So says Mary Bonventre from the ACLU’s Technology & Liberty Program on the ACLU blog.

Blogging for the Newark, N.J. Star-Ledger, politicial science prof. Thurman Hart presents this objection to school vouchers:

[T]he effect of it would be that state, and maybe federal funds, would be used for the expressed [sic] purpose of teaching Catholic dogma. My opposition to that has nothing to do with my status as an Episcopalian — I don’t want All Saints Episcopalian Day School in Hoboken to get state funds to teach Episcopalian dogma

There is merit to his concern. Many of this nation’s early immigrants had fled compelled support for religion and other infrigements on their freedom of belief in their mother countries. But there is a way to avoid these problems while simultaneously ensuring educational freedom and choice for all: education tax credits.

These programs cut taxes on families who cover the cost of their own children’s education, and on individuals and businesses who donate to non-profit scholarship funds for lower-income students. If you choose to participate, you also choose the institution that gets your money — either the school you send your own children to or the scholarship orgnization that receives your contribution. In the latter case, you simply pick the scholarship fund you think is doing the best job helping low-income families.

If you don’t want to fund a religious education for Catholics or Muslims, you don’t have to. You can choose a secular scholarship fund or one serving Episcopalians, Jews or Hindus. For those not particularly sensitive to the religiosity of other families’ schooling, there are scholarship funds that make no religious distinctions at all.

This is a way to unite like-minded donors and parents without the use of compulsion, and without inhibiting the very freedom and clear sense of mission that are the entire raison-d’etre of school choice. It is also in the best spirit of individual liberty and cooperation among free people that we will be celebrating early next month…

Shocking, I know. But while the public likes President Barack Obama personally, they are just a bit more skeptical when it comes to his policies. Such as deficit reduction. 

Reports the New York Times:

A substantial majority of Americans say President Obama has not developed a strategy to deal with the budget deficit, according to the latest New York Times/​CBS News poll, which also found that support for his plans to overhaul health care, rescue the auto industry and close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, falls well below his job approval ratings.

This shows that the public is paying attention to what is going on in Washington. In fact, the president’s policy is debt inflation rather than reduction. You know — $13 trillion in bail-outs (so far; who knows what new financial disasters await!), nearly $1 trillion in “stimulus” spending, proposed budget deficits of nearly $10 trillion over the next decade, health care “reform” which will run trillions (the only argument is how many) over the same period, and more, much more.

Yes, I’d say that the president has no strategy to deal with the budget deficit, other than to increase it at every opportunity.

It appears that the Obama administration has decided to disown the venerable Senator. No wonder. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the ten-year cost of Sen. Kennedy’s bill at $1 trillion, but admitted that its analysis was incomplete. 

Now the consulting group HSI Network, LLC comes foward with an estimate of $4 trillion:

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) have proposed a health reform bill called the Affordable Health Choice Act (AHC) that seeks to reduce the number of uninsured and increase health system efficiency and quality. The draft legislation was introduced on June 9th, 2009. The proposal provided adequate information to suggest what the impact would be of AHC using the ARCOLA™ simulation model. AHC would include an individual mandate as well as a pay or plan provision. In addition, it would include a means-tested subsidy with premium supports available for those up to 500% of the federal poverty level. Public plan options in three tiers: Gold, Silver and Bronze are proposed in a structure similar to that of the Massachusetts Connector, except that it is called The Gateway. These public plan options would contain costs by reimbursing providers up to 10% above current reimbursement rates. There is no mention of removing the tax exclusion associated with employer sponsored health insurance. There is also no mention of changes to Medicare and Medicaid, other than fraud prevention, that could provide cost-savings for the coverage expansion proposed. Below, we summarize the impact of the proposed plan in terms of the reduction on uninsured, the 2010 cost, as well as the ten year cost of the plan in 2010 dollars.

HELP Affordable Health Choices Act

• Uninsurance is reduced by 99% to cover approximately 47,700,000 people
• Subsidy — Tax Recovery = Net cost:
  • $279,000,000,000 subsidy to the individual market
  • $180,000,000,000 subsidy to the ESI market with
  • Net cost: $460,500,000,000 (annual)
  • Net cost: $4,098,000,000,000 (10 year)
• Private sector crowd out: ~79,300,000 lives

HSI figures that a lot more people will take advantage of federal health insurance subsidies, driving costs up far more than indicated by the CBO figure. (H/​t to Phil Klein at the American Spectator online.)

Of course, no one knows what the bill would really cost in operation. But the history of social insurance and welfare programs is sky-rocketing expense well beyond original projections. Go back and look at the initial cost estimates for Medicare and Social Security, and you will run from the room simultaneously laughing and crying.

Health care reform would be serious business at any moment of time, but especially when the country faces $10 trillion in new debt over the next decade on top of the existing $11 trillion national debt. And with the $100 trillion Medicare/​Social Security financial bomb lurking in the background, rushing to leap off the financial cliff with this sort of health care legislation would be utterly irresponsible.

With the move in the Senate to revive our moribund national ID law, the REAL ID Act, under the name “PASS ID,” it’s important to look at whether we’re still dealing with a national ID law. My assessment is that we are.

First, PASS ID is modeled directly on REAL ID. The structure and major provisions of the two bills are the same. Just like REAL ID, PASS ID sets national standards for identity cards and drivers’ licenses, withholding federal recognition if they are not met.

There is no precise definition of a national identification card or system, of course, but its elements are relatively easy to identify.

First, it is national. That is, it is intended to be used throughout the country, and to be nationally uniform in its key elements. REAL ID and PASS ID have the exact same purpose — to create a nationally uniform identity system.

