Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru have a fantastic article on health care [subscription required] in the February 6 issue of National Review that, while not excusing RomneyCare, offers probably the best way that a compromised Mitt Romney could run against ObamaCare. If you don’t have a subscription, find a copy.

Newt Gingrich defeated communism, someone hacked Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account, and President Obama saved the U.S. automobile industry. Grandiosity, denial, and revisionism are all noted indulgences of the political breed. That’s why we should always be skeptical of their words and pity the partisan lemmings who mindlessly parrot their rhetoric.

In his SOTU speech last night, the president claimed credit for rescuing the auto industry:

On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.

We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.

This is a claim that is likely to be repeated as the president campaigns across the country this year, so it may be worthwhile to examine its merits. (Who knows, maybe an effective debate moderator or Sunday news show host might find his way to asking the right questions of the president or members of his administration.)

Closer analysis reveals that President Obama (enabled by President Bush’s complicity) bailed out specific stakeholders at two auto companies at great cost to U.S. taxpayers and at great expense to important U.S. institutions. 

The assertion – or implication – that he saved the auto industry is bogus. The auto industry was never on the verge of collapse. GM and Chrysler were in deep trouble, but Ford, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Kia, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes Benz (to name some U.S. producers) were fine. Yes, in 2008–2009 the economy was in recession and automobile demand had tanked. The companies that had been the most profligate, the most reckless, and the least disciplined were exposed, but talk of industry collapse was the product of a Detroit public relations campaign that featured the claim that 2 to 3 million jobs could be lost if the government didn’t funnel huge sums of cash to the Big Three. (Details here.)

I have shouted from the rooftops about this issue for over three years. So rather than present all the facts and reconstruct all the arguments, let me economize with reference to this congressional testimony, given seven month ago. It pretty well sums up everything that’s wrong or misleading about the president’s narrative.

As I wrote last year:

The objection to the auto bailout was not that the federal government wouldn’t be able to marshal adequate resources to help GM. The most serious concerns were about the consequences of that intervention — the undermining of the rule of law, the property confiscations, the politically driven decisions and the distortion of market signals.

Any verdict on the auto bailouts must take into account, among other things, the illegal diversion of TARP funds, the forced transfer of assets from shareholders and debt-holders to pensioners and their union; the higher-risk premiums consequently built into U.S. corporate debt; the costs of denying Ford and the other more worthy automakers the spoils of competition; the costs of insulating irresponsible actors, such as the autoworkers’ union, from the outcomes of an apolitical bankruptcy proceeding; the diminution of U.S. moral authority to counsel foreign governments against market interventions; and the lingering uncertainty about policy that pervades the business environment to this day.

GM’s recent profits speak only to the fact that politicians committed more than $50 billion to the task of rescuing those companies and the United Auto Workers. With debts expunged, cash infused, inefficiencies severed, ownership reconstituted, sales rebates underwritten and political obstacles steamrolled — all in the midst of a recovery in U.S. auto demand — only the most incompetent operations could fail to make profits.

But taxpayers are still short at least $10 billion to $20 billion (depending on the price that the government’s 500 million shares of GM will fetch), and there is still significant overcapacity in the auto industry.

The administration should divest as soon as possible, without regard to the stock price. Keeping the government’s tentacles around a large firm in an important industry will keep the door open wider to industrial policy and will deter market-driven decision-making throughout the industry, possibly keeping the brakes on the recovery. Yes, there will be a significant loss to taxpayers. But the right lesson to learn from this chapter in history is that government interventions carry real economic costs — only some of which are readily measurable.

Perhaps I’m a little sensitive from having spent 7 years working in the Senate (rather than just using the Senate as a stepping stone), but when Obama makes statements in his State of the Union like:

Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything – even routine business – passed through the Senate. Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.

I have to wonder if he even has the slightest clue what he is talking about. First, what’s with the “no longer”, the fact is that the Senate has operated under super-majority rules since before Obama was born. The vast majority of bills and nominations pass by unanimous consent, meaning that 100 votes are needed. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, 95% of the nominations sent to the Senate in 2011 were confirmed.

And the rules aren’t to blame for “routine business” not getting done. It’s been over 1000 days since Senate Democrats passed a budget, but then you have to assemble one to pass one. In 2011 the Senate passed over 400 pieces of legislation, only about 20% below the average of the last 20 years. As someone who’d like to see government come to a halt, let me assure you, this isn’t it.

