The Heritage Insider: 12 policies cost households $4,400 annually, Dodd-Frank v. start ups, private schooling better for promoting tolerance, and more
November 28, 2015
EDUCATION
Now activists want Princeton to take Woodrow Wilson’s name off of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; who’s next for expunging from American history? “So Wilson had, as is the case with not a few famous historical leaders, conspicuous shortcomings—a reluctance to compromise, grand visions without the means to implement them, a curt temper, and not least, a belief in the innate racial superiority of whites. But what does it really mean to try and tar him for not having adhered to enlightened twenty-first-century standards? Where will the impulse to purge the past of its sins end? Should Washington, DC, named after a slave owner, adopt a new title? Should the Jefferson Memorial be torn down? Or what about the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars or the Wilson research fellowship that Johns Hopkins University, where Wilson taught for years, bestows upon promising undergraduates?
“As L. Gordon Crovitz observes in the Wall Street Journal, there are a bevy of malefactors from the past that young students can try to hunt down: ‘Elihu Yale made his fortune as a British East India Company imperialist. Exploited Chinese laborers build Leland Stanford’s transcontinental railway. James Duke peddled tobacco.’ And so on. It’s a game of trivial pursuit with real consequences for the intellectual climate on campus. No longer do students attempt to divine why the leading lights of a different era thought as they did, to attempt to put them in a broader context. Looking at Wilson as a racist pure and simple is rather reductionist. It tells you something about him but hardly everything.
—Jacob Heilbrunn, “Political Correctness Goes to War on American History,” National Interest, November 24.
If you want tolerance, support school choice. “Government operation of public schools appears to provide no special protection against the spread of anti-Semitic attitudes. To the contrary, attending private, mostly Christian, schools is associated with higher levels of tolerance in general and for Jews in particular.”
Details: “When presented with the anti-Semitic stereotype ‘Jews have too much control over the United States government,’ 67 percent of people who attended at least some private school disagree with this statement, compared to 54 percent of those who received all of their education from public school. Adjusting these results for background characteristics yields virtually the same results as the unadjusted analysis […] . […]
“Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of adults who attended private school disagree with the statement ‘Jews have too much power in international financial markets,’ compared to 47 percent of those who attended public schools. Again, these results change little when adjusted for background characteristics.
“More people disagree with the anti-Semitic stereotype ‘Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars,’ but the difference in agreement between those who attended public and private schools persists and is statistically significant. Among adults who attended private school, 77 percent disagree with this statement, compared to 61 percent of those who attended public school. Controlling for background characteristics changes the result slightly, reducing the gap to 13 percentage points.”
—Jay P. Greene and Cari A. Bogulski, “The Effect of Public and Private Schooling on Anti-Semitism” American Enterprise Institute, November 2015.
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ECONOMY
To see how much living standards have improved over the centuries, look at the life of Louis XIV who ruled France and Navarre from 1643 to 1715 and was one of the wealthiest people of his day. “His Versailles palace had 2,000 windows, 700 rooms, 1,250 chimneys and 67 staircases and cost, at a minimum, $3.2 billion in today’s dollars.
“Yet here was a man who almost died of smallpox when he was 9 years old and lost nearly all of his legitimate heirs — his son, a grandson and a great-grandson — along with his younger brother, another grandson and a great-grandson, to smallpox. […]
“One outcome of that epidemic was to make the Europeans suspicious of bathing. According to some medical experts of the day, ‘once heat and water created openings (pores) through the skin, the plague could easily invade the entire body.’ As such, hygiene got progressively worse. Queen Elizabeth I, for example, who ruled over England and Ireland between 1558 and 1603, supposedly said that she bathed once a month, ‘whether she needed it or not.’ Her successor, James I, however, only washed his fingers.
“The ‘journal de la santé,’ which was kept for Louis XIV by his doctors from infancy until 1711, describes the king’s daily life in microscopic detail, but mentions bathing only once. According to the journal, the king was often sick and wore extravagant wigs not only to hide his hair loss, but also to keep him warm. Rightly so, for according to one contemporary account, ‘people froze in those vast salons of marble and gold.… The wife of the Duke of Orleans wrote, “It is so cold here [Versailles] that at the king’s table wine as well as water froze in the glasses.”
“The palace also was ill equipped to deal with human waste. People relieved themselves wherever they could. Thus, shortly before Louis XIV died, an ordinance decreed that feces be removed from the corridors of Versailles once a week. All that filth meant that disease-spreading parasites were rife. Before the 19th century, people had no idea about the germ theory of disease, and doctors often caused more harm than good.”
