Here’s the story from today’s Washington Post.

Keep an eye out for Brian Doherty’s forthcoming book about this landmark case!

The UK Health Minister wants a big tax increase on the rich in order to boost morale and demonstrate that Labour Party officials “understand what it is like to cope with rising food, fuel, and utility bills.” But if punishing Britain’s most productive residents actually is a way to boost morale for the rest of population, why not build a big coliseum and feed them to lions instead? Wouldn’t that be an even bigger “morale booster”? Needless to say, Minister Lewis does not bother to justify any of his assertions. He claims, for instance, that politicians can demonstrate their “understanding” of the plight of ordinary Britons by seizing more money from the so-called rich. Are British voters really that stupid? After all, if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi raided the pockets of hedge fund managers or some other well-to-do group, I certainly wouldn’t think that they had a better understanding of what it is like for me to pay my mortgage and cough up tuition payments for three kids. Tax​-news​.com reports:

…UK Health Minister, Ivan Lewis caused controversy by suggesting that “morale boosting” tax increases for the country’s wealthy may be the way forward. Writing in the Sunday Times, Mr Lewis warned that as Labour’s popularity appears to be waning, it should take steps to protect the “mainstream majority” that make up its key supporters. “Our duty is to act decisively and make tax and spending decisions that show we understand what it is like to cope with rising food, fuel and utility bills,” Mr Lewis wrote, adding that: “If as a result of the current economic situation the only way to help hard-pressed middle-class families is to ask the higher earners to pay more, then serious consideration should be given to that.” Although the Health Minister did not specify the rate of increase that he thought would allow the government to provide “meaningful” assistance to middle class voters, reports in the UK media in the wake of the article have suggested that he would likely favour the suggestion put forward last month by former Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Constitutional Affairs, and current Director of the New Local Government Network, Chris Leslie, which would see an extra ten pence in the pound imposed on earnings of more than GBP250,000.

In my last post I observed that U.S. public schools would save $100 billion annually if they returned to the staff/​student ratio that existed in 1970, and that this would be more than enough to erase the budget crunches districts are facing due to higher fuel prices “unless we start busing kids to Mars.”

Well, I’m a tad embarassed to admit I was a little off. Assuming that one could actually drive to other planets, $100 billion would be more than enough to fuel a fleet of three school buses making round trips to Mars every day for the full school year. And the nation’s school districts would still have $13 billion in pocket change left over to cover their higher fuel bills here on Earth. (Numbers crunched below the fold).

Average distance to Mars 143,000,000.00 miles
Savings from 1970 student/​staff ratio 100,000,000,000.00 dollars
Bus fuel economy 7.50 miles per gallon
Average price of diesel 4.21 dollars per gallon
Could buy this many gallons 23,752,969,121.14 gallons
Could drive this many miles 178,147,268,408.55 miles
Could make this many trips to Mars 1,245.79 trips
School years of one bus service 3.46 years (two trips per day, 180 school days)

Back in a 1979 interview with Roger Mudd, Democratic presidential contender Ted Kennedy flubbed what looked like a softball question: “Senator, why do you want to be president?” Kennedy’s sputtering answer did real damage to his campaign.

Senators Obama and McCain gave marginally more coherent answers than Kennedy when Rick Warren asked the same question at Saturday’s megachurch confab, but in an America with a saner perspective on the presidency, their answers would have been disqualifying as well.

Obama offered some touchy-feely Rawlsianism mixed with a call for bipartisanship:

You know, I remember what my mother used to tell me. I was talking to somebody a while back and I said the one time that she would get really angry with me is if she ever thought that I was being mean to somebody, or unfair to somebody. She said, imagine standing in their shoes. Imagine looking through their eyes. That basic idea of empathy, and that, I think, is what’s made America special is that notion, that everybody has got a shot. If we see somebody down and out, if we see a kid who can’t afford college, that we care for them, too.

And I want to be president because that’s the America I believe in and I feel like that American dream is slipping away. I think we are at a critical juncture. Economically, I think we are at a critical juncture. Internationally, we’ve got to make some big decisions not just for us for the next generation and we keep on putting it off. And unfortunately, our politics is broken and Washington is so broken, that we can’t bring together people of goodwill to solve these common problems. I think I have the ability to build bridges across partisan lines, racial, regional lines to get people to work on some common sense solutions to critical issues and I hope that I have the opportunity to do that.

Only the first sentence of McCain’s answer is particularly cogent, but it reflects what Matt Welch has described as McCain’s “exaltation of sacrifice over the private pursuit of happiness” :

I want to inspire a generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest. I believe that America’s best days are ahead of us, but I also believe that we face enormous challenges, both national security and domestic, as we have found out in the last few days in the case of Georgia.…

America wants hope. America wants optimism. America wants us to sit down together. I have a record of reaching across the aisle and working with the other party, and I want to do that, and I believe, as I said, that Americans feel it is time for us to put our country first.

