Monday, April 22, 2013
Barker's Newsbites: Monday, May 22, 2013
So... just to answer one of the questions I brought up last week in relation to news reporting on the Boston Bombings... as of yesterday it appears that perhaps 11... perhaps 13 people lost limbs or were permanently maimed by the bomb explosions - not 25-30 people as initially (mis)reported by an incompetent and irresponsible media.
Again, no one is making light of the Boston Bombings... but it could have been a hell of a lot worse and indeed as far as "terrorist attacks" go... we were relatively lucky.
Nope... not saying the dead were "lucky." Not saying the wounded were "lucky." Just saying it could have been a hell of a lot worse and that when it comes to terrorism... it usually has been.
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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/52d23fa6-aa98-11e2-bc0d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2RCMutw9a
The U.S. economy will officially become 3% bigger in July as part of a shake-up that will see government statistics take into account 21st century components such as film royalties and spending on research and development.
* PRETTY SURE THERE WERE FILM ROYALTIES PRIOR TO THE 21ST CENTURY...
* FORGIVE ME... BUT SHOULDN'T R&D COUNT AS SPENDING... NOT PRODUCT...???
Billions of dollars of intangible assets will enter the gross domestic product of the world’s largest economy in a revision aimed at capturing the changing nature of U.S. output.
* OR... AS A CYNIC MIGHT OPINE... IN AN EFFORT TO DELIBERATELY MISLEAD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CONCERNING ECONOMIC OUTPUT.
(*SHRUG*)
Brent Moulton, who manages the national accounts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, told the Financial Times that the update was the biggest since computer software was added to the accounts in 1999.
“We are carrying these major changes all the way back in time – which for us means to 1929 – so we are essentially rewriting economic history,” said Mr. Moulton.
* AH... "REWRITING ECONOMIC HISTORY." UH-HUH...
The revision, equivalent to adding a country as big as Belgium to the estimated size of the world economy, will make the U.S. one of the first adopters of a new international standard for GDP accounting.
* NAH... NOTHING SUSPICIOUS ABOUT THAT... (*ROLLING MY EYES*)
At present, R&D counts as a cost of doing business, so the final output of Apple iPads is included in GDP but the research done to create them is not. R&D will now count as an investment, adding a bit more than 2 per cent to the measured size of the economy.
* FOLKS... (*GUFFAW*)... CLEARLY THIS IS THE NEWEST OBAMA ECONOMIC SCAM. SPENDING IS SPENDING. (SEE: "BALANCING A CHECKBOOK") AS FOR "INVESTMENTS"... WELL... FROM WHAT WE'RE SEEING HERE THEY'RE NOT PLANNING ON SEPARATING "SUCCESSFUL INVESTMENT" FROM "UNSUCCESSFUL INVESTMENT." AGAIN... IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK AND QUACKS LIKE A DUCK... (*SHRUG*)
* OH... HOLD ON... SOME GOOD NEWS! (READ ON!)
Deficits in defined benefit pension schemes will also be included because what companies have promised to pay out will be measured, rather than the cash they pay into plans.
“We will now show a liability for underfunded plans, which particularly has large ramifications for the government sector, where both at the state level and the federal level we have large underfunded plans,” said Mr. Moulton.
* THIS IS ACTUALLY GOOD! (BUT IT COULD AND SHOULD BE DONE SEPARATELY AND APART SINCE THE REST OF THIS SCAM SEEMS TO BE... PURE SCAM.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324493704578432961601644942-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwMTEyNDEyWj.html
And you thought ObamaCare was jammed through Nancy Pelosi's Democratic House in a hurry...
Every time Congress has taken a serious look at proposals to boost Internet sales taxes, it has rejected them. That's probably why pro-tax Senators are trying to rush through an online tax hike with as little consideration as possible.
As early as Monday, the Senate will vote on a bill that was introduced only last Tuesday. The text of this legislation, which would fundamentally change interstate commerce, only became available on the Library of Congress website over the weekend.
* AGAIN, FOLKS... THE SYSTEM IS FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN. THE POLITICIANS HAVE BROKEN IT.