—Marian L. Tupy, “Some Perspective on What We Have to Be Thankful For,” Cato Institute, November 27
Twelve public policies that cost you:
You might be surprised by how much of that cost local governments cause. “Local governments regulate housing, which is the largest expense for most families. In total, Americans pay about $209 billion a year extra for housing due to overregulation of land use. For the average household, the cost is $1,700 a year […] .”
—Salim Furth, “Costly Mistakes: How Bad Policies Raise the Cost of Living,” The Heritage Foundation, November 23.
Is Dodd-Frank the reason the economy has grown slowly since the recession?
“The recovery from the 2008 crisis and recession compared to previous recoveries.”
Some evidence: “In a Goldman Sachs report published in April 2015, and titled ‘The Two-Speed Economy,’ the authors posit that new banking regulations have made bank credit both more expensive and less available. ‘This affects small firms disproportionately because they largely lack alternative sources of finance, whereas large firms have been able to shift to less-expensive public market financing.’
“Using IRS data, the Goldman study finds that large firms—those with $50 million or more in revenue annually, have been growing revenue at a compounded annual rate of 8 percent, while firms with less than $50 million in revenue have been growing revenue at an average of only 2 percent compounded annually. Even more significant, using Census data, the Goldman authors found that ‘firms with more than 500 employees grew by roughly 42,000 per month between 2010 and 2012, exceeding the best historical performance over the prior four recoveries. In contrast, jobs at firms with fewer than 500 employees declined by nearly 700 per month over the same timeframe, although these small firms had grown by roughly 54,000 per month on average over the prior four recoveries.’
“This accounts for the dearth of new business formations. Small firms are simply unable to get the credit that used to be available to small business start-ups, and the credit that they can get is more expensive. This would also have a disproportionate effect on employment in the recovery, because small business start-ups are the principal source of new employment growth in the US economy. [Internal citations omitted.]”
—Peter Wallison, “Is the Dodd-Frank Act Responsible for the Economy’s Slow Recovery from the Financial Crisis and the Ensuing Recession?” National Center for Policy Analysis, November 20
More evidence that higher minimum wages reduces employment:
“This year restaurant employment in the metropolitan areas with major cities that raised the minimum wage only grew 1.1 percent through September. In the surrounding state areas, however, restaurant employment grew 2.8 percent.”
—Ben Gittis, “2015 Local Minimum Wage Increases and Restaurant Employment Trends,” American Action Forum, November 20
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HEALTH CARE
ObamaCare is becoming Medicaid. “This week, UnitedHealth lowered its earnings outlook, blaming the worsening financial performance of its Obamacare plans. The company warned that it might stop offering insurance plans to people through the public exchanges. It could pull out of Obamacare, perhaps entirely.
“United’s move follows data showing that the commercial insurers have largely scaled back their offerings, and taken significant price increases on their Obamacare plans, to offset losses that they’ve been taking on the exchanges.
“Obamacare’s costly regulations mean that the mix of people who sign up are tending to be older and sicker. Many young and otherwise healthy individuals continue to be priced out of the exchanges, even after the benefit of federal subsidies are baked into their costs.
“Meanwhile, it’s the Medicaid managed care companies that are growing the number of plans they market on the exchanges. They are also offering the best prices. The cheap health plans that they end up selling on the exchanges mirror what they offer in Medicaid – in terms of the skinny doctor networks, the closed drug formularies, as well as the basic design of the austere health coverage.
“In short order, Obamacare is evolving into a Medicaid marketplace.”
—Scott Gottlieb, “UnitedHealth’s Warning Shows How Medicaid Is Taking Over Obamacare,” Forbes, November 19.
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HAPPENINGS
The Texas Public Policy Foundation will host a panel discussion on “Do Tax and Expenditure Limits Matter?” from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on December 1.
Dan Crane will speak on “Why Can’t Tesla Sell Cars in Michigan?” Crane, Associate Dean for Faculty and Research and the Frederick Paul Furth, Sr. Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, will be hosted by the Mackinac Center at the Radisson Lansing at the Capitol. Noon to 1 p.m. on December 2.
The American Legislative Exchange Council will hold its States & Nation Policy Summit at the Westin Kierland Scottsdale, in Scottsdale, Ariz., on December 2 to December 4.
The Center for Competitive Politics will hold its Ten Year Anniversary Gala, with keynote speaker George Will, at the Mayflower Hotel, at 6:30 p.m. on December 2.
The Heritage Foundation will host a panel discussion featuring “Muslim Voices Against the Islamic State and Islamic Extremism,” at 3 p.m. on December 3.
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