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MEMORANDUM:
EYES ONLY
TO: Bill Leighty, Chief of Staff
FR: Ellen Qualls, Press Secretary
RE: Having our "tax reform" cake and
eating it too.
As usual, Paul Goldman's recent column on our
"tax reform" missed the point, something
the GUV and the rest of us predicted would happen.
It proves what Belle Wheelan, the education
secretary, has been saying: A health-food guy like
Goldman will never appreciate our Twinkie Strategy
for passing "tax reform."
Unless, of course, he happens to read working paper
#9319 of the National Bureau of Economic Research,
entitled "Food
For Thought: The Effects of School Accountability
Plans on School Nutrition."
That's right: The NBER put our strategy on their
website. All you have to is log-on to the NBER
website, put 9319 into the Google search engine and
you come up with the paper, plus a quick synopsis
entitled Eating Your Way to Higher Test Scores saying,
"School districts that increased calories on
test days experienced increases in 5th grade pass
rates of 11, 6, and 6 percent respectively on the
mathematics, English, and history/social studies
tests."
Calm down Bill, stuff happens. Still, Mame Reilly
and Paul Reagan say not to worry, no General
Assembly member will ever connect this paper to our
"Tax reform" strategy. Bill Thomas, Alan
Diamonstein, and Jimmy Hazel agree. If they don't
know how a legislator thinks, then who does? Those
guys buy them breakfast, lunch, and dinner all the
time.
So, lets not panic. Let me review how we decided on
our strategy, how it works, and why I believe we
should stay the course.
As you know, the governor asked
us at a cabinet meeting not long ago to map a
strategy to get the General Assembly to enact his
"tax reform" proposal.
So, naturally, the senior staff took Secretary
Wheelan to lunch at the Governor's Mansion.
Educating legislators is not easy, so we were hungry
for new ideas.
Anyway, after lunch, we sat around and brainstormed.
Bill, I got to