The drivers of this rush to tax are Walmart and other big retailers that can more easily absorb the costs of collection than can smaller competitors.
Also supporting the bill is Internet giant Amazon, which coincidentally now sells its own tax compliance service to other merchants.
Adding to the lobbying muscle are state and local governments. The politicians believe they'll collect tens of billions of dollars in taxes that are already owed by shoppers on remote sales but rarely paid.
* I BEG TO DIFFER WITH THAT LAST STATEMENT. NO SUCH TAXES ARE DUE. MY LOCALITY/COUNTY/STATE HAS NO RIGHT TO CLAIM SALES TAXES ON ITEMS I PURCHASE OUT OF SAID LOCALITY/COUNTY/STATE!
[B]ig business and big government are uniting to pursue their mutual interest in sticking it to the little guy.
Any Internet seller with more than $1 million in annual sales would be forced to serve all of the nation's tax collectors.
It's true that many small brick-and-mortar retailers in states with sales taxes support the Enzi bill. They say they're at a disadvantage as customers examine products in their showrooms and then go home to buy them tax-free. On the other hand, some customers use retail websites for research before buying at a local store.
* BUT THE WAY TO DEAL WITH THAT IS TO MAKE THE CUSTOMER PAY THE SALES TAX THAT WOULD BE DUE IF HE OR SHE PURCHASED THE ITEM PHYSICALLY IN THE SELLERS STATE OF INCORPORATION AND/OR LOCALITY OF HEADQUARTERS OR MAIN PRODUCTION/DISTRIBUTION FACILITY!
* SIX-PARTER... (Part 1 of 6)
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/22/in_preschool_debate_politics_trumps_evidence_118064.html
As President Obama pushes a major expansion of federal involvement in preschool, it’s worth reflecting on the inflated rhetoric, false promises, and disregard of hard evidence that plague our national discourse on the issue.
Head Start, as the flagship federal preschool program, is the perfect case study.
Started as a small summer program in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative, Head Start originally enrolled about 560,000 children on an operating budget of about $1 billion.
Today, more than 900,000 children are enrolled in Head Start, and the program’s operating budget has grown to nearly $8 billion per year.
* FOLKS... PROCESS THAT.
Perhaps the most effective part of Head Start’s marketing is the name itself. It’s a simple and powerful metaphor for something that all parents want: a way to give their kids the extra preparation they need to face the world. And Head Start’s modus operandi - targeting young children before they hit kindergarten - fits with the conventional wisdom that children are easier to influence at younger ages.
But does the program work?
At the behest of Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) conducted a “gold standard” experiment to answer that question. Researchers compared the growth and development of children randomly granted access to Head Start against a large control group of children who had applied for the program but were not given access due to space constraints. By first grade, there were essentially no differences in cognitive or social development between the two groups, and the third-grade follow-up study came to the same depressing conclusion.
As with many other social programs that sounded promising before being subjected to a rigorous experimental evaluation, the magnitude of the treatment effect is zero. Those are the facts.
Now enter the politics.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 6)
After the most recent HHS study was released, the NHSA set the tone with some unusually brazen spin. Here is how its press release begins: “What the Impact Study clearly shows is that Head Start does its job - it gets at-risk children ready for kindergarten in every aspect that the study measured.”
This is almost Orwellian.
The NHSA is referring to the fact that Head Start participants initially show gains over non-participants during the preschool years. The effects then fade out entirely by first grade. The whole purpose of getting children ready for kindergarten is presumably so that they can perform better once they are there. But they don’t. So in what sense at all has Head Start done its job?
The NHSA statement continues, "the benefits of kindergarten readiness seem to flatten out from kindergarten through third grade." Note the deceptive terminology here. The benefits of kindergarten readiness do not “flatten out” - they disappear. That’s not a trivial distinction.
The fact that the initial test score gains quickly faded out in the HHS study should not be surprising. Researchers have observed for decades that Head Start does not seem to improve academic outcomes.