Second, its possession or use is either practically or legally required. A card or system that is one of many options for proving identity or other information is not a national ID if people can decline to use it and still easily access goods, services, or infrastructure. But if law or regulation make it very difficult to avoid carrying or using a card, this presses it into the national ID category.

Neither REAL ID nor PASS ID directly mandate carrying a card. Doing so would be too obviously a national ID system, and politically unpalatable. But both seek to take advantage of the state driver licensing system, and they do that for a reason: Carrying a driver’s license is a practical requirement in most parts of the country, where the automobile reigns supreme as the mode of travel.

But maybe states would decline to participate. Nothing in the PASS ID Act directly requires states to implement the system, and they are entirely free to issue non-compliant licenses and ID cards. But this was also true of REAL ID — because of the constitutional rule that the federal government cannot commandeer the organs of state government. (The case is New York v. United States.)

What both REAL ID and PASS ID do is make it difficult for state residents to function without their nationally standardized ID. They both require the nationally standardized ID to enter federal facilities (perhaps fewer of them under PASS ID), to access nuclear power plants, and to board aircraft.

But the PASS ID bill has specific language saying that a person can’t be denied boarding because they don’t have a national ID. Isn’t that an improvement? It sounds like it, but that language simply restates the rules that exist under REAL ID.

The TSA has never been able to deny people boarding because they don’t have an ID. (Many people have traveled without ID to prove the point.)

What the Department of Homeland Security does is make it really inconvenient to travel without showing ID. Not having your national ID can put you into a long secondary-search delay. And a year ago, the Transportation Security Administration created a new rule allowing them to turn travelers away if they “willingly” refuse to show ID and don’t “assist transportation security officers in ascertaining their identity.”

What this means is that people not showing ID have to answer questions about themselves for a TSA background check — a background check that has included political party affiliation. In other words, you either participate in the national ID system run by states, or you participate in the cardless national ID system that the TSA runs. (The TSA was storing information about who traveled without ID until it got caught.)

The rules are no different between REAL ID and the REAL ID revival bill, PASS ID. You don’t have to carry a national ID to get through the airport, but woe to the person who tries to exercise that freedom.

In addition, the plan under PASS ID is for the federal government to pay states a lot more money for implementation. Cost concerns were a real impediment to REAL ID, and the (false) promise of federal funds is designed to draw states into issuing nationally standard IDs for all their residents.

On balance, REAL ID and PASS ID are peas in a pod. They are both aimed at being practically required. The plan under both is for everyone who has a driver’s license to have a nationally standardized, REAL-ID-type license.

The final “element” of a national ID is that it is used for identification. A national ID card or system shows that a physical person identified previously to a government is the one presenting him- or herself on later occasions. (A Social Security Number is a national identifier, but it is not a national identifiction system because there is no biometric tie between the number and a person.)

REAL ID and PASS ID both subject every applicant for a license to “mandatory facial image capture.” They both put a “digital photograph of the person” on the card. They are most definitely about identification.

Are we still talking about a national ID? REAL ID and the REAL ID revival bill, “PASS ID,” are structured the same. They have no differences in terms of their aim — to create a national ID.

It’s certainly unusual that members of the Senate who formerly appeared to oppose a national ID would reverse course. I’ll spend more time on the politics, of course, and delve into many other issues in future posts.

Most politicians and other advocates of tax harmonization are clever enough to pretend that they do not want higher tax rates. Instead, they assert that their proposals are merely ways of reducing evasion and making tax systems more efficient. So it is rather surprising that the Prime Minister of Finland has a column in the Financial Times, where he admits that various governments should conspire to simultaneously raise tax rates in order to finance big government:

The overall tax rate will have to rise as well over the longer term. In some areas that can be done without much consultation between the countries. For example, property taxes or inheritance taxes can largely be determined at the national level without adverse economic consequences. But such taxes will not raise significant amounts of revenue. Only changes in value added tax, various excise taxes or taxes on earned and capital income can make a real difference. However, raising such taxes can have detrimental effects on economic activity. This is especially so when a country acts on its own: capital and people can respond by migrating to jurisdictions with lower rates. Deeper co-operation is therefore necessary if tax revenues are to be increased in a way that truly helps fiscal consolidation. …It is important that different countries do not find themselves with very different tax solutions. We should avoid tax competition and the damage this would cause to Europe’s economic growth. …member countries could agree, for example, to change the levels of certain taxes in parallel. Parallel measures would help all of Europe: tax competition risk would be reduced and the public finances of individual countries would improve. Such co-ordinated tax changes could set also an important global example. In particular, it might encourage the US – with lower tax levels in most areas – to do what has to be done to address its spiralling budget deficit.

In the column, Prime Minister Vanhanen even suggests that the United States might be tempted to join the tax cartel. This has always been a goal of the Europeans since an OPEC for politicians without the United States will not work any better than the real OPEC without Saudi Arabia. One of my first videos — back in late 2007 — was on this topic, and it is embedded below for those who did not have a chance to view it.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is seeking requests for production of a better Recov​ery​.gov. And in a bold stroke the Sunlight Foundation is stepping up to bid.

A substantial amount of database and Web talent circulates around and in the Sunlight Foundation, and they can produce as good a Web site or better than any government contractor — and cheaper too.

I think Sunlight stands a pretty good chance in this, simply because the contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risks of awarding the contract based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism. Transparency in all things.

If Sunlight wins the contract, I have little doubt that they will produce a much better site and make real progress in transparency and oversight — things I talked about at our December 2008 conference, “Just Give Us the Data!”

Kudos to Sunlight for taking this bold and fun step.