a financially secure profession. But all of the skilled trades offer a career path with an almost assured income, Joerres said, and make it possible to open one’s own business.
In the United States, recession and persistent high unemployment may lead parents and young people entering the workforce to reconsider their options.
Read the whole thing. [LATER: That link seems to be dead, but try this one.]
UPDATE: More here:
As a public school teacher, I’ve been saying for some time that the entire “No Child Left Behind – Every Kid Has To Go To College” mentality would have just this sort of negative, and unintended consequence. Public High school used to have big shop departments—woodshop, auto repair, plumbing, welding, etc. Now, the government’s emphasis on high-stakes academic tests in measuring school quality has resulted in reduction or elimination of non-academic classes. Students are being told that college is their only hope.
It all makes sense from the school’s point of view. Schools need students to buy into the college mentality so they will concentrate on the sort of knowledge and skills that will help them score well on standardized academic tests (in Michigan, that’s the ACT for high school students). Students scores on standardized tests determine whether a school is deemed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) or is failing. Failing schools suffer a number of sanctions, none of which are pleasant for administrators or teachers.
College prep classes help schools meet AYP and avoid sanctions. Shop classes do not. So the shop classes have to go.
Read the whole thing.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Todd Steed.
NEITHER HOPE NOR CHANGE: California rejects even modest pension reform. “Unfunded public pension liabilities, which a Pew Center on the States report calculates is now as high as $1 trillion nationwide, threaten to bankrupt states that fail to address this ticking fiscal time bomb. But in California, which has an unimaginable $500 billion public pension problem and became the object of national ridicule for outrageous pension abuses in Bell, state lawmakers still couldn’t bring themselves to pass legislation preventing highly paid government employees from using unused vacation and sick days accumulated during their last year on the job to pad their life-long pensions.”
UPDATE: Reader Steve Rothstein writes: “To quote Powerline’s John Hinderaker from a June 26 post, ‘The tick (is still) faring much better than the dog.'”
THE HILL: Government needs to close the feedback loop. “The government must take a page from the technology industry by learning how to measure the effectiveness of its programs, according to tech evangelist and O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly. As a well-known digital publisher and organizer of events like the Gov 2.0 Summit, O’Reilly is a key figure in the movement to increase the federal government’s use of technology to engage the public. But he argues the focus on getting agencies to join Twitter and Facebook is misplaced.”
TIM CAVANAUGH: More Scenes from the Economic Hyperpocalypse.
Analyst Charles Nenner says the Dow will be down to 5,000 within 30 months. And Fast Money’s John Melloy reports that nobody’s buying stocks anymore: Equity trading in the slow month of August is the lowest it’s been since 1999. Small investors are bailing on the stock market, and Melloy says many of them will never be back.
Calculated Risk has a roundup of causes for alarm, ranging from home sales to truck tonnage to an inevitable decline in the Case-Shiller housing index.
But strangely, the index has not come down yet: People are actually paying more for their worthless houses. I don’t know what is more dismaying: that the National Association of Realtors brags about how the home buyer tax credit kept house prices rising even while sales were falling, or that Time titles one of its columns “The Curious Capitalist.”
Something’s out of whack.
August 25, 2010
IT’S SEAN CONNERY’S 80th Birthday.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D BE SENDING DRONES AFTER PEOPLE IN ALL SORTS OF COUNTRIES — and they were right!
NEW POCKET CAMCORDERS FROM JVC. One of ’em’s waterproof, which seems to be the new big thing. Remember: Ubiquitous video is good.
MEGAN MCARDLE: What Did Barack Obama Do Wrong? I can think of a shorter way to ask this question. . . .
WILL JIM CRAMER’S BODY be found in an alley? Relax, Jim. It’s safe to criticize them now. And soon it will not merely be safe, but fashionable.
BABY YOU CAN DRIVE MY CAR. I think that the ATL commenters are getting a little overwrought about this. It’s not such a bad part-time job for a law student.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
Please don’t quote me or my firm by name on this, but that post and the comments are sadly typical for Above the Law and a few similar lawyer-related blogs. The multiple references to the jobs not being worthy of students at law schools “ranked #15” are perfectly in tune with the elitist sense of entitlement expressed throughout the site and pervasive among many law students and young lawyers. I’m a partner at one of the 10 largest firms in the US and many of my fellow partners are both amused and dismayed by both the tone and substance of many of the posts and comments on those sites.
You write frequently about a higher education bubble. Our law schools are great evidence of that as they continue to churn out untalented, over-educated, over-credentialed snobs who really can’t do anything. (Sorry, professor). It’s been quite clear for several years that law students feel that they “don’t do windows” or other tasks that they view as beneath them, which unfortunately includes most aspects of actually, you know, practicing law as a young lawyer. Now that the economy and legal market has imploded, they’re finding out exactly what their “skills” are worth.
And it used to just be Yale Law grads who were that way. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Chad Chandler writes:
Chad Chandler
to punditshow details 8:49 AM (32 minutes ago)
It’s not just law school, and it’s not that new. My wife graduated with an accounting degree from Birmingham Southern College in 2000. For four years, she was assured by countless professors and administrators that her business degree from such a unique liberal arts school would giver her an advantage over her peers. She and her classmates all believed they’d graduate from school, play around town for a few weeks, and then take on the arduous task of weighing multiple job offers. When they eventually realized that they’d have to beg for jobs — jobs that didn’t start at $50K — they felt betrayed. Nowadays, tuition has gone up and graduates’ prospects have gone down. I can only imagine how disparaged the kids must feel today. I, on the other hand, graduated college with a realistic outlook on life. If there’s one thing Auburn’s business school taught me, as inadvertent and embarrassing as it must be to the administration, is that I’m not special at all. Sitting in a theater-style classroom among 300 peers, you could see your competition all around you. If you missed a class, no one called to see if you were alright. If you did poorly on a test, the professor didn’t ask if you were having trouble at home. To the university, I was nothing more than a recurring check and a social security number. I was entirely replaceable and unappreciated. In that environment, I learned perspective and self-reliance. That frame of mind transferred over to the “real world,” where I worked in post-9/11 DC at a dead-end job as a temp with other recent graduates who couldn’t understand why they were stuck in corporate purgatory. After all, they had college degrees! They were entitled to the good life!
Well, let’s hear it for large, impersonal state universities.
HOW ABOUT THIS? Carnahan Confirms Powers Firebomb Story. “Rep. Russ Carnahan confirmed that former staffer Chris Powers was the individual who ‘firebombed’ his campaign office, not tea party activists as some in the local media had reported.”
Jim Hoft had this story earlier and it seemed so incredible that I held off for confirmation. Then again, when the “anti-muslim attacker” in NYC turns out to be a pro-mosque worker, anything is possible. And can we have some apologies, please? Once again, violence for which the Tea Party is blamed turns out to come from the left.
More from Jim Hoft here.
And not seeing anything about this story over at TalkingPointsMemo, though Hoft reports that Powers blogs there under the name “Ripper McCord.” Good grief.
UPDATE: More on this from Moe Lane:
It’s also interesting that TPM – and the rest of the quote-unquote ‘A List’ of the netroots – didn’t really cover this story in the first place. Were they tipped off? I mean, Powers could have told Josh Marshall, and Marshall could have passed this around to whatever they’re using in place of Journolist these days, and a thousand angry screeds would die a-borning…
Well, who knows — but the suspicion is understandable in light of past conduct.
WHY HOLLYWOOD LOVES DEMOCRATS: “Hollywood stars hence feel that there is something arbitrary about their success — that their personal merit does not warrant their revered status. While they may be pleased at this outcome, they can’t help but feel that the system is unjust because their status is undeserved.”