the tindog coffeehouse

Father’s Day may just be another holiday manufactured by the greeting card companies (and sponsored by Home Depot), but it could just be the key to ending poverty as we know it.

According to a new study by the Heritage Foundation, having a married father in the household “has the same effect in reducing poverty as adding five to six years to a parent’s education level”:

About two of every three poor children live in single-parent households. Yet if poor single moms married the fathers of their children, nearly two out of three would be lifted out of poverty. …

It’s not as simple as young men “manning up” and becoming the lawfully wedded husbands of their girlfriends, live-in or otherwise. These unmarried mothers tend to be in their 20s, without much income or education. They come to depend on public assistance; many learn how to work the welfare system.

Research shows that a child raised in a home where Dad is married to Mom is much less likely to live in poverty, get arrested as a juvenile, be suspended or expelled from school, be treated for emotional or behavioral problems, or drop out before completing high school. Taxpayers foot the bill for more than $300 billion a year in means-tested government spending on low-income single moms – and, in relatively rare cases, single dads.

So Happy Father’s Day to all the married dads out there. You’re not just saving your kids’ lives, you just might be saving the entire economy.

Previously:
Defining ‘manhood’
Economist: Marriage is ‘necessary for good economic development’
Single parents cost taxpayers $112 billion

Dallas Morning News columnist Jacuielynn Floyd framed the Texas State Board of Education’s incessant tussling over social studies standards perfectly:

But it glaringly underscores that this entire exercise, which I once naively believed to be part of an effort to produce intelligent, intellectually responsible citizens, is not about academics at all.

No, there’s nothing to see here but the same old blowhard talking points that currently pass for political discourse.

Religious conservatives who dominate the board don’t even bother trying to pretend otherwise. They’ve made it clear that they believe their mission is to even the score with what they see as snotty leftist academics who have poisoned public education.

It’s not about kids grasping history and learning to draw independent conclusions – it’s about who gets to run the indoctrination camp. …

Paradoxically, the saddest thing about all this is also the only consolation I can find.

It’s this: Ideological fist-pumping over such meddlesome trivia as substituting “free enterprise” for “capitalism” or “constitutional republic” for “democracy” won’t make much difference to teenagers who graduate without being able to punctuate, add simple fractions or find Panama on a map.

Indeed, the SBOE has spent months bickering over a trivial list of names each public school student should somehow be expected to memorize in order to be deemed properly educated. How many whites are on the list, how many blacks, how many Hispanics, women, Christians, non-Christians, conservatives, liberals, etc., etc. etc. How much should Christianity factor into history lessons, whether or not to emphasize certain Constitutional amendments over others, de-emphasize the Civil Rights Movement while championing free enterprise, and so on, ad nauseum.

As if any of that matters.

Here’s a tip for our esteemed Board: History has very little to do with individual names, facts, and figures. Anyone can look up a name or find a statistic. But without context they’re meaningless. And that’s what history is all about. It’s looking at a particular event or moment in time and understanding how it fits in with all the other events and moments of time. What are the political, economic, religious, and social factors that led up to this thing, and what are the repercussions as a result of it? What caused this event, and what are the effects? If you can’t answer those questions, you haven’t really learning anything, and none of those names, dates, and other random numbers will matter a bit.

But instead of figuring out how to actually teach context, about how to teach kids to ask questions and solve problems and think critically and then communicate those ideas verbally and in writing, the State Board would prefer to quibble over terminology and racial quotas, argue over which tune to fiddle while our public schools burn. That’s not progress. That’s not education. And it does nothing to benefit the students of Texas.

Previously:
Academic freedom amendment isn’t necessary
How much emphasis should be placed on Christianity when teaching history?
Should evolution be debated in public schools?

Just in time for this year’s census, Radical Cartography has published a bunch of amazingly detailed (and beautiful) maps and charts from the census of 1870.

The data essentially reinforce what you would expect to find in the first census since the end of the Civil War: The North had a higher population overall, more foreign-born residents, much fewer African-Americans, and was much wealthier than the South. The percentage of men in the West (California, Nevada, Idaho, etc.) far exceeded the percentage of women. And the federal government, whose expenditures were almost completely limited to the military, saw the national debt explode in order to pay for the Civil War.