* I'VE CERTAINLY KNOWN THIS FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER! (PROBABLY KNEW IT AS FAR BACK AS COLLEGE - PERHAPS EVEN HIGH SCHOOL!)
Perhaps that frustrating lack of cognitive impact is to blame for Head Start’s amorphous mission over the years. President Johnson wrote shortly after its creation that children would be receiving “preschool training to prepare them for regular school,” recounts Checker Finn of the Fordham Institute. But as study after study began to show Head Start was failing in that goal, proponents pushed for a broader mission – one with a greater emphasis on health, motivation and nutrition.
(*NOD*)
* IT'S CALLED "MISSION CREEP," FOLKS, AND THE MAIN BENEFICIARIES OF IT ARE THE BUREACRATS EMPLOYED VIA THE EXPANSION. IT'S NOT ABOUT THE KIDS...
(*SHRUG*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 3 of 6)
The effort to transform Head Start’s mission from an academic focus to health and social outcomes led to the program being housed at what would become the HHS, not the Department of Education. But the HHS study found that Head Start fails to improve not just cognitive outcomes, but also practically every social and behavioral outcome it examined as well. In short, the program has not lived up to any of its goals, changeable as they have been.
(*SMIRK*)
In the face of such depressing evidence, Head Start’s supporters have a fall-back position - the faith that the positive effects that quickly disappeared may yet reappear later in life.
Back to the NHSA press release: "The causes of the “flattening out effect” between kindergarten and third grade are not clear. But, it is clear from hundreds of studies over four decades, that desired long-term effects on life - such as lowered need for special education, better health and wellness as teens and adults, higher high school and college graduation rates, and greater participation of parents in their child’s education - are real and strong among Head Start participants."
* UH-HUH... (WHY IS MY INNATE CYNICISM KICKING IN RIGHT ABOUT NOW...?)
Unlike the HHS study, the long-term studies referenced in the quote are non-experimental, meaning that participants and non-participants in Head Start were not randomly chosen.
* PERHAPS... THIS EXPLAINS MY "CYNICISM ALERT!"
(*CHUCKLE*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 4 OF 6)
Although researchers do their best in non-experimental situations to control for as many factors as possible, self-selection bias often remains a problem.
For the long-term positive effects suggested by non-experimental evidence to fit with the experimental results, the impact of Head Start would have to be entirely hidden in third grade, only to reappear in the teenage years or later. The authors of the HHS study call these “sleeper effects,” but their existence is based more on hope than on evidence. As Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution recently noted, in the unusual situation when the effects of an intervention fade out but then do seemingly reappear - for example, in the oft-cited Perry Preschool Project - the initial effects lasted far longer than they ever have with Head Start.
* MEANING... WE'RE NOT REALLY TALKING HEAD START. THEY'RE DELIBERATELY CONFUSING APPLES WITH ORANGES.
(*SHRUG*)
Faith in sleeper effects is emblematic of the larger problem with federal preschool policy. Supporters so strongly desire positive impacts that they go to great lengths to explain away the mounting evidence against them. Unfortunately, the NHSA and other groups with financial interests in the programs are all-too-happy to be enablers of false hope.
On Valentine’s Day, President Obama called for an expansion of government preschool, including more federal funding for Head Start. In its press release, the White House even touted the administration’s “historic investments” in the program.
But what about the fact that Head Start doesn’t work?
* SINCE WHEN SHOULD THAT MATTER TO OBAMA...???
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 5 of 6)
The White House refers obliquely to the HHS study in saying that it will be imposing new regulations on low-performing Head Start centers. This response is highly inadequate. Are these requirements linked to evidence? Is there any reason to believe that Head Start centers with allegedly high operating standards do get results? Talking vaguely of new regulations is not useful unless they are connected to actual performance-based evidence, which in this case they are not.
President Obama’s proposal for expanded preschool is similarly disconnected from real-world evidence.
In his recent State of the Union address, the president asserted something that has become a central White House talking point: every dollar invested in preschool will return $7 in benefits.
* WHAT ABSOLUTE NONSENSE!
