Archives: January, 2011

USPS Takes Another Shot at Closing Outlets

By
Tad DeHaven

The U.S. Postal Service, which lost $8.5 billion last year, wants to close about 2,000 retail postal outlets that are operating in the red. The USPS wanted to close 3,200 outlets in 2009, but the number was chopped to 162 following a congressional outcry. The USPS has over 36,000 postal outlets.

According to the Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe, the USPS learned a lesson from its congressional beating last time around, and is coming back at Congress with more data:

The incident compelled officials to establish the computerized process they began using in November, Granholm said. He’s meeting regularly with colleagues to review potential sites, starting with small, rural stations in communities such as Mahaska, Kan., and Barium Springs, N.C.

With a few clicks of his mouse, Granholm can pull up fact sheets detailing a location’s square footage, hours of operation, payroll, annual sales and maps showing the next-closest location. If an unprofitable site employs fewer than five people, is open fewer than eight hours a day and is within 15 to 20 miles of another, larger location, it’s likely to close.

The USPS is only targeting postal stations and branches. Traditional post offices, which number about 27,000, cannot be closed “for solely operating at a deficit” and the closure process is burdensome. A Cato essay on privatizing the U.S. Postal Service explains that the USPS’s overcapacity is becoming a bigger financial drag as the demand for its retail services continues to decrease:

Full post offices are more costly to operate than other means of serving customers. The average post office transaction cost 23 cents per dollar of revenue in 2009 while the average transaction at a contract postal unit cost just 13 cents. Post offices used to generate almost all postal retail revenue, but 29 percent is now generated online through usps.com and other alternative channels.

In 2009 post offices recorded 117 million fewer transactions than in 2008. Four out of five post offices are operating at a loss. However, the postal network’s overcapacity has drawn little corrective action from Congress. In fact, legislation introduced in the House with 102 cosponsors would apply the burdensome procedures for closing post offices to other postal outlets as well. Congress is actively working against the modernization of the U.S. postal system.

The USPS needs to adjust to the times, but congressional meddling makes the task nearly impossible. The solution is to separate the government from the postal business altogether and allow the private sector to provide mail services, just as it provides package delivery and countless other services.

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

SOTU, Brute?

By
Andrew J. Coulson

In tonight’s State Of The Union address, President Obama is expected to call for increased government education spending on the theory that this will improve outcomes, raise productivity, and make us more internationally competitive.

Really? Again?

I already offered a thorough debunking of the notion that increased federal (or total) education spending has improved U.S. student achievement on the eve of last year’s SOTU, and thanks to the miracle of the intarwebs, there’s no need to repeat it here.

But the president is not simply advocating a strategy that is a proven failure, he is plunging a dagger into the heart of the one federal education program that is a proven success. There is already a program that is producing better educational outcomes at a quarter of the cost of the status quo: the Washington, DC Opportunity Scholarships Program. It pays private school tuition for poor DC kids, at an average cost of about $7,000. Participating parents are happy with their chosen private schools, test scores are as good or better than those in the public schools, graduation rates are significantly better than in the public schools, and, here’s the clincher: DC is spending four times as much per pupil on its district public schools… over $28,000 a year.

Yes, I know, they claim it’s less. But if you simply add up the k-12 spending numbers for the District of Columbia, ignoring charter schools and higher ed., it comes to $28,000 per child. Don’t take my word for it, here’s a spreadsheet with all the numbers as well as links to the official budget documents.

While the media have been shy about reporting DC’s actual public education spending figures (maybe the MSM can’t afford a copy of Excel these days?) there’s one thing they’ll have a hard time not reporting on tonight: the Opportunity Scholarships program itself. That’s because Speaker John Boehner has invited students, parents, and teachers who have participated in that program to attend the SOTU with him. You can catch our liveblogging of the event here, and it’ll be interesting to see how the different networks cover this particular story.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

How to Think & Talk About Vouchers & Ed Tax Credits

By
Adam B. Schaeffer

School Choice Week is here, and there are a lot of people trying to spread the good word about the benefits of increasing educational freedom.

But what benefit of choice is best to focus on?

You can make at most a few points in an oped or on talk radio. On TV, and even in print reporting, you’re lucky to get one point across. And with friends and family, and even politicians, you need to keep the focus where it will do the most good.

So, should you focus on how horrible inner-city schools are, how many lives are destroyed in a failing government system? Maybe. Depends on the person, certainly.

But the evidence suggests that the best message overall is one that focuses on the financial benefits of school choice (and this is even before the financial crisis). People think about vouchers and education tax credits differently. And be careful trying to pull at Democratic heart-strings with arguments that choice will increase educational equity for poor kids … there’s evidence that it backfires!

