Archives: December, 2012

For Afghan Reconstruction, Millions of Dollars Up in Smoke

By
Malou Innocent

Unconscionable levels of waste, fraud, and abuse continue to plague America’s 11 year nation-building mission in Afghanistan. According to an investigation by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), officers with the NATO training mission shredded the financial records of fuel purchased for the Afghan National Army. As a result, “the U.S. government still cannot account for $201 million in fuel purchased to support the Afghan National Army.”

On the document destruction, SIGAR investigators determined among its many findings that:

  • The two fuel ordering officers cited efficiency, saving physical storage space, and the ability to share document [sic], as factors in the decision to scan and shred the documents. They added that they believed that the scanned documents had been stored electronically on a [Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A)] SharePoint portal or shared drive, but they could not recall the exact locations.
  • […]
  • … CSTC-A was unable to locate any of the missing documents.

A number of other projects underscore the problems U.S. agencies confront in carrying out large-scale development initiatives. For instance, the U.S. military plans to provide electricity via diesel generators to about 2,500 Afghan homes and businesses around Kandahar, according to a report over the summer by the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran. U.S. government planners expect the program, called the “Kandahar Bridging Solution,” to cost American taxpayers about $220 million through 2013, that is, until the United States Agency for International Development and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build a new hydropower turbine at a dam in neighboring Helmand.

Washington planners, in keeping with their population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine, assume that many Afghans will be pleased to have power, and thus, will throw their support behind the Afghan central government. Instead, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Kandahar last year, found no evidence that the added electricity was yielding greater support for the government, a conclusion far from surprising. Moreover, Dahl also discovered that the turbine at the dam will provide residents with less power than what they currently get from the generators. As SIGAR noted, “the U.S. government may be building an expectations gap.”

Yet another in a laundry list of dashed expectations may soon be the new $23 million road in Helmand, dashed because the Afghan government has yet to compensate landowners for buildings and property demolished during construction.

The United States continues to expend money and lives for stabilization efforts and infrastructure projects that may still fail to leverage Afghan support for the government. At its heart, that failure lies not only with the mission’s overlapping, redundant, and expensive development strategies, but also with the underlying assumption that when armed with “performance-based contracts” and “metrics to measure achievement,” government bureaucracies can successfully plan such projects.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Where Is Thaddeus Stevens Now That We Need Him?

By
David Boaz

The radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens is enjoying a rediscovery as the moral center of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. As portrayed in the film, he confronts the sort of dilemma faced by many people of strong ideological convictions forced to deal with political reality: Will he disavow his radical belief in full racial equality in order to ease passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery? (No spoilers here.)

Stevens’s belief in equality under the law went beyond race, as Karen Tumulty notes in a Washington Post article on the fiscal cliff negotiations:

House Ways and Means Chairman Thaddeus Stevens (now enjoying a return to popular consciousness as Tommy Lee Jones’s character in the movie “Lincoln”) denounced the idea of a graduated rate structure as a “strange way to punish men because they are rich.”

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics

The NRA’s Panic Attack

By
Gene Healy

A few days ago, I made the mordant observation that the wake of the Newtown elementary school massacre would usher in “a brief period in which conservatives rue legislative panics in pursuit of perfect safety,” but come the next terrorist attack, everyone would switch sides.

Apparently, I spoke too soon. In an extraordinary statement to the press Friday, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, breathlessly demanded that we ACT NOW: “Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation or anything else, as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work — and by that I mean armed security.” (Transcript here .pdf).

If the phrase “our kids” sticks in your craw, if you tend to think the claim that a policy is “for the children” signals a lousy argument and that promiscuous italicization overeggs the pudding, LaPierre’s speech won’t give you much cause to reconsider.    

LaPierre begins by reeling off a list of the various places in American life where you can find armed guards: “American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses — even sports stadiums—are all protected by armed security,” LaPierre marveled;  Congress has the Capitol Police, the President his Secret Service:

Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family—our children—we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!

The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters—people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment? 

How many more copycats are waiting in the wings?…. A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? 

Er, probably not, Wayne. “Multiple-victim homicides at schools, however, occur very rarely. Of the last 109 incidents of school-associated student homicides studied, 101 involved one victim only.” That’s from a 2010 Education Researcher report, “What Can Be Done About School Shootings? A Review of the Evidence.” (.pdf). In it, the authors put the problem in perspective with a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation:

In the 10-year period from 1996–1997 to 2005–2006, 207 student homicides occurred in U.S. schools, an average of 21 deaths per year. Dividing the nation’s approximately 125,000 elementary and secondary schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2008) by 21, any given school can expect to experience a student homicide about once every 6,000 years.

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Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

FTC Oversteps Its Bounds

By
Jim Harper

This week, the Federal Trade Commission awarded itself a holiday gift: more regulation of the Internet.

Under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a 1998 law designed to insulate children from marketing, It Takes a Village-style, the FTC found that it gets to regulate more intensively and confusingly.

The regulation is a mostly unremarkable expansion of authority. Like any political actor would do, the FTC followed the path of least resistance, avoiding raising the hackles of any major player in the marketplace. (Regulation tends to advance the way spilled paint spreads on cobblestone.) Of course, there are few major players in the marketplace because COPPA has increased the cost of serving entertaining and educational content to children since the Internet’s earliest days. The Association for Competitive Technology got it right in a release calling COPPA “improved for big companies, not for education startups.”

One interesting point about the new regulation is not political, though. It’s legal. The agency arguably overstepped the authority Congress gave it.

FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen explains:

The statute provides, “It is unlawful for an operator of a website or online service directed to children, or any operator that has actual knowledge that it is collecting personal information from a child, to collect personal information from a child in a manner that violates the regulations prescribed [by the FTC].” … [T]he amendments add a new proviso to the definition of operator in the COPPA Rule: “Personal information is collected or maintained on behalf of an operator when: (a) it is collected or maintained by an agent or service provider of the operator; or (b) the operator benefits by allowing another person to collect personal information directly from users of such website or online service.” The proposed amendments construe the term “on whose behalf such information is collected and maintained” to reach child-directed websites or services that merely derive from a third-party plug-in some kind of benefit, which may well be unrelated to the collection and use of children’s information (e.g., content, functionality, or advertising revenue).

In other words, if a Web site directed at children uses third-party plug-ins to enhance its functionality, analytical capability, and such, and if the plug-in collects information, then the Web site operator is responsible as if it were collecting the information. The result? Web sites aimed at children will avoid using third-party technology to enhance the experience of kids.

Commissioner Ohlhausen: “I find that this proviso—which would extend COPPA obligations to entities that do not collect personal information from children or have access to or control of such information collected by a third-party—does not comport with the plain meaning of the statutory definition of an operator in COPPA.”

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Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Regulatory Studies, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

U.S. Government: Our “Head Start” Program Doesn’t Work

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Head Start, the flagship federal education program for low-income preschoolers, doesn’t work. That is the conclusion of yet another high quality, large-scale randomized experiment commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the program.

Like an earlier study that found no lasting benefit to Head Start by the end of the 1st grade, this new study confirms no lasting benefit by the end of the 3rd grade—after an investment of 47 years and about $200 billion.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently warned that going over the “fiscal cliff” would result in cuts to programs like Head Start. It would, in other words, cut federal education programs that don’t work—which is actually what Barack Obama promised to do on the campaign trail back in 2008. Remember when he said “I want to go through the federal budget line by line, programs that don’t work, we cut”? Apparently, neither does he.

Perhaps that’s one reason the DHHS decided to sit on this report for four years after data collection was completed, and sneak it onto the Web on the Friday before Christmas without so much as a statement. The “most transparent government in history” is transparently uninterested in anything except political expediency. Doesn’t care about your kids. Doesn’t care about your money. Just. Doesn’t. Care.

Hat tip to professor Jay Greene for uncovering the release of this study, and for promising to search out the names of the government officials responsible for burying as long as possible the proof of their own failures. 

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Barbara Mikulski, Spending Champ

By
David Boaz

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) is the new chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the powerful body that spends taxpayers’ money. If you haven’t already moved to Australia, this may be the signal you’ve been waiting for.

On the Senate floor Wednesday, defending a spending increase she had added to yet another emergency spending bill even as the country worries about looming fiscal disaster, she responded to criticism from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). Coburn, she said, “has said on many occasions that he has been the defendant of the taxpayer. Well, so am I.” 

Presumably she meant that she is a “defender” of the taxpayer. Though taxpayers no doubt feel like defendants whenever Mikulski takes the floor. She has the worst rating I’ve ever seen from the National Taxpayers Union: She earned an F every single year from 1992 through 2011 on “support for reducing spending and opposing higher taxes. “  Some years she is 98th or 99th in the Senate at protecting taxpayers, and such a ranking may well mean that she tied with other big spenders for the worst record.

As for taxes, I’ve written before that there are many theories of taxation, but the one that best explains the behavior of Congress is the theory most clearly enunciated in 1990 by Mikulski:

Let’s go and get it from those who’ve got it.

Fasten your seatbelts, taxpayers, it’s going to be a bumpy year.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

How to Lower Gun Homicides

By
Tim Lynch

Dan Kahan points to empirical evidence suggesting a sure-fire way to dramatically lower gun homicides: repeal the drug laws. 

I now want to point out that in fact, while the empirical evidence on the relationship between gun control and homicide is (at this time at least) utterly inconclusive, there certainly are policies out there that we have very solid evidence to believe would reduce gun-related homicides very substantially.

 The one at the top of the list, in my view, is to legalize recreational drugs such as marijuana and cocaine.

The theory behind this policy prescription is that illegal markets breed competition-driven violence among suppliers by offering the prospect of monopoly profits and by denying them lawful means for enforcing commercial obligations.

Later in the same post, Kahan notes a paper on this subject by Cato senior fellow Jeff Miron.

Here inside the Beltway bubble, the policy discussion does not revolve around reducing the risk of gun homicides. It instead revolves around questions like which gun control regulations will Obama enact by executive order, and which gun control regulations will be voted on in the Congress? Once we know the answers to those questions, we are told, we can then assess the performance of policymakers. The notion that repealing a law might be helpful is an utterly foreign concept here in D.C. Lawmaking and spending money on programs = progress. The media drum beat for new laws was captured when reporter Jake Tapper taunted President Obama at a news conference, “Where have you been?”  The taunt was, basically, “You failed to enact new gun restrictions during your first term, didn’t you!?” The implication, understood by all inside the Beltway, is that there are so many proposed laws in limbo because the president and Congress dither.

Note also that the current discussion seems dominated by the phrase “gun violence.” That’s a sleight-of-hand designed to blur the distinction between self-defense and murder. Vice President Biden, for example, has a task force looking at ways to curb “gun violence.” Question: If a police officer had been able to get to the Newtown school sooner and shoot the deranged killer, would anyone say that the killer was a victim of “gun violence”?

For good commentary and analysis of this subject, go here and here. Glenn Reynolds has a good round-up every day over at Instapundit.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

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