And we may disagree on a specific issue… but I want every American to know that when I go to Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and meet the African-American women there who are so wonderful and lovely, an experience I’ll never forget, and when I go to places where I know they probably won’t vote for me, I know that my job is to tell them that I’ll be the president of every American and I’ll always put my country first.

In the original constitutional scheme, the president wasn’t supposed to be the Empath-in-Chief or a national life coach-cum-self-help guru, charged with getting us off our duffs and uniting us all behind a higher calling. He was there to faithfully execute the laws, defend the country from foreign attack, and check Congress with the veto power whenever it exceeded its constitutional bounds. The formless, boundless vision of presidential responsibility revealed in Obama and McCain’s answers shows us how dangerously far we’ve travelled from that modest, unromantic conception of the president’s role. I could recommend a book that might set them straight.

We’ve all been told that school districts around the country are feeling the pinch from higher fuel costs. What’s never mentioned is that districts are supposedly suffering budget crunches despite spending more than twice as much – in real, inflation-adjusted dollars – as they did in 1970.

According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, districts spent an average of $5,247 per pupil in 1970 (in 2008 dollars). Today, the average is about $12,000. How is it possible that districts could have trouble covering higher gas prices when they have an extra $6,500 to spend per pupil? One reason is that the public school bureaucracy has been doing what bureaucracies do best: growing. Since 1970, total public school employment has nearly doubled to over 6.1 million people, while total enrollment has increased by less than 9 percent. It is to support this army of new public school employees that taxpayers are being asked for more and more funding each year. If the public schools were to return to the student/​staff ratio they had in 1970, they would have an extra $100 billion per year with which to fill the tanks of the nation’s school buses. And unless we start busing kids to Mars, that should probably cover it.

Of course, taxpayers might be willing to foot this lavish bill if the smaller class sizes and larger bureaucracies of recent years had led to improved student outcomes. They haven’t. Students at the end of high school score no better in reading and math today than they did in 1970, according to the Long Term Trends tests administered as part of the National Assessment of Education Progress. In science, their scores today are lower.

At the “Civil Forum” at Saddleback Church in Orange County, California this weekend, Senator John McCain (R‑AZ) repeated a favorite line of his about Osama bin Laden:

If I have to follow him to the gates of hell, I will get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.… No one should be allowed to take thousands of American, innocent American lives. Of course evil must be defeated … we are facing the transcendent challenge of the 21st century–radical Islamic extremists.

What a gift to the recruiting efforts of Al Qaeda! — to have an American presidential candidate declare himself a follower of Osama bin Laden. According to McCain, Bin Laden is so powerful that he poses a “transcendent” challenge to John McCain’s United States.

In his cogent, well-supported, and readable article, “What Terrorists Really Want,” Max Abrahms at UCLA argues that terrorists “are rational people who use terrorism primarily to develop strong affective ties with fellow terrorists.” Think of Al Qaeda as a gang that disaffected youth might join — something powerful to belong to that gives their lives meaning.

McCain’s “gates of hell” talk is leadership malpractice, and he should stop using it immediately. Calling the threat of terrorism “transcendent” is equal parts incoherent and false. Terrorism stands no chance of defeating the United States or the West unless we ourselves collapse the society. Speaking this way about terrorism thrills our terrorist enemies and draws recruits and support to them. Silence would be much better, presidential campaign or no.

I wrote here a year and a half ago about the sensible thinking of Bill Bishop, Director of the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security. He understood that our national ID law, the REAL ID Act, fails as a security tool. Something else about Bishop came back to me as I was recently reading Abrahms’ article: Bishop wouldn’t even speak the name of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. This is how he exhibited his loathing for a shameless terrorist killer, and it also happens to comport with sensible counter-terrorism.

Exalting terrorism — as John McCain does with his “gates of hell” talk — is precisely the wrong thing for a national leader to do. The country will be made more secure by deflating the world image of Osama bin Laden and making his movement less attractive. Our leaders must withdraw rhetorical power from terrorists by controlling their tongues.

This week, I sent the following letter to the editor of The Washington Post:

With fuel prices surging, commercial airlines have started charging passengers for once-gratis amenities (sodas, the first checked bag, pillows-n-blankets) and have increased fees for other amenities (alcoholic drinks, additional checked bags). A recent editorial [“Pillows and Planes,” August 13] describes these fees as “picking passengers’ pockets” and “idea[s] to separate you from your money.”

Are you kidding me? Those amenities weigh down the plane. The fees therefore distribute higher fuel costs to passengers who consume more fuel. As important, they allow passengers to avoid getting their pockets picked by avoiding those amenities. (Don’t want to pay for checked baggage? Pack light.) The only people those fees hurt are the free-riders whose amenities were being subsidized by everyone else. The fees don’t allow pocket-picking; they put an end to it.

The next time I hear a temper-tantrum coming from the main cabin — or first class? — I’ll know it’s a Post editor who had to pay $14 for his vodka tonic and pillow.