Below: The Constitutional Population (“Excluding Indians not taxed”).

Below: The “Colored” Population. Almost exclusively located in the Deep South along the Mississippi River and Southern plantations.

Below: The Foreign Population. Notice that the foreign immigrants flocked mainly to the upper Midwest but also to Central Texas. The influx of German and Czech immigrants to Texas is responsible for the incredible barbecue we still salivate over today. In California, of course, most of the immigrants were Chinese.

Below: Church Accommodation. Almost 50% of the total population was either Methodist or Baptist (red striped area and green area, respectively), with smaller numbers in Presbyterian or Roman Catholic churches (blue and maroon areas). In New England, Congregational churches were more dominant (light blue striped area), while the Southwest was divided between Catholics (maroon) and Mormons (black).

Below: The National Debt. Almost non-existent before the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) but then exploding during the Civil War, reaching a height of about $2.7 billion in 1866. It’s interesting to note that only a few years later the Panic of 1873 would plunge the nation into a major economic depression.

Check out all the maps in full size and stunning detail on the Radical Cartography site.

Previously:
Tonight we’re gonna panic like it’s 1873
A presidential view on debt

What happens when your computer crashes? You get ticked off, probably spew a few four-letter words, then turn it off and turn it back on. In most cases, the system comes back up and you’re good to go.

Now, what happens if your car’s computer crashes?

Rep. Henry Waxman sent a terse letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, complaining that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration doesn’t have the expertise to properly evaluate technical problems in cars, such as those that have plagued Toyota:

According to some accounts, autos now contain more computer code than some fighter jets, nearing 100 million lines of code. Yet, NHTSA officials told the Committee staff that the agency does not employ any electrical engineers or software engineers. As a result, NHTSA appears to lack the technical expertise necessary to analyze whether incidents of sudden unintended acceleration are caused by defects in the cars’ electronic systems.

Waxman makes a good point. Cars and trucks today have extremely sophisticated computers, and a software defect can cause all kinds of problems. And yet apparently there’s no real government oversight when it comes to all that code.

Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo wrote a great essay a while back about the “beta” culture that has become the norm in the technology world:

I’m tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The “This will work in the next version.” The “It’s in our roadmap.” The “Buy now and upgrade later.” The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn’t tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I’m tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. …

Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear.

Diaz was clearly talking about consumer electronics and the Internet, but the same arguments can be applied to auto manufacturers, who face the same market pressures that any other technology company does: produce more complex, more capable, and yet more efficient products year after year at a lower cost and market the hell out of them to gain whatever slight edge you can over your competitors.

If you’re talking a website or a computer operating system or a smartphone, manufacturers can probably afford to cut corners in the development cycle if they know most bugs can be patched later. After all, in the vast majority of cases a software failure is at most an inconvenience and an annoyance. But a software failure in a car can — and does — endanger lives.

It’ll be interesting to see how Toyota and other auto makers respond to these issues. Hopefully they can improve the quality control on their own, but I’m willing to bet the government will also have lots to say. It usually does.

Previously:
What the auto mileage bill really means for consumers

For some reason I’ve been really down the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if it’s a case of post-holiday blues, my workload, the weather, or what. But I’ve been depressed and have constantly been beating myself up.

Staring at the images of Haiti, though, I realize how petty I’ve been. Even in the best of times, the people there live in unimaginable poverty. According to Encyclopedia of the Nations:

Most Haitians live in small, often remote, villages or isolated settlements, with no access to electricity, clean water, or social services. Some rudimentary education is offered by church and other charitable organizations, but the distances children must travel to school, the costs of books and uniforms, and the necessity for them to work from an early age means that illiteracy is estimated at over half of the adult population. Illness can often spell financial disaster, as meager savings or investments such as a pig must be sold to pay for medicines. In some areas large numbers of people are dependent on aid agencies for food supplies.

