Entries for November 2007

Here is my Creators Syndicate column for the week on the public employee unions and their enormous influence in the Democratic Party. I decided to write it because I think this influence is not widely understood and is certainly not much commented on. But the public employee unions exert enormous upward pressure on state and local government spending and enormous downward pressure on the accountability of public employees. Over time this will tend to increase the share of the economy devoted to state and local government spending, with significant macroeconomic effects. Nearly half of American union members are public employees—a vivid contrast with mid-century America, when only a small percentage, perhaps on the order of 10 percent (I haven't looked it up lately), of union members were public employees. And of course public employee unions are financed by the taxpayer: Their income comes from members' dues, which come from their salaries, which come from the public purse.

The surprising thing is that American union leaders continue to press hard against free trade, and almost all Democratic members of Congress go along with them, even though protectionism is not in the narrow economic interest of public employees.

On the conservative website The American Thinker, military operations research analyst Ray Robison had an article on the September 2001 anthrax attack. It's based on a recently revealed pre-September 11 letter from a London jihadi named Numan Bin Uthman to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Robison's conclusion:

John Harwood's story in the Wall Street Journal is headlined "Poll Suggests Clinton Is Vulnerable." The key finding is that although adults want a Democratic president rather than a Republican president by a margin of 50 to 35 percent, they favor Hillary Clinton over Rudy Giuliani by a statistically insignificant 46 to 45 percent. Clinton's lead over Giuliani is down from her previous leads in NBC/Wall Street Journal polls of 49 to 42 percent in September, 47 to 41 percent in July, and 48 to 43 percent in June.

This improvement in Giuliani's standing versus Clinton's is reflected by a similar improvement in some, but not all, other polls recently: Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, Fox News. Why does Clinton run so far behind the Democratic vote?

Last Thursday I attended a focus group of Republican voters in suburban Richmond, Va., moderated by Democrat Peter Hart for the Annenberg Center for School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Readers may want to know that I worked for Peter Hart from 1974 to 1981, and we have remained friends ever since. Peter is very skillful at conducting focus groups and eliciting participants' opinions without leading them in one direction or another. I thought this was a particularly good focus group. Usually among a dozen people you have two or three who don't have much to say, and sometimes you have one or two who try to hijack the whole group and send it off in their direction.

Here is a link to the Daily Telegraph's lists of the 100 most influential liberals and the 100 most influential conservatives in American politics. As much as I'm an admirer of the Telegraph's Toby Harnden, I have to say that the rankings are most eccentric—and I'm not referring just to the one that Toby makes a point of defending (George W. Bush as only the 21st most influential conservative) or the one that hits home the most (me as the 87th most influential conservative, two places ahead of Sen. Larry Craig); there are legitimate arguments for both the Bush and Barone rankings.

Megan McArdle at theatlantic.com has been blogging up a storm on teachers unions and school vouchers. Here is one pungent passage:

How many educated people who:

a) Oppose vouchers
b) Have children who do not attend inner city public schools would still oppose vouchers if they were the only way to get their child out of an inner city public school? How many of them would accept that their child had to be left in that school because the systemic effects of allowing their child to exit that repulsive school would be dreadful?

Respectfully, I believe the answer is "null set".

Opposing school vouchers is, for basically every single person who does so, a completely costless belief. You get the pleasure of "supporting public education"; someone else's kid, whom you will thankfully never meet, loses their future.