So I suppose it’s no surprise that as Gore’s movie is getting credulous reviews from coast to coast, a new opera opens in New York that makes Grendel “likable.”

“I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill, and I’m sittin’ here on Capitol Hill…”

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and cartoons were confined to Saturday morning broadcast programming, kids learned about the separation of powers (among other things) from the “SchoolHouse Rock” toons.

Apparently some future New Jersey lawyers weren’t tuned in.

The recent lawsuit about which Cato’s Neal McCluskey has been writing asks the court to create a school voucher program in New Jersey as a remedy to the state’s deficient public school system. Right ends, wrong means. Courts are for legal interpretation; legislation is for legislatures.

There’s little doubt that New Jersey is failing to live up to its constitutional promise to provide a “thorough and efficient” education. Should the court so rule, it will be up to the legislature to fix the problem, and introducing a universally accessible free education marketplace is certainly the best solution they could implement.

But it’s their job to implement it, not the court’s.

The Administration claimed this week that Medicare and Medicaid spending has slowed, but a close look at the overall picture tells a different story. My colleague Michael Cannon has already posted his opinion about Medicare spending. Here’s the low-down on Medicaid.

The official spin:

Medicaid cost projections are once again declining, reflecting … a slowdown in Federal Medicaid spending growth from over 12 percent per year in fiscal year 2000–2002 to 7.2 percent from 2002–2005, down further to 4.6 percent projected for fiscal year 2006–2007.

And the complete story:

Summary budget tables — updated during the release of the Administration’s Mid-Session Review of the Budget this week — indicate that federal Medicaid and SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program – also a part of Medicaid) outlays would grow from $129 billion in 2001 to $213 billion by 2008. That’s a cumulative (geometric) annual average growth rate of 7.7 percent during the Administration’s full tenure. The nation’s Gross Domestic Product, on the other hand, would grow at a much slower pace — just 5.2 percent per year during the same period.

Much of Medicaid spending growth resulted from the substantial surge in enrollments and benefits per enrollee during the aftermath of the 2001 recession. Medicaid outlays would be expected to surge during recessions but should abate when growth picks up. The latter did not occur during the 1991 and 2001 recession episodes. During the later recession, changes in federal regulations made it easier for states to expand coverage to broader groups and claim federal matching grants against such coverage. And evidence from micro-data surveys indicates that it was not the poorest groups that received most of the latest increases in Medicaid coverage and benefits.

The reasons for the current slower growth in Medicaid spending are the transfer of the fastest growing prescription drug coverage to Medicare and robust economic growth. However, according to the Administration’s projections, faster Medicaid spending growth – at 7‑plus percent per year — is projected to resume after 2007.

Providing greater power to states to redesign their programs while persisting with a federal financing mechanism of matching grants (rather than block grants with capped growth) promotes states’ incentives to spend more. That will cause…you guessed it…more spending on our middle-class Medicaid entitlement.

Slate has a great piece up on the use and misuse of statistics by reporters.

The magic number for journalists covering the identity theft beat has been $48 billion—the estimated annual losses suffered by identity theft victims—which carries the Federal Trade Commission’s imprimatur. … Fred H. Cate, a law professor and director of Indiana University’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, notes that if the estimate were accurate, it would wipe out up to half of the banking industry’s $103 billion profits in 2005. “If those numbers were true, we’d have a banking crisis on our hands,” he says.

When I worked on the Hill, I came to recognize a similar dynamic at play: There were things everyone believed and no one questioned. I called them “political facts” because the source of the fact was consensus rather than any measurement or observation. Repetition of political facts in Members’ speeches and floor statements just made them all the more true.

A political fact relating to identity fraud is that it is a stranger crime, often a product of data breaches, that is conducted mainly over the Internet. It sometimes is, but in my book, Identity Crisis, I point out the results of an actual study showing that:

[M]ore than a third of individuals who had been impersonated in a true identity fraud knew … who the perpetrator was. And in more than half of those cases, the perpetrator was a family member or other relative. Other prominent perpetrators of identity frauds are people in companies or financial institutions with access to personal information, as well as friends, neighbors, or in-home employees of impersonation victims. So much for the Internet being the cause of identity fraud, though it certainly plays a role in some cases.