Existence in the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince is perhaps even grimmer, with overcrowding, disease, and squalor widespread. Those who work can expect to earn no more than US$2 a day, hardly enough to buy food, let alone other necessities. The majority, however, must scrape some sort of living from the informal sector. Figures for child mortality, communicable diseases, and life expectancy reveal the country’s poverty and deprivation. According to the Pan-American Health Organization, approximately 380,000 Haitians—over 5 percent of the population—were infected with HIV/AIDS by 2000.

Meanwhile, my family and I live in a nice house in a nice suburban neighborhood. We have electricity, heating and air-conditioning as needed, clean water, plenty of clothes, and more than enough food. Our kids are getting a great education in a public school only a mile from our house, and I have a full-time job that pays well. We also have health insurance and easy access to some of the best medical care in the world.

We’re blessed beyond measure. And yet I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks feeling sorry for myself. Why?

The earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince on Tuesday was simply tragic. My heart is broken for the countless numbers of people impacted by the devastation, for the thousands who died, and for the possible millions who are left homeless. I’m thankful, though, that even in the midst of so much suffering, God is still in control. That much, at least, I can take solace in.

More photos here.

In an interesting turn of events, Senators Maria Cantwell and John McCain have proposed reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which — among other things — prevented commercial banks from merging with investment banks. That restriction, first passed in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and it was that law that set in motion much of the financial meltdown that we’re still dealing with today.

“I want to ensure that never again we stick the American taxpayer with another $700 billion or even larger tab to bail out the financial industry,” Mr. McCain said, referring to the Treasury bailout program of financial firms.

Mr. McCain said he isn’t opposed to investment banks taking risks to pursue greater returns, but he doesn’t believe these risks should be taken using retail banking depositors’ money.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, it’s unlikely that the call to separate the banks will go very far in Congress, and Newsweek has compared it to “unscrambling an egg”. So why is it so interesting? Because McCain voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley in 1999 and because one of the authors of the bill, Phil Gramm, was McCain’s chief economic adviser during his presidential campaign. Which makes me wonder if McCain would be making the same call had he won the election. My guess is, probably not.

Previously:
The root cause of the subprime meltdown

Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka recently quoted a report on ProPublica.com, which indicated that (according to the Treasury) the federal government would actually make about $15 billion profit from last year’s $700,000,000,000 bailout rescue plan known as TARP. Burka’s point was that even though gubernatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison has since renounced the plan, she may have done the right thing in initially voting for it.

But did she?

First, the ProPublica report goes on to show that even if some parts of TARP make money, overall the government is still in the red when you factor in the rest of the program as well as all the other bailouts (AIG, Fannie Mae, GM, etc.). So Burka’s point is moot.

But let’s assume the government did actually end up profiting from all the various bailouts. Does that make them OK? Or are they still unacceptable based on principle alone?

Senator Hutchison wrote in September 2008 that:

With every bailout, each American taxpayer becomes more invested in these markets. And we all have the right to ask the question, why is one firm rescued, when another must face the consequences of its actions? In a capitalist system, some risks will yield big rewards and some will lead to failure. When possible, it is better to let free market economics pick the winners and losers, not the federal government. Corporate bailouts set a dangerous precedent and stand to negatively impact market dynamics over the long-term.

So do big government bailouts still set a dangerous precedent if they not only help the market stabilize and recover but also yield a profit for taxpayers?

Again, that’s just a theoretical question since we have yet to see (and almost certainly won’t see) a return on our investments. But in my opinion, a bailout’s potential profitability doesn’t make it right. Otherwise, the government simply becomes a massive investment manager whose motives are driven more by the bottom line than the public good. Which would make it just as “evil” as the Wall Street firms that the bailouts were designed to save us from.

Previously:
Report: Bailouts hurt the government’s credibility
TARP is the financial equivalent of the Vietnam War
Actual cost of TARP bailouts: $2.9 trillion

Last month I pointed out how The Dallas Morning News told us that Texas had simultaneously both gained and lost jobs.

Now we get the sequel.

First, we find out that Texas employers hired 41,700 new employees in October (a number almost identical to the jobs lost a month before). But then in another article (also from the DMN), we find out that Dallas-Fort Worth “lost about 60,000 jobs in October compared to a year earlier.” Both stats, conveniently, come from the Texas Workforce Commission.

