The Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com blog has a breakout of all 36 bills in the “Coburn Omnibus.”

#36: a greenhouse in Suitland, Maryland!

The New York Times reports that Providence’s police would prefer to spend their federal grants on crime rather than terrorism. That is because there is crime in Rhode Island but no terrorism.

This conflict is national, as I discussed here. Because our domestic counter-terrorism bureaucracy is largely our crime-fighting bureaucracy, the more you chase terrorists, the less you chase criminals. Some of the counter-terrorism money is new, but much of it comes by cutting back on other things. The FBI only has so many agents and the Justice Department so much grant money. Police officers only have so much time.

The result is pressure to divert counter-terrorism resources to crime-fighting. There are not enough terrorists to go around, so terrorist fusion centers become all-hazards fusion centers. Police departments try to use counter-terrorism funding to buy things — like police cars — that aid their actual work. Scandals about misused homeland security funds follow. But maybe the misallocating police had a better grasp on local risks than the grant-giving feds.

This was all summarized by the Wire. Early on, Detective McNulty struggles to interest the FBI in his investigation of Baltimore drug dealers, going so far as to call them terrorists to try to meet FBI criteria. Later, as a beat cop, he complains about the uselessness of a counter-terrorism course but uses notebooks they give him there for his kids’ school supplies.

“Excessive Heat Can Run up Hospitals’ Bad Debt Expense for Treating the Uninsured: Report,” trumpeted a trade publication called Inside ARM (Inside Accounts Receivable Management).

The first paragraph informed us that, “ A report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality suggests hospitals may find they are treating more uninsured patients suffering from heat exposure and exhaustion, resulting in more medical bad debt.”

Turns out that about 6,200 people were hospitalized in 2005 due to excessive heat and weather conditions, at an average cost of $6,200.

But in the penultimate paragraph of the report, we find out that 6,500 were hospitalized due to extreme cold weather conditions at an average cost of $12,500 per stay because the hospitals stays tended to be longer.

Final tally:

Hospitalization costs from exposure to extreme heat – $38.4 million

Hospitalization costs from exposure to extreme cold – $81.3 million.

Wonder what the numbers would have looked like, absent any global warming, which should have increased minimum temperatures more than maximum temperatures or, more importantly, had there been no greenhouse gas producing air conditioning or heating.

Kudos to the Adam Smith Institute of London, which has succeeded in remarkably short order in commissioning, funding, and erecting a statue of Adam Smith “on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile – right in the heart of Scotland’s capital city, where Adam Smith worked and died.” Appropriately enough, the statue stands on the site of an ancient marketplace.

Adam Smith’s importance as a founder of modern liberal society can hardly be overestimated. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1952,

The ideas that found their classical expression in the two books of Adam Smith demolished the traditional philosophy of mercantilism and opened the way for capitalist mass production for the needs of the masses. Under capitalism the common man is the much-talked-about customer who “is always right.” His buying makes efficient entrepreneurs rich, and his abstention from buying forces inefficient entrepreneurs to go out of business.

Smith’s wisdom might be especially useful in this election season when Republicans and Democrats compete to spend more taxpayer dollars:

“[Governments are] … without exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.”

“Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct…. Those unproductive hands … may consume so great a share of their whole revenue … that all the frugality and good conduct of individuals may not be able to compensate the waste and degradation of produce occasioned by this violent and forced encroachment.”

For a lively and readable introduction to Adam Smith, read P. J. O’Rourke’s On the Wealth of Nations or watch him discuss the book here.

Paul Gigot has an outstanding piece on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac today in the WSJ. “The abiding lesson here is what happens when you combine private profit with government power.” Exactly.

Here’s what I said about the twin-headed hydra in my 2005 Downsizing the Federal Government:

Federal taxpayers also face financial exposure from the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These ‘government-sponsored enterprises’ are private firms, but taxpayers might become responsible for their debts because of their close ties to the government. The value of these ties created an implicit federal subsidy of $23 billion in 2003. The large size of GSEs threatens to create a major financial crisis should they run into trouble. Balance sheet liabilities of the housing GSEs grew from $374 billion in 1992 to $2.5 trillion by 2003.

A benefit of fully privatizing the GSEs would be to end the corrupting ties that these entities have with the federal establishment. Fannie Mae’s expansive executive suites are filled with political cronies receiving excessive salaries. They spend their time handing out campaign contributions to protect the agency’s subsidies.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and others have argued that Fannie and Freddie need to be subject to more regulatory control because they pose a threat to financial market stability. But a better solution is to make these and other GSEs play by the same rules as other businesses, and to end the distortions caused by federal subsidies. The federal government should completely sever the ties with Fannie, Freddie, and the other GSEs.

My analysis sadly proved to be correct, and my policy solution is more needed than ever.

… when compared to public schooling? For the interesting answer to that question, have a look at Jay Greene’s edu blog.

I’m currently attending Cato University — extraordinary academics, so-so athletics — so I’ve neither been able to get to the edublogs in too timely a fashion, nor ruminate extensively on their content. I have, though, managed to get to a few blogs, and couldn’t help but notice a question-and-answer in need of facilitation.

Over at Flypaper — the blog of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation — Mike Petrilli has returned from vacation and not missed a beat in his national-education-standards march. Picking up on a recent Jonathan Alter column dealing largely with crippling teacher-union obstructionism, Petrilli declares that:

if we harnessed the resources we currently spend on our fifty-state system of tests for one common system, we could afford to measure subjects beyond reading and math, online, in a way that encouraged intellectually-challenging schoolwork rather than test prep.

My concern here is not with the money-saving proposition. It’s with the “intellectually-challenging schoolwork” assumption. It goes back to an argument I’ve made many times before, but this time another blogger has brought it up, and one quite different than libertarian ol’ me. Asks Andy Rotherham over at Eduwonk, contemplating the gaming of state tests under No Child Left Behind:

Can someone explain exactly how a national, federal, or “American” in the new parlance, test will be any different? If indeed there is a political pathology out there to make schools look better, regardless of whether they are better, a proposition that seems pretty spot on to me, then how are the politics somehow so radically different at the national level? National test proponents have never really answered this question except to point to the NAEP. But, the NAEP is a no-stakes test right now so it really doesn’t make the point.

Terrific questions, Andy, to which I’d just add: How especially would you expect high-stakes national tests to escape gaming pressures when the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Association of School Administrators, National School Boards Association, and just about every other major education interest group has its headquarters right in the DC area?

I — and I assume Andy — would love to hear the answers to these questions.