Alas, … my source was a Federal Trade Commission study.

This is well past its purchase-by date, but Dafna Linzer had a Washington Post Outlook piece in March on the National Security Council’s “Sesame Street Generation.” Not as sneering as the title implies, the article describes the first generation of NSC officials to come of age in an era of American unipolarity. If the article is any indication, my exceedingly low expectations for my generation may have been a touch too optimistic.

In one particularly breathtaking passage, Meghan O’Sullivan, the president’s point person for Iraq on the NSC, describes her intellectual heritage and how that shapes her approach to policy:

For many of the generals with whom O’Sullivan consults in her current job, the painful experience of Vietnam permeates their thinking on Iraq. Not for O’Sullivan. “We are the first post-Vietnam generation, without the baggage of Vietnam, which doesn’t mean we don’t try to learn some of the lessons from there about counterinsurgency and so forth, but it’s not my first frame of reference and I think that’s a good thing,” said O’Sullivan.

Actually, having a pessimistic view of counterinsurgency would probably be a good thing. The new Army field manual on counterinsurgency is only the latest indication that the sunny optimism of the Bush administration was a mistake, and that counterinsurgency is much, much harder than administration officials thought it was before we went in to Iraq.

After the first Persian Gulf war, President George H.W. Bush famously exclaimed “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” It appears his son, and the Sesame Street Generation at the NSC—the Best and the Brightest, if you will, of Generation X—are doing their level best to bring it back.

According to Polit​i​cal​Money​Line​.com:

Federal lobbying of the legislative and executive branches totaled $1.2 billion ($1,201,255,222) during the last six months of 2005. This is the first period lobbying expenditures have averaged over $200 million a month. For all of 2005 the total spent was $2,363,102,190.

Lobbying by health care interests led the pack ($183,324,757 spent in the last half of 2005), just as it has for the last 10 or so years. That might have something to do with the fact that government purchases about half of all health care in the United States and controls the other half indirectly.

The American Medical Association was among the top five organizational spenders ($9,720,000 spent in the last half of 2005) in part because they successfully lobbied to block Medicare payment cuts, which had already been enacted into law and were scheduled to take effect this year. That would be the third or fourth year in a row that providers have staved off those payment cuts.

Jagadeesh Gokhale and I have a theory. It is that politicians have no intention of reducing how much Medicare pays providers, but instead use the threat of payment cuts to extract political contributions from doctors and hospitals.

The federal budget deficit projection for 2006 shrank to $296 billion (story here). White House insiders are reporting that this is a good thing.

Compared to what? Well, compared to last year’s deficit, of course. Or compared to where the deficit was expected to go. But being proud of an accomplishment like that is a bit like congratulating yourself for successfully not driving your car into a brick wall. 

Before anyone accuses me of being Eeyore incarnate, I’d like to note that the economy has been growing faster than many people expected, and surprises like that are always welcome. That’s the main reason the federal government has collected so much revenue – and it’s unlikely that the Bush tax cuts didn’t have something to do with that.

Yet it’s hard to find much solace in data that also show the federal budget has grown by a staggering 45 percent during the Bush presidency so far. (The national economy as measured by GDP has only grown by 30 percent.) And you just might realize the good news is also the bad news. On the one hand, the government collected more tax money. On the other hand, the government collected more tax money. 

Government spending is still chewing on close to 21 percent of GDP. That’s still bigger than the 18 percent it consumed when Bush took office. In fact, that’s the biggest the budget has been in over 10 years — which is, conveniently, a point in history right before the Republican Revolution. 

If the federal budget had grown from the day George W. Bush was inaugurated at the same annual rate it had for the six years before he came to office, the federal budget would swallow only 17 percent of GDP today. Balanced or not, seems to me a budget of that size would be much better than what we’ve got now. Maybe we should stop the bidding there next year. 

In the meantime, the unfunded liabilities of federal entitlements have rocketed to over $85 trillion. That’s obviously a much bigger number than the current year deficit. And obviously a much bigger problem. Yet you don’t seem to hear too much about that from policymakers anymore.

Okay, enough of the gloom. You may now return to your regularly-scheduled happiness.