More school choice for military kids. | The military is a bad personnel manager. | Politics gets in the way of good infrastructure investment. | And more ...
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June 10, 2017 |
Giving military children more school choice would be both good education policy and good defense policy. The military needs to rethink its personnel policies. Politics makes infrastructure investment inefficient. The Senate can rein in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Colorado makes its civil asset seizure and forfeiture practices more transparent. |
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More choice for military kids. Military families don’t always have school choice options. Providing such choices, writes Lindsey Burke, would not only be good education policy; it would also be good defense policy: “Children from military families are much more likely to serve in the military themselves. According to the 2016 Blue Star Family Military Family Lifestyle Survey, while only 0.5 percent of the general public is currently serving, Because future recruitment depends in large part on military-connected youth, it is in the nation’s best interest to ensure that these children are adequately prepared not simply to pass a basic qualification test, but to excel during their service years afterward. The future success of our armed services depends on offering military-connected children an excellent education. “Military readiness is affected by the quality of education available to children of military families. The quality of educational options available to military families can play a role in whether a family accepts an assignment or even decides to leave military service altogether. According to a recent survey conducted and published by Military Times, 35 percent of respondents said that dissatisfaction with their child’s education was a ‘significant factor’ in their decision to remain in or leave military service. The Pentagon’s changes to policy in 2016 enabling families to remain at duty stations for longer time periods was a direct response ‘to complaints by military parents who are loathe to move if the next duty station has poorly performing schools.’ Those complaints may stem from the fact that military-connected children are too often assigned to the district schools closest in proximity to military bases, regardless of whether those district schools are right for them. […] “The federal government’s exclusive responsibility and mandate to oversee national defense and the military extends to military-related issues that impact education. Whereas education is not an enumerated power of the federal government per the U.S. Constitution, national defense is clearly so, and the education of military-connected children has a special place as a Department of Education (DOE) program. Since it pertains to the U.S. military, Impact Aid is one of the few federal programs dealing with education that has constitutional warrant. […] “Important as education is to military parents, more than half of all active-duty military families live in states with no school choice options at all. In order to ensure those who serve in the military to protect the U.S. are able to access education options that serve them in the best way possible, federal policymakers should work to empower children of military families with education choice. Transitioning Impact Aid funding into parent-controlled education savings accounts would provide children of active-duty military families with education choice, while ensuring the federal program serves military families as well as they serve us.” [Internal citations omitted.] [The Heritage Foundation]
The military is not very good at managing its talented work force. Tim Kane writes: “One statistic above all else serves as a red alert that the military personnel system is dysfunctional: the unemployment rate of young veterans. It averaged nearly a third higher than nonveterans (10.7 percent compared to 8.0 percent) before the 2009 recession. After 2009, more than one in five veterans age eighteen to twenty-four could not find a job between 2009 and 2012, twice the jobless rate of nonveterans. The persistence of this employment gap has reinforced some misperceptions about the quality of troops, even among top policymakers. “The unemployment rate of veterans may seem irrelevant to the readiness of the active-duty force, but it is a profoundly relevant symptom of the real problem: the institutional inefficiency of central planning. In blunt terms, some of the nation’s most talented young men and women are on active duty but never empowered to take—and in fact are discouraged from taking—an active role in applying their unique skills to the military’s needs. Job-matching is centrally planned in all of the armed forces. Young veterans enter the private sector almost totally unprepared to search for a job because that activity—the engine that drives America’s free market economy—is anathema to the modern Pentagon bureaucracy.” [Hoover Institution]
Politics leads to poor investments. As the Trump administration develops its infrastructure program, we should remember the pitfalls that come with such public investments. Ryan Bourne identifies a few: “Trump’s team has promised to prioritize schemes that directly create jobs. Yet, as noted previously, jobs are a cost to projects. If ‘job creation’ is a target of government investment, then projects may be chosen and delivered in a less efficient manner than they could be, raising the burden on taxpayers through making infrastructure delivery more expensive. “Regional favoritism and pork-barrel spending often occur too. Infamously, in July 2005, Congress passed a bill that included earmarked funds for the Gravina Bridge in Alaska, the so-called Bridge to Nowhere. It was not funded with a view toward maximizing returns or allocating funds according to market demands. It is well-known that Amtrak has historically allocated resources for investment to rural areas with low population densities at the behest of politicians. The Highway Trust Fund also allocates funds seemingly divorced from needs. A 2013 paper found that states with greater highway use or a larger highway system did relatively badly with regard to federal aid. The CBO echoes this criticism, noting that ‘spending on highways does not correspond very well with how the roads are used and valued.’ “For political gain, politicians also grant funds to prestige or so-called ribbon-cutting projects, rather than to projects with the highest economic returns, such as maintenance, repair, and bottlenecks. Consider that federal funds have been granted to the California High-Speed Rail scheme, which originally had a purported benefit-cost ratio of about 2. The estimated costs for this project have since expanded rapidly and are still rising, taking the estimated benefit-cost ratio closer to 1 already. Meanwhile, other schemes with much higher benefit-cost ratios have not received funds. The outgoing Obama administration highlighted the $8 billion Hampton Roads highway project, for example, that had a benefit-cost ratio of about 4. “Choosing to prioritize investments that do not have the highest returns is a phenomenon not unique to the United States. In the United Kingdom, the coalition government’s 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review (which aimed to reduce government expenditure in light of a huge budget deficit) led to deferral, cancellation, or review of a host of road schemes with average benefit-cost ratios of 6.8, 3.2, and 4.2, respectively. Yet the government pushed on with plans for a high-speed rail project between London and Birmingham despite the high-speed line’s purported benefit-cost ratio of just 1.2. New historical evidence suggests a potential rationale: grand infrastructure projects can help boost electoral performance.” [Internal citations omitted.] What’s the alternative? Bourne advises that the Trump administration “should focus on long-term growth and on creating an institutional environment where investment is responsive to the wants and needs of users.” That includes such steps as privatizing infrastructure that the government does not need to own, removing regulatory and tax barriers to private investment, and allowing more user fees. [Cato Institute]
The Senate can rein in the CFPB. The Financial Choice Act, which rewrites many of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, moves to the Senate after passage in the House this week. One thing the bill does is ditch the current set-up of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency almost entirely unaccountable by law. Meghan Milloy writes: “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has become one of the most well known and most controversial creations of Dodd-Frank. Since its inception, instead of protecting consumers it has burdened consumers with nearly 17 million hours of paperwork requirements and almost $3 billion in regulatory costs. That doesn’t account for the billions in civil penalties that the CFPB has levied on businesses, many of which resulted from unsubstantiated accusations that were agreed upon under the sole direction of the Bureau’s director, without the oversight of a panel or even the oversight of the congressional appropriations process. Instead, the CFPB relies on a set, annual draw from the Fed – funds ultimately traceable back to the average American. “The CHOICE Act will dramatically change these consumer burdens from the agency meant to protect them. First, it will change the structure from an independent, unaccountable director, to a director that serves at the will of the president and is subject to removal. CHOICE will further subject the CFPB (which will be renamed the Consumer Law Enforcement Agency or CLEA) to the congressional appropriations process – so if it is not living up to congressional expectations, it will not continue to receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Finally, CHOICE will reform the mission of the CFPB. Instead of allowing it to go rogue and create costly new regulations, CLEA will only be tasked with enforcing those laws and regulations that are already on the books from the several other financial regulatory agencies. All things combined, CHOICE will make the CFPB a workable, efficient entity that will no longer burden, but that will actually protect, consumers.” For eight more things the bill does for consumers, read Milloy’s paper “Top 9 Wins for Consumers in the Choice Act.” [American Action Forum] Colorado puts some breaks on civil asset forfeiture. Colorado now leads the nation in the transparency of its asset seizure and forfeiture practices, reports the Institute for Justice: “With an hour remaining before his deadline to act, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper signed HB 17-1313, a bill that bolsters transparency for civil forfeiture and closes a federal loophole that has generated millions in forfeiture revenue for law enforcement. Under civil forfeiture, law enforcement agencies can seize and then take title to cash, cars and other valuables without charging anyone with—let alone convicting them of—a crime. […] “HB 17-1313 will: “· Implement new biannual reporting requirements, including the type of property seized, place of the seizure (e.g. which direction on a highway), if any criminal charges were filed in relation to the seizure, if the forfeiture was contested, and the final disposition of the property; “· Oblige agencies to report their forfeiture expenditures, including spending on salaries, overtime, victim services, drug abuse programs, travel, meals, as well as capital and operating expenses. This provision is particularly important because Colorado law lets agencies keep half of what they confiscate, enabling them to self-finance outside the legislature’s power of the purse; “· Require that all forfeiture reporting be posted to a public, searchable database, to be created and maintained by the Department of Local Affairs, and require that those reports be aggregated; and “· Impose $500 fines for failure to comply with the reporting requirements. If an agency has not complied within 75 days of the due date, it must pay either a $500 fine or 50 percent of the forfeiture proceeds it received during the reporting period, whichever is greater. This new penalty is likely to induce better agency compliance than has been previously observed. […] “In addition, the new law prevents agencies from receiving federal forfeiture funds through the ‘equitable sharing’ program, unless the forfeited property is worth more than $50,000 and relates to a federal criminal case. Under equitable sharing, police and prosecutors can collaborate with a federal agency or joint task force, forfeit property under federal law, and receive up to 80 percent of the proceeds—dramatically higher than what state law authorizes.” [Institute for Justice]
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