2+2=1
California's school chief has issued his annual warning that California public schools are in a 'precarious' situation. It's an annual problem because the edu-pros are grappling with a basic conundrum that never fails to stop them in their tracks: no matter how much $$ we spend per pupil (not that the money actually goes toward education), it's never enough. But, we already spend enough to educate anyone willing to show up everyday and pay attention. It's the kids on the left side of the bell curve who are the ones receiving the benefit of education $$ largesse without any significant change in their intelligence or knowledge.
Still, dollars and deficits are only part of the story in the education wars. Often, the real problem with the schools - well, on top of everything else - is the approach that many parent's take. Parents often seem to regard school in the same way Madoff investors saw their "accounts;" All they have to do is sit at home while the "steady returns" - their kids grade-inflated report cards - come rolling in every quarter. They think their educational duty is done when they shove the kids on to the bus in the morning. Wrong. School can only do so much under the best conditions. And public schools never operate under the best conditions. So, kids are left to get an education that leaves them ill prepared for adulthood, while their parents look at the billions spent by the education bureaucracy and figure "Hey, I don't need to do anything. Look at all the money they're spending."
School should not have a monopoly on what kids learn, but often it does because parents don't want to be bothered. There is really no excuse for this: any adult should be able to tutor their kids in elementary math, science, and reading. Every adult has some passion - art, poetry, restoring cars, civil war re-enactments, sailing, double entry bookkeeping - that they can expose their kids to. That is as much a part of their education as anything that happens in the six hours a day when their kids are at school.
That'll Be The Day When I Die
Today is the 50th(!) anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly, or "The Day The Music Died." Many have wondered how such an unassuming kid from Lubbock, TX could make music that could inspire the likes of The Beatles and The Stones.
The answer is simple: Holly made music the right way. His songs were simple, but filled with inventive melodies and rhythms. His odd sense of style served notice that he was no fashion plate singer. And he never strayed from the guitar-bass-drum format that is the heart of all good rock music.
It's hard to know what we lost with him. Maybe he would have turned to drugs, added a sitar to the Crickets' sound, made records filled with 20 minute "jams." That could have happened.
It's hard to know what we lost with him. Maybe he would have turned to drugs, added a sitar to the Crickets' sound, made records filled with 20 minute "jams." That could have happened.
But, I'll bet he would have ended up closer to a career like Chuck Berry's: a fixture on the Oldies circuit, a great guitarist welcome on anybody's stage, and still able to raise the roof whenever he liked. Holly would have been just 38 years old when The Ramones (inadvertent geniuses like Holly) arrived. I think he would have been right there to welcome them and their successors.
The guitar solo from "That'll Be The Day" was one of the first things I learned to play on the guitar. I've played that solo almost every day since then. so I think I'll play it now. And, if you are going to listen to anything today, don't listen to Don McLean. Listen to Buddy's actual songs and think of all the music that we missed.
The Stopped Clock
It's a reflection of these desperate times that I find myself agreeing with Bob Herbert, but his complaints about the anodyne infrastructure spending as contemplated in the House's "stimulus" package are spot on. Haven't we been hearing about our "crumbling infrastructure" ever since conservative Republicans started winning presidential elections? Didn't every lefty and their "partner" break a gasket over the now infamous Minneapolis bridge? Not to mention the New Orleans levees (by the way, thanks Bob for admitting that the floods in New Orleans were the result of neglect at the local level, rather than Rovian ethnic cleansing)? And isn't repairing "our crumbling infrastructure" one of the few things for which there is genuine bi-partisan support.
My only criticism of Herbert's complaint has to do with the pains he goes through to avoid blaming a certain political party and a certain President who presently control the purse strings. Instead, Herbert blames a vague "we," or "our leaders." He predictably points out that "we" have not hesitated to throw billions at banks to no apparent effect. Sorry, but some of "us" have been against this from the beginning, and in fact the opponents of the bailouts Herbert rails against are almost all on the GOP side (in Herbert's world the "wrong" side). There's a lot of bi-partisanship to be found on the anti-bailout/pro-infrastructure side, but Herbert can't even begin to admit that the side he has made a career excoriating might be on the right side, and the handsome young redeemer he supports is on the wrong side.
In his speech on the economy right before the Inaguration, Obama said he wanted to rebuild our "crumbling infrastructure" and more specifically that he wanted to create a new "smart power grid." We were told that this crisis is a once in a lifetime moment to accomplish Big Things becasue there is so much support for stimulus to stoke an economic recovery. So where is it?
'Til Shiloh
George F. Will touches on something that, I think, accounts for the Democrats outsize enthusiasm for Bailout Nation. The bailouts aren't really meant to protect the financial services industry or the broader economy; they are ultimately intended to protect the welfare state, which will crash as surely as the stock market did if things continue as they are. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, government pensions, private pensions guaranteed by the gov't: these are the line items in the budget that are growing inexorably and unceasingly; and yet no one dares to touch them. Moreover, their true size and scope are hidden from the public in plain sight, making a mockery of transparent representative government. Meanwhile, the basic functions of the federal government - the mails, the military, the foreign service, the judiciary - go begging and are told to be "leaner, but not meaner." It should be the other way around.
The Crash of '08 may have upended an unhealthy dynamic of deficit spending combined with "off budget" accounting for our largest line items. Real questions are being asked about whether the US can really afford all that we have committed to do: trillions for banks plus a trillion more to the government to redistribute under the guise of stimulus. It might not seem like it, but the bank bailouts and the stimulus are actually inter-related. With the death of Wall Street and the loss of what has become the US's most productive sector, the welfare state has lost its paymaster and fund raising arm. It has been an open secret that the left wing "party of the common man" has been the party of Wall Street for quite some time. The welfare state needs the banks to provide the means to finance US debt and it needs the outsize taxes paid by Wall Street billions to inflate the tax rolls. Thus, while America's heavy industries suffer under business killing environmental laws and payroll taxes, the financial sectors benefitted from "deregulation" in the form of toothless regulators and corrupt friends in Congress.
Even the most idealistic government is a means of distributing limited resources. The earliest conception of our federal government was that of a national government with limited powers. It followed that limited powers would mean limited expenditures. Early America was also cheapskate America. The original business of the federal government was conducted in rented rooms in Philadelphia and New York. At the end of the Civil War, US Grant found himself without a pension because the government simply did not provide them. As late as the 1950's. American presidents lacked any kind of pension.
Those days are long behind us, of course. Blame what you would like: LBJ's "original sin" of mingling the social security surplus with the budget; FDR's court packing scheme which bought the favorable Supreme Court rulings that provided the legal grounds for his vast expansion of federal power; Woodrow Wilson's agitation for a "living" constitution (which would revive the lost power of the segregated South). It doesn't matter. The welfare state is simply growing beyond all reason or beyond all ability to pay for it. Conservatives have provided an ideological counter-weight to Democratic demands, but the Crash of '08 may finally provide its practical counter.
No Democrat has ever had to answer the question "How big should government grow?" They simply return to DC each spring, like swallows to Capistrano, with new initiatives and spending plans. Some address real needs, but most are simply creations of the welfare-industrial complex; the universities, community activists, unions, think tanks, journals, and non-profits that generate unending plans to solve the unsolvable: war, poverty, inequality, the weather. Results are not as important as the is the all-important goal of Doing Something. And if any Republican (or occasionally practical minded Democrat) suggests otherwise, they are dubbed racists, child killers, plutocrats, you get the idea.
The increasing hysteria coming from The Left - perfectly encapsulated in Nancy Pelosi's notorious speech before the first House bailout bill - reveals more than they realize. They know that populist promises first made in the Thirties are becoming more untenable by the day and yet for all their talk of bipartisanship, they cannot make the most basic concessions. They cannot agree to meaningfully raise the retirement age to either receive pensions or start receiving Social Security benefits; they cannot accept a temporary cut in the payroll tax or corporate taxes; they cannot ease the regulatory burden on US auto manufacturers (and instead are increasing it with "green" regulations!). Not only that, the welfare-industrial complex is beginning its media campaign to convince the US that we need government sponsored health care. Are they in denial, or are they determined to ride this train to the end of the line?
The Return of Home Field Advantage
A lot of people are wondering out loud, "What are our lives going to be like in the coming recession years?" Tyler Cowan suggests that we may have to look to simpler pleasures: board games, walks in the park, etc. We apparently will turn away from our Hummer homes and NBA box seats. That might happen, but I suspect what will really happen is our houses will get a little smaller and those NBA seats may become cheap enough so that the real fans can return to courtside. And it's about damned time.
One of the corrosive aspects of American popular culture has been the relentless corporatization of everything. I don't mean to complain when, say, private business is brought in to improve a benighted area as was famously done in Times Square. But all things fun - sports, big time stadium rock concerts, NASCAR, even skateboarding(!) - have been turned into mega-events only affordable to corporate interests, especially financial ones(that at least will change!). In a symbolic sense, true fans are locked out in favor of their bosses and bankers. Think of Montgomery Burns trying to mix with ordinary joes by saying "How about that local sports team." Now, think of that attitude carried over to every aspect of life. The effects of this phenomenon have been best described by Bill Simmons as the demise of home-field advantage, and it is ugly in its enforced blandness.
The corporatization of everything has turned its participants into corporate drones themselves; look at Tony Romo or Alex Rodriguez listlessly droning at their lockers. The alphas of our society have been reduced to the level of mimics blandly reciting platitudes like PR flacks, rather than going off half cocked as their more "colorful" predecessors may have once done. America is all about energy, but too often it has allowed this vitality to be sucked away in favor of some HR department-style of discourse. If the Crash of '08 and the Great Recession of '09 bring about a return of a more untrammeled popular culture (sans vulgarity, of course), that would be a positive.
