The solution to this giant mess

is this reform plan.

Before he launched his presidential campaign, Jeb Bush released his emails from his eight years as governor. Now he’s released a 700-page book of selected emails. According to Amazon’s search function, I’m not in the book. But I did have a brief exchange with Governor Bush in 2003. As a libertarian, I wasn’t convinced by his argument. But I was impressed that the governor personally answered an email that I didn’t even send to him but rather to a member of his press staff. Governor Bush announced the creation of the Governor’s Task Force on the Obesity Epidemic, with such goals as:

1. Recommend ways to promote the recognition of overweight and obesity as a major public health problem in Florida that also has serious implications for Florida’s economic prosperity;
2. Review data and other research to determine the number of Florida’s children who are overweight or at risk of becoming overweight;
3. Identify the contributing factors to the increasing burden of overweight and obesity in Florida;
4. Recommend ways to help Floridians balance healthy eating with regular physical activity to achieve and maintain a healthy or healthier body weight;
5. Identify and research evidenced-based strategies to promote lifelong physical activity and lifelong healthful nutrition, and to assist those who are already overweight or obese to maintain healthy lifestyles;
6. Identify effective and culturally appropriate interventions to prevent and treat overweight and obesity;

When the announcement of this task force reached my inbox, courtesy of the governor’s office press list, I had this exchange (read from the bottom):

From: Jeb Bush [mailto:jeb@jeb.org]
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 8:05 PM
To: David Boaz
Cc: jill.​bratina@​myflorida.​com

Subject: FW: Executive Order Number 03–196

David, the reason for this is that obesity creates huge costs to government. If you believe in limited government, you should support initiatives that reduce it. I know you believe that it is not the role of government to deal with these demands, which I respect, but until you win the day, we need to respond to the challenge.

Jeb

—–Original Message—–
From: David Boaz [mailto:dboaz@cato.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 10:30 AM
To: DiPietre, Jacob
Subject: RE: Executive Order Number 03–196

Why is what I eat any of the government’s business? This is the very definition of big government.

—–Original Message—–
From: DiPietre, Jacob [mailto:Jacob.DiPietre@MyFlorida.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 10:21 AM
To: ALL OF EOG, OPB & SDD
Subject: Executive Order Number 03–196

Memorandum
DATE: October 15, 2003
TO: Capital Press Corps
FROM: Jill Bratina, Governor’s Communications Director
RE: Executive Order Number 03–196
Please find attached an Executive Order creating the Governor’s Task Force on the Obesity Epidemic.

As I said, I wasn’t persuaded. I’ve written that obesity is not in fact a public health problem. It may be a widespread health problem, but you can’t catch obesity from doorknobs or molecules in the air. And the idea that our personal choices impose costs on government, through semi-socialized medicine and similar programs, has no good stopping point. If obesity is the government’s business, then so are smoking, salt intake, motorcycle riding, insufficient sleep, cooking all the nutrients out of vegetables, and an endless stream of potentially sub-optimal decisions. (I was going to include drinking whole milk, but … well, you know.)

I’m glad to note that last month Jeb Bush said that a federally developed anti-obesity video game, “Mommio,” was a waste of “scarce resources.” Maybe he’s coming around.

The overwhelming conclusion of the best research on school choice is that students who receive scholarships to attend the school of their choice perform as well or better on achievement tests on average and are more likely to graduate high school and go to college. The positive effects are particularly found among low-income and minority populations that are presently the most choice deprived.

The only way opponents of school choice get around this inconvenient truth is by ignoring it, which they do with great persistence. They are frequently aided in their willful ignorance by dubious “reports” that claim to evaluate the evidence while inexplicably leaving out numerous gold standard studies by researchers at top universities. The latest such “report” comes from the Center for Public Education, which Professor James Shuls of the University of Missouri-St. Louis methodically exposed over at the Show-Me Institute’s blog: 

Recently, the Center for Public Education, an arm of the National School Boards Association, released a report on the merits of school choice. The paper claims to summarize “what the research says.” Interestingly, the report fails to include almost every analysis that has found benefits to private school choice programs.

When Anna Egalite, an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy, and human development at North Carolina State University, conducted a systematic review of the competitive effects of private school choice programs, she found 21 studies. She concluded that the results “unanimously find positive impacts on student achievement. Such overwhelming evidence supports the development of market-based schooling policies as a means to increase student achievement in traditional public schools.” Interestingly, the Center for Public Education did not cite any of these studies.

Similarly, there have been 12 random-assignment studies of voucher programs. These are considered the “gold-standard” in social science research because they are the best at determining causality. Eleven of the 12 studies have found positive effects from voucher programs. The Center for Public Education review only cites one of these studies.

The report cites plenty of useful statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics and other sources, but does not even attempt to cite the plethora of useful research on school choice programs.

Nevertheless, the report does get at least one thing right—private school choice tends to boost graduation rates. This was highlighted in the evaluation of the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, which showed a 21 percentage point increase in the graduation rate for voucher users.

Not surprisingly, given that they neglect to cite any of the ample evidence showing that school choice succeeds, the Center’s conclusion is that “In general, we find that school choices work for some students sometimes, are worse for some students sometimes, and are usually no better or worse than traditional public schools.”

The Center for Public Education does not explain what criteria it used to determine which studies to include in its supposed review of the research on school choice. Hopefully they will respond to Prof. Shuls’ critique by issuing a revised report that is more transparent and thorough–but don’t hold your breath.