Such a terrific benefit-cost ratio would seem to make preschool a slam-dunk investment, and one might wonder why the president (and every state governor) didn’t propose it years ago. But the truth is that the seven-for-one statistic is inapplicable to what the president is proposing.
Seven-for-one comes from an experimental evaluation of the famous Perry Preschool Project that began in the 1960s. Perry was a highly targeted and intensive intervention that provided services for participating children and their parents – with just 58 children comprising the treatment group.
* FOLKS... COM'ON... ANYONE EVEN GLANCINGLY FAMILIAR WITH REPUTABLE STATISTICAL ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY...
(*SNORT*)
The children, deemed at risk of “retarded intellectual functioning and eventual school failure,” received structured classroom instruction and home visits on a weekly basis. Researchers followed up with the Perry subjects through age 40 and found several positive outcomes, but Perry’s apparent effect on criminality drives much of the seven-for-one benefit-cost estimate. Whereas 52% of children in the control group had served time in jail or prison, 28% the treatment group did.
* SO IN OTHER WORDS... IF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OPENED UP DIRECT INTERVENTION WITH ALL AMERICAN FAMILIES... (RE-READ THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION OF THE PERRY PROJECT IF NEED BE... PARTICULARLY THE PART ABOUT TARGETING CHILDREN *AND* THEIR PARENTS...)
* AND EVEN THEN THEY STILL WOUND UP WITH 28% OF THE PERRY CHILDREN ENDING UP IN JAIL!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 6 of 6)
Perry and the Abecedarian project, a similar intervention from the early 1970s, have been cited for three decades as examples of effective preschool programs. It may seem strange that two small programs started during the Kennedy and Nixon administrations would be the basis for grandiose claims about federal preschool programs in 2013. Why have there been no modern, scaled-up replications of Perry or Abecedarian that preschool advocates can cite?
In his upcoming book, our colleague David Muhlhausen writes that there are several reasons to be skeptical of Perry’s success. Measured effects of the program vacillated between large and small as the children aged, which is a sign that the sample was insufficiently large to counter the effects of outliers. In addition, there is some question as to whether the treatment and control groups were truly randomized in the first place, as the researchers deliberately arranged for certain siblings and other types of children to be assigned to the same experimental group.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
But even if we disregard Perry’s methodological and interpretive limitations, it has little relevance to the kinds of preschool programs that the White House would like to see expanded. Recent state preschool programs are far less targeted and intensive than Perry or Abecedarian. Russ Whitehurst put it best: “Generalizations to state pre-K programs from research findings on Perry and Abecedarian are prodigious leaps of faith.”
We are not aware of any experimental evaluations of the recent state pre-K programs that the president has held up as models for the nation with amazing benefit-cost ratios. As Whitehurst also notes, these programs are even less involved than Head Start, which gives us a sense of their likely effectiveness.
In short, the Obama administration’s seven-to-one figure is the latest in a long series of truth-stretching claims made by advocates of government preschool over the years. Science and politics have never mixed well together, but there is something about preschool that seems to generate an especially strong disconnect between rhetoric and evidence. The disconnect may be rooted in ideological differences. Some people are more comfortable with government intervention than others, and it’s possible that advocates see preschool as an entry point for further experimentation. Even if the existing preschool programs don’t work, this thinking goes, the federal structure is in place to modify and expand the interventions as necessary until the right formula is obtained.
But there are costs that go along with all of that tinkering - costs that go beyond just the direct expenditures on the programs.
Government programs can crowd out the civil society structures and social capital that have evolved to help communities function. For example, when Quebec introduced heavily-subsidized day care back in 1997, researchers found that it increased child-care enrollment at the expense of both private providers and networks of informal arrangements involving family and friends.
Since some of life’s most lasting satisfactions come from taking on responsibilities within a family or community, we want to strengthen civil society rather than erode it. This happens through initiatives that engage communities with little or no government interference.
In our view, the goal of public policy should not be to provide direct government support, but instead to provide the conditions in which private initiatives can flourish.
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