Miscellaneous Musings About Recent News Events and The Amrican Political Class

A number of news items have come about recently that are worth pondering about the state of the country and how well, or not, the American political class is doing their job:

- A recent article from the Associated Press on September 3, 2010 reported on a skirmish between Mexican armed forces and a large number of suspected drug cartel members in a Mexican state close to the U.S. border. We have recently talked about the rising problem of drug gang and cartel violence and potential for that violence to spill over into the U.S. The fact that Mexico is using soldiers to storm drug cartel properties gives you a scary idea of how big the problem is becoming, so big that local police are now no match for the gangs. After the fight, police confiscated 25 guns, grenades, and 4,200 rounds of ammunition. No wonder the army had to be called in. We must find a way to take the profits out of the drug trade in whatever way possible before the drug trade horror Mexico is going through now migrates over the border to us. We must move on this problem as soon as possible before the legitimate government of Mexico collapses and who know what takes it place. American politicians have dodged this problem since Nixon.

- An article in the September 3, 2010 issue of The Week magazine talked about the dreadful state that the housing industry is in right now. Specifically, it talked about the Home Affordable Mortgage Program or HAMP, the Obama administration program that was intended to help struggling homeowners not default on their mortgages. According to Obama's own watchdog on the program, not the Republicans, the program added $50 billion to the national deficit while failing to "put an appreciable dent in foreclosure filings." Combine this failure with the $8,000 home buyer tax credit failure and you can see that the political class really does not know how to manage the housing market. All their programs do is waste taxpayer money and wealth. The best solution: downsize the government out of many of these functions and let the free market fix itself.

This is what John Tammy writing in fortune.com recommends. His view is "to let housing and mortgage securities find their natural, market clearing levels." Once reality returns to the housing market, things will pick up. Mr. Tammy believes that all of these failed government programs only "elongated what remains a painful downturn." The market is too big and to complicated for our politicians to fix, we should have taken our lumps earlier and we would have been that much closer to a true turnaround and recovery as opposed to Obama's short term, wasteful and ineffective gimmick programs.

- Also in that same issue of The Week, a short article discussed how the Federal Department of Education had awarded $3.3 billion to nine states and the District of Columbia to institute school improvement programs. Nice idea but, in general, our public schools are failing, they do not need improving, they need to be revolutionized. Giving out a few billion dollars here and there will have very small, localized success, if that. We need to take a more ground breaking approach rather than tweaking what we already have. The public education sector is way too big to be leveraged and dramatically improved by a few measly billions of dollars.

Any revolutionary approach would likely include some ideas from around the world that were written about in the August 23, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine:

- Understand that family stability and circumstances are a large part of a child's education success so find a way to understand and overcome family dysfunctionality when it impedes the learning process.

- Finland has found a way to enforce strict and rigorous learning standards that have resulted in minimal drop out rates. What could we learn from the Finns to address the horrendous dropout rates in some of our public school systems?

- Studies indicate that the right type of effective pre-schooling (not HeadStart) "does more for a child's chances in school and life than any other educational intervention."

- Some school districts, both domestic and around the world, spend up to 60% - more time in school than the typical American student. These other kids arrive earlier to school, leave later, and some even go to school every other Saturday. Chile extended its students' school hours so much that they end up getting an extra two years worth of schooling by the time the graduate high school.

- Bad teachers equals bad learning. Good teachers equals good learning. Sounds simple but we are not generally doing it in the United States. In Singapore, the article states that school systems are very choosy about who they hire to teach, they provide training and continuing education to their teachers, they evaluate teachers' performance regularly, and only top teaching performers get bonuses.

- Provide individual tutoring for those students that are having learning problems.

These are some ideas that are working around the world when it comes to education improvement and excellence. We need to mold these and other ideas into a coherent strategic education blueprint for the country. Certainly it would be more successful than the incremental approach of both the Bush and Obama administrations.

- Also in that same issue of Newsweek was a story by Babak Dehghanpisher regarding the growing relationship between Iraq and Iran. According to the article, trade between the two countries, which was $7 billion in 2009 is expected to double very soon. Wouldn't that be a kick in the teeth that after all of the money we spent and the casualties that our armed forces endured in Iraq, that Iraq became an ally of our mortal enemy, Iran? Talk about diplomatic and strategic planning incompetence.

- Vice President Joe Biden was at it again recently, highlighting what he thought were the great contributions that the Obama administration's stimulus package made to America. In the Associated Press article from August 27, 2010 that reviewed the VP's claims, was a short history in the area of mapping out the human genome. The National Institute Of Health, a Federal entity, burned through $3 billion of taxpayer money over a ten period to come up with the first draft of a human genome. However, in 2009, a Stanford professor reported that he sequenced his own genome in a week at a cost of $48,000, using a $1 million machine. Let's see, which effort was more efficient: the government approach that took ten years and $3 billion or a private citizen who did his own in a week on a budget less than $50,000. No brainer.

By considerably downsizing government and allowing individuals and businesses to keep more and more of their wealth and taxes, efficient innovation and economic growth will happen much quicker and cheaper than believing that huge government bureaucracies can do the job better. Government cannot to it better than individuals, this genome area is just one example where we waste so much money for so little in return from the political class.

- An August 27, 2010 Associated Press article discussed how recent Federal agent raids across the country had apprehended 370 immigrants in ten different states. Two things were distressing in the article. First, these immigrants were not just arrested in border states, they were from such states as Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nebraska, certainly not what you would call border states. Thus, our immigration problem is really a nationwide problem. Second, the 370 people arrested were from 50 different countries including such dangerous and anti-American countries as Iraq and Syria. From a homeland security perspective, it is just a matter of time before the drug gangs and deteriorating government control in Mexico results in more anti-American people coming into the country.

When you muse like this you sadly realize that we have some very serious problems in this country, problems that have been with us for a long time, and we have no coherent political class leaders that seem able to address and solve these problems. Politicians do not know how to strategically do problem solving. Their only priority is their continued time in office, not how to solve our problems. It is not that hard, you just want do do it. Unfortunately, I see absolutely no one in Washington who wants to do it.