Take a look at this slide presentation that describes how the public thinks about private school choice, what you should emphasize, and what you should be careful with … it’s not just my opinion, it’s based on evidence from a unique message experiment:

How to Think and Talk about Education Tax Credits and Vouchers
Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

NAEP: If the Scores Don’t Rise, You Must Revise!

By
Andrew J. Coulson

New science test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released today, and they’re not comparable to the scores for earlier years. You may want to know whether our schools are getting better or worse over time in this subject, but apparently the federal government is more ambivalent.

There are actually two different flavors of the NAEP tests: the Long Term Trends (which stay the same over time so that we can see, well, trends), and the “Nation’s Report Card,” which can be redesigned whenever it is absolutely… convenient.

But here’s the thing: the NAEP Long Term Trends science test has not been administered since 1999, when it showed that a statistically significant decline in achievement had taken place at the end of high school since the test began in 1974 (see the chart below). If there’s an official reason for its discontinuation, I’m not aware of it.

The “Nation’s Report Card” science test that was administered in 1996, 2000, and 2005 also showed a statistically significant decline over that period at the end of high school. Today America learns that that test has been discontinued, too. The new “Report Card” science test is not comparable to the earlier one, so now we have no national measure of science trends at all.

Maybe there’s an excellent reason why the federal government no longer wants to measure trends in science  achievement, but if there is, I suspect it’s political rather than educational.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Showdown on Homeland Security

By
David Rittgers

If you haven’t seen it already, I recommend the Frontline report Are We Safer? Since September 11, 2001, the government has gone on a spending spree without any regard for fiscal federalism, dumping $31 billion into grant programs. The program is based on The Washington Posts’ Top Secret America article, “Monitoring America.” Watch it below:

Much of this spending has gone to local pork projects or allowed state and local governments to avoid the realities of budgeting – spend federal counterterrorism dollars on normal law enforcement requirements while spending the local tax base on unsustainable pensions for public employees. For a tally of this excess, check out the Price of Peril, an interactive map showing homeland security spending by state, courtesy of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

All of this spending isn’t without cost to our civil liberties. The recipients of the money have to show something, hence the rise of fusion centers across the nation and the scaremongering reports they produce. There simply aren’t enough terrorists to go around.

Two of the people featured in the Frontline report, Mike German of the ACLU (and former FBI agent) and Harvey Eisenberg, Chief, National Security Section, Office of United States Attorney, District of Maryland, squared off at a Cato Institute event in 2009. Check it out here. Pay special attention to Eisenberg’s remarks at 53:35, where he misstates the threshold for starting a domestic counterterrorism investigation under the Attorney General Guidelines.

Mike German corrects him – the 2008 guidelines loosened the standard such that agents don’t even need a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity to investigate someone. Eisenberg responds that he requires it for all of his investigations. That’s admirable, if true, but a bit unnerving that the policy change is news to him.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Public Education Needs Transparency & Competition, Not More Money

By
Adam B. Schaeffer

In honor of School Choice Week, President Obama seems set to use his SOTU address this evening to demonstrate how truly pathetic most education “reform” ideas are in this, the era of our Great Recession.

We are, and have long been, out of money at the Federal level. So, naturally, the President proposes more “investment,” ah, spending in education. Of course, we know that Fed Ed spending does diddly to improve test scores.

But at least with the Feds, we have a fairly good accounting of how much is being spent on K-12 education.

Unfortunately, at the state, local, and school-district level, it takes a forensic accountant to discover how much we’re really spending.

Watch this video to get an idea of why public K-12 education is the most unaccountable, least transparent government service in the nation:

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Our Brave Leaders

By
Chris Edwards

The Washington Post reports: “Obama has decided not to endorse his deficit commission’s recommendation to raise the retirement age, and otherwise reduce Social Security benefits, in Tuesday’s State of the Union address.”

When I read this, I thought of a song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Brave Sir Robin ran away
Bravely ran away, away
When danger reared its ugly head
He bravely turned his tail and fled
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out
Bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin.

In the movie, Sir Robin and the other knights are galloping along on horseback, except when you look closely you see that their aides are banging coconuts together only simulating the sounds of brave mounted knights.

Isn’t that what’s going on in Washington? A giant fiscal disaster looms over the nation, and our leaders are only simulating leadership. Republican leaders can’t name a single program that they would cut, and President Obama runs away from a reform to the nation’s most costly program that should be a no-brainer.

Rather than chasing the Holy Grail of “investment” spending, the president needs to sit down with his congressional knights at a roundtable and get the kingdom’s finances under control with major spending cuts.

Topics: 
General, Tax and Budget Policy

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