By nearly a 2 to 1 margin, Ohio’s Issue 3 has failed. It may be just as well. Jacob Sullum writes at Reason:

[I]t’s not clear whether the rejection of Issue 3 reflects general resistance to legalization or opposition to the initiative’s most controversial feature: a cannabis cultivation cartel that would have limited commercial production to 10 sites controlled by the initiative’s financial backers. The ballot description highlighted that aspect of the initiative, saying Issue 3 “grants a monopoly for the commercial production and sale of marijuana for recreational and medicinal purposes” and would “endow exclusive rights for commercial marijuana growth, cultivation, and extraction to self-designated landowners who own ten predetermined parcels of land.”

This is nothing like the model that prevailed in Colorado, and that seems to be working well so far.

Establishing a permanent commercial pot cartel has no clear public policy rationale. It appears rather to have been an instance of shameless self-dealing by individuals who hoped to extract rents based on the public’s anxiety about change. Even – and I don’t say this lightly – even a state monopoly on commercial sales might have been better, in that the rents would have gone to a public purpose, rather than to some well-connected speculators, who ought not to profit from a law written specifically to favor them. Indeed, such laws are not properly called laws at all; they are privileges – private laws, rather than public ones, and as such they come under grave suspicion.

The problem, then, is not corporatization. Love it or hate it, we’re neck deep in corporatization already. Few would object to it now, I would think, particularly given that Issue 3’s backers did (grudgingly) relent and allow personal cultivation. The trouble is not corporatization; it’s when only a self-selected handful of corporations even get a chance to enter the market, and when all others are excluded by law forever, presumably by means of the same awful Drug War apparatus we’ve always known.

What should a legal marijuana market look like? It’s a little early to tell. Colorado’s experiment is still developing, and its market may not yet be mature. What’s called for is flexibility in business design, as well as rapid response by state governments to any genuine problems that might arise. (Will they? Maybe!) We don’t really know what consumers are going to want yet, including whether that may vary regionally or over time, and what negative externalities their choices might or might not produce. Establishing a cartel would have been exactly the wrong move.

In a recent The Hill piece on the REAL ID debate in New Hampshire, I wrote about the complaint against federal legislators who cease representing their states in Washington, D.C., and start representing Washington, D.C., in their states.

That seems to be happening in New Mexico, where four of five members of the congressional delegation are at best standing by worrying about a Department of Homeland Security attack on their state. At worst, they are lobbying the state legislature to cede authority over driver licensing to the federal government.

The DHS is pushing New Mexico toward compliance with REAL ID, the national ID law, by saying that it will not offer another extension of the deadline for compliance. The statutory deadline passed seven years ago and no state is in compliance. No state will be in 2016. The national ID law is as unworkable as it is weak as a security tool.

But U.S. Senators Tom Udall (D) and Martin Heinrich (D), and Representatives Ben Ray Luján (D) and Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) had this to say in a joint statement:

Our offices remain in close contact with DHS and it is clear from our conversations that the state legislature and the governor must take action to ensure New Mexicans can continue to access federal facilities and airports in the months to come.

It’s not the New Mexico delegation calling the shots in Washington, D.C. It’s Ted Sobel of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of State-Issued Identification Support. According to Government Technology, he confirmed Friday that New Mexico’s practice of issuing licenses to qualified drivers without reference to their immigration status is the reason why DHS has mounted this attack on New Mexico.

That’s a good state policy, though, treating driver’s licenses simply as a license to drive. And it’s the policy New Mexico has chosen. I can imagine New Mexicans being nonplussed to learn that their congressional delegation is “in close contact” with the federal bureaucrats attacking their state’s policies and authority.

A Santa Fe New Mexican editorial calling for state compliance is too conciliatory and wrong in its conclusion, but it says of REAL ID, “It likely won’t increase security but does add to the bureaucratic hurdles citizens and state governments face. Another solution to New Mexico’s problem would be for Congress to repeal the law.”

Another solution indeed. Perhaps the paper should urge the congressional delegation to defend the interests of New Mexico and New Mexicans by defunding and repealing the national ID law.

Presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have proposed value-added taxes (VATs) as part of their tax reform plans.

I critique these taxes in National Review today, arguing that they could become engines of big government growth.

Cruz and Paul are champions of small government, and so their embrace of VATs is unfortunate, and also potentially dangerous.

Dangerous because VATs are probably the only way that liberals would be able to fund the huge projected growth in unreformed entitlement programs in coming years.

In a worse-case scenario under the current tax system, liberals would succeed in hiking income taxes, but they wouldn’t be able to seize much more money because the income tax base is so mobile in today’s global economy. The corporate income tax, for example, is a complex and damaging tax, but it is not capable of raising the government any more revenue than it already does.

But in a worst-case scenario under a Cruz or Paul VAT, the government would be able to confiscate far more money as the VAT rate were jacked up over time. It is no coincidence that Western European governments—with their VATs—collect substantially higher revenues as a share of GDP than we do.

In a best-case scenario, reformers like Cruz and Paul will lead the charge to cut entitlements and enact a simpler, lower, pro-growth tax code. But we have to consider how liberals will work to hijack new tax structures and try to drive us in the opposite direction.

Cruz and Paul are heroes for their battles against the GOP establishment on overspending and other issues. But I fear their tax plans would not move us in the small-government direction they want to go in over the long run.