Setting aside the offensive nature of a President suggesting changes in the Senate rules (ever hear of the separation of powers?) the fact is that his proposal wouldn’t have mattered in the case of his recent “recess” nominations. First, Cordray was given a vote, with a required 60 for moving to consideration. He didn’t get 60. There’s nothing in the Constitution that defines Senate “consent” as a simple majority. Obama’s unconstitutional NRLB nominations weren’t even in the Senate for 90 days (his apparent standard).

Our founding fathers purposely created a system that made it hard, not easy, to legislate. The very existence of both a House and Senate is evidence they rejected simple majority rules for legislating. One of the many things I learned from working in the Senate, and having spent more time on the Senate floor than Obama, is that dealing in good faith can almost always get you to an broad agreement. If Obama feels his legislative agenda has come to a halt, he has himself to blame, not the Senate rules.

President Obama’s State of the Union address last night was, in my opinion, pretty awful (although James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute thinks it could have been worse). I know SOTUs are political theater at its worst, and I watch them always with something not unlike disgust, but I found almost nothing to like in the substance last night. The electioneering, partisan, self-aggrandizing tone didn’t help.

Let me turn specifically to trade policy, which was more thoroughly covered last night than in recent SOTUs. In an election year, and from a president who is ambivalent (at best) on trade, a trade-heavy speech is not always a good thing: trade policy can get caught up in broader political arguments about inequality, unemployment and economic growth. And rarely does that combination work well for those of us who want and promote free trade between people regardless of the political borders behind which those people happen to live.

But first, the Good news from last night’s speech. President Obama did make a passing and veiled reference to the need for Congress to extend Permanent Normal Trade Relations to Russia, necessary for the United States to treat Russia as any other member of the World Trade Organization when it joins the body later this year (i.e., allowing Americans to access Russian goods and services more readily). And at least he painted the recent passage of the trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea and Panama as a positive development, albeit on mercantilist grounds (more on this later).

The Bad? The president said precisely nothing about the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations currently underway with nine other Asia-Pacific countries (with Canada, Mexico and Japan interested in joining in the future). The TPP is supposedly the crowning achievement of his administration’s trade efforts and a deal that he was itching to complete in 2012. What does it say about his priorities that it warrants not a mention in his main speech of the year? Maybe his political supporters in organized labor aren’t buying this “21st century trade agreement” stuff any more than I am and he sees merit in keeping it quiet. But that then raises worrying questions about the ability of the negotiations to be completed on schedule if they don’t have full-throated political support at the highest level. The president made no mention of the World Trade Organization or its struggling Doha round of trade liberalization negotiations, either, although maybe there he is simply showing acceptance of the round’s (near) death, an assessment he would share with most trade watchers.

And the Ugly? Once again the president displays no appreciation for the true benefits of free trade – the benefits from specialization and exchange. They include the economic benefits that come from increased competition, and from access to cheaper and more variable goods and services for Americans. From his silly (and, I suspect, futile) goal to “double exports in five years” to his rhetoric about how America can “win” if the playing field is level (what does “winning” mean in that context anyway?), the speech was peppered with nationalistic, misguided and quite frankly inflammatory rhetoric that will not help trade relations – let alone lead to enhanced trading opportunities for Americans – one bit. Creating yet another government agency, this time to “investigat[e] unfair trade practices in countries like China”, will just add to tensions. Claiming the tires debacle as a model of trade enforcement success is yet another example of how the concept of unintended consequences is apparently lost on this president.

Matthew Yglesias has some excellent things to say on the mercantilist nonsense in Obama’s message, and the ill-conceived manufacturing fetish he conveyed. And Obama managed to combine both economic illiterate concepts when wailing about the unfairness of having to compete with “foreign manufacturers [who] have a leg up on ours only because they’re heavily subsidized.” (He then, inevitably, went on to include all sorts of subsidies or tax breaks that he would like to extend to certain American firms/​industries – Chris Edwards has amply covered the tax stuff here). Overall, I give this speech a “D” on trade. Must try harder.

The American Legislative Exchange Council has just released its latest Report Card on American Education, and will be hosting an event to launch it in Washington, DC, tomorrow, at the Heritage Foundation. I haven’t had a chance to get very far into it yet, but it was established on Monday of this week that ALEC can predict the future, so it’s certainly worth a look.

In last night’s State of the Union speech, President Obama called for tax law reforms he says we need. Cato scholars have their doubts about much of what was in the speech, but my interest was piqued by the fact that he said, “Send me these tax reforms, and I will sign them right away.”

You see signing them “right away” would again violate his 2008 campaign promise to post the bills sent him by Congress online for five days before signing them.

That’s a cheeky point, but it is time to focus on campaign promises and their honesty. The beginning of President Obama’s fourth year in office is roughly the beginning of his campaign for another term.

When I first began tracking President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise, I joked with friends that it was career gold because I could write hundreds of blog posts for the next four years without thinking a new thought. Well, it’s not quite that good. This is post thirty-six in the SBS series.

(Each character in that last sentence was a link to a previous post. You can spend a whole day reviewing them!)

Last Thursday, January 19th, was the end of President Obama’s third year, so it’s time to review how he’s been doing with Sunlight Before Signing. It was the president’s first broken promise, and at the mid-point of the term he had popped just above 50% in his compliance.

How has he done in the ensuing year?

Well … meh.

Of the 90 bills that became law in the last year, 55 got the Sunlight Before Signing treatment. That’s a 61.1% average, good enough to earn a middle-school student a D.

Year three was stronger than the previous two, so President Obama’s overall Sunlight Before Signing record moves to 52.4%. That’s poor execution on a transparency promise that energized audiences on the 2008 campaign trail. But let’s dig a little deeper.

At the end of the second year, we did some analysis and graphing to explore the hunch that inconsequential bills get plenty of sunlight and the more important ones do not. We return to that analysis.

Our first look is at compliance with Sunlight Before Signing over time. The updated numbers show essentially the same as they did before. After a first year of outright failure, there has been improvement—nowhere near perfection, just improvement.

(You can also see that Congress’ output dropped dramatically in 2011. That’s a matter of indifference in terms of Sunlight Before Signing—and a good thing if you like limited government.)

Click on the image at right to see a chart of compliance and non-compliance by number of bills over time, then compliance as a percentage of bills over time, and, in the pie chart, that overall compliance figure.

We also investigated previously the hunch that important bills get less sunlight, while unimportant bills get more. Our first proxy for importance—a rough one—was the number of pages in the bills coming to the president. Generally speaking, longer bills are more important than shorter ones. The second set of charts (click on the left) show Sunlight Before Signing compliance and non-compliance over time by number of pages, compliance by percentage of pages, and overall compliance by number of pages. You can see that overall compliance drops well below 50% to about 36%.

Another proxy for importance is the number of final passage votes a bill got in the House and Senate. Generally speaking—and it’s definitely not always true—more important bills are voted on in the House, the Senate, or both. Less important bills go through on voice vote, unanimous consent, and so on. (Sometimes important bills go through without votes because the political balances are so carefully struck. That’s good for Congress “getting things done,” but not good for transparency or your ability to oversee the government.)

Go ahead and click on the image to the right and you can see the charts reflecting Sunlight Before Signing compliance and non-compliance over time with multipliers given to bills getting one or two final votes. That result is not so decisive: compliance drops by a small amount to about 50%.

There’s still time for President Obama to execute on Sunlight Before Signing. He could make a real run at transparency by signalling right now—today—that all bills will get five-days online before he signs them. If Congress wants to finish appropriations this year at the last minute. They had better do that at the last minute plus five days or else the government will shut down.

Maybe that’s a silly idea. Maybe no president in his right mind would do something like that. If so, consider that President Obama promised to do exactly that when he campaigned for the presidency. If he was being fanciful during his last campaign, voters might consider that during his next campaign, just as they consider the credibility of all candidates. President Obama’s transparency promises have been unparalleled. His results … quite paralleled.

Perhaps President Obama is going to limp to the next election without fulfilling Sunlight Before Signing. The president could still score some real transparency points by publishing a machine-readable organization chart for the executive branch, with agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects all uniquely identified for computer processing. That would be big, and it would not be that hard.

In the meantime, here are the Sunlight Before Signing results for all the bills signed into law during President Obama’s third year.

[Brackets indicate a link from White​house​.gov to Thomas legislative database]

Today is the mid-point of National School Choice Week, and we’re once again rockin’ to the oldies of prognostication. This time we’re going all the way back to the Mann. That’s Horace Mann, the “Father of the Common School” himself.

It is Mann who, among many things, is probably most responsible for introducing one of the deepest underlying sentiments supporting government schooling: that public schools will unify us and give us peace. As he waxed eloquent in his first annual report as Secretary of the newly-constituted Massachusetts State Board of Education:

Amongst any people, sufficiently advanced in intelligence, to perceive, that hereditary opinions on religious subjects are not always coincident with truth, it cannot be overlooked, that the tendency of the private school system is to assimilate our modes of education to those of England, where churchmen and dissenters, —each sect according to its own creed,—maintain separate schools, in which children are taught, from their tenderest years to wield the sword of polemics with fatal dexterity; and where the gospel, instead of being a temple of peace, is converted into an armory of deadly weapons, for social, interminable warfare. Of such disastrous consequences, there is but one remedy and one preventive. It is the elevation of the common schools.

How wrong Mann was.

Keep in mind that as of 1837, the year Mann gave his first address, some pretty impressive unifying things had happened in America despite education being grounded in families, private schools, and yes, churches. We’d established unified colonies; penned and ratified a Declaration of Independence that enunciated foundational American values; fought and won a war against the greatest military power on Earth; established a new nation; and created a national government based on a Constitution that — though it’s legs are under constant assault — still stands.

But let’s get to Mann’s prediction: Did “elevation of the common schools” end “social, interminable warfare”?

Not on your life. Indeed, by attempting to force diverse people into a monolithic system of government schools, it most likely exacerbated social tensions and sparked otherwise avoidable wars. To name just a few school-stoked conflagrations (both real and rhetorical):

• The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844, sparked by a dispute over whose version of the Bible — Roman Catholic, Protestant, or neither — would be allowed in the public schools. By the conclusion of the rioting hundreds of people had been killed or injured and millions of dollars of property damage inflicted. Similar conflict — though not as physically destructive — occurred in many other American towns, with social strife largely only lessened when Catholics established their own school system.
• The Scopes “Monkey” Trial, a sensational case that grabbed the attention of the entire nation as a Tennessee court ruled whether or not it was acceptable to teach evolution in public schools. It is a topic that continues to rip communities apart today, and is so hot that, even where state standards mandate evolution be taught, most biology teachers avoid it. They simply don’t want to deal with the acrimony that would ensue.
• In 1974, Kanawha County, West Virginia, was plunged into a state of near-civil war over books selected by the county school district that many residents perceived to be anti-Christian and anti-American. Before the strife subsided commerce had ground to a halt, at least one person had been shot, and schools had been dynamited.

These are just some of the most well known or violent of the battles in the “interminable warfare” sparked not by private schooling, but the public schools Mann promised would bring peace if they became ascendant. Indeed, as I itemized in an analysis of just the 2005-06 school year, values-based skirmishes are fought all around us, all the time, whether over prayer in the schools, reading assignments, bullying and student speech, ethnic studies, and on and on. But that is exactly what we should expect when people of widely diverse religions, ethnicity, and philosophies are all required to support a single system of government schools. They won’t just give up the things that are often at the very heart of their lives — they will fight to have them taught.

Perhaps the biggest irony in all this is that students who attend private schools, even after adjusting for important non-school factors, are actually more knowledgeable about civics, active in their communities, and tolerant of others than are public school students. As University of Arkansas professor Patrick Wolf discovered in reviewing the empirical literature:

The statistical record suggests that private schooling and school choice often enhance the realization of the civic values that are central to a well-functioning democracy. This seems to be the case particularly among ethnic minorities (such as Latinos) in places with great ethnic diversity (such as New York City and Texas), and when Catholic schools are the schools of choice. Choice programs targeted to such constituencies seem to hold the greatest promise of enhancing the civic values of the next generation of American citizens.

How could this be? Because, in contrast to the assumption of Mann and others, most people don’t have to be forced to embrace tolerance and responsible freedom, they choose them. Public schooling, conversely, sends the message that government, not individuals freely working together, is responsible for whatever problems communities face. Even more importantly, by forcing diverse people together, government schools drop them into a zero-sum arena and render conflict all but inevitable.

Common schools haven’t brought us peace in our day. Indeed, quite the opposite.