OK, so I guess you could argue that the DFW area lost 60,000 jobs while other parts of Texas gained 101,700. If so, how do you explain the unemployment rate rising from 8.2 percent in September to 8.3 percent in October? Something’s not adding up.

Further, the first article states that “Dallas-Fort Worth lost 59,100 jobs between October 2008 and last month”, while the second article (quoting the Dallas Federal Reserve) says that DFW has “lost almost 115,000 jobs this year”.

Huh?

Have we lost 59,000 jobs in the last year or 115,000? Did we gain 41,000 jobs in October or lose 60,000? Honestly, I don’t think anyone really knows.

And that’s why our economy is so screwed up.

Previously:
Texas gains jobs, Texas loses jobs
‘Stimulus’ spending could cost Texas 171,900 jobs

John Hinderaker at PowerLine makes a great point about how under Nancy Pelosi’s health care bill (full 1,990-page PDF here), private health insurance is technically really no longer insurance:

Under the House bill private health insurance companies will still exist, but to what end? They will be legally prohibited from competing in any meaningful sense. They will be required to issue substantially the same coverages at substantially the same rates, changes in which must be justified to the government. They will be prohibited from underwriting insurance risks in any rational way: they must pay all bills resulting from preexisting conditions, and they will be prohibited from charging lower-risk customers lower rates.

As I wrote here, you can force insurance companies to “cover” preexisting conditions, but the resulting product is not insurance. You cannot insure against something that has already happened. It is merely a bill-paying mechanism. …

Under the House bill, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that health insurance companies are no longer in the insurance business. They can’t rate and underwrite risks, which is the essence of insurance. That’s illegal. They can’t decide to whom they will issue policies; that’s illegal, too. They can’t offer novel or innovative coverages; their coverages are dictated by law. To a limited extent they can make decisions on paying claims, but under the watchful eye of government regulators. Meaningful competition among insurance companies will be, in effect, illegal.

I’m not saying insurance reforms aren’t needed, but regulating any industry to this extent simply can’t be good.

A new report claims that the $700,000,000,000 bailout rescue plan known as TARP may have saved the economy (debatable), but it also severely damaged the credibility of the federal government:

The mixed and blunt assessment by Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general in charge of oversight for the bailout fund, appears in a quarterly report scheduled for release Wednesday. Barofsky said the Troubled Asset Relief Program has come at great cost to taxpayers, to the integrity of the financial system and to the public’s perception of the federal government.

“Despite the aspects of TARP that could reasonably be viewed as a substantial success,” he wrote, “Treasury’s actions in this regard have contributed to damage the credibility of the program and of the government itself, and the anger, cynicism and distrust created must be chalked up as one of the substantial, albeit unnecessary, costs of TARP.”

Of course, the report assumes that Americans had any faith in the government in the first place, which is questionable.

There’s a reason our currency says “In God We Trust”.

Previously:
‘Dude, where’s my $700 billion?’
TARP is the financial equivalent of the Vietnam War

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks the U.S. should try to cut its budget deficits before Asia completely destroys us with its super economy-rebounding powers.

“As the global economy recovers and trade volumes rebound, however, global imbalances my reassert themselves,” Bernanke warned. For the United States’ part, “the most effective way” to boost national savings in this country “is by establishing a sustainable fiscal trajectory, anchored by a clear commitment to substantially reduce federal deficits over time,” Bernanke said. He didn’t suggest ways to do so.

Bernanke may not have any ideas for how to cut the deficit, but I have a few suggestions. How ’bout no more bailouts for starters? Maybe stop buying banks, auto companies, and insurance companies? Also, we could stop paying people to trade in their old cars. And — call me crazy! — maybe we should abandon plans for a massive, multi-trillion-dollar health care overhaul.

Just a few ideas off the top of my head. You’re welcome.

Previously:
The real ‘death panel’? The federal budget

The Dallas Morning News would like you to know that 1100 jobs in Texas have either been saved or created because of federal stimulus money. Hooray! They would also like you to know that Texas lost 44,700 jobs in September.

Wait, wha?

Have we gained jobs or haven’t we?

See, this is why you should never let politicians do math.

Previously:
‘Stimulus’ spending could cost Texas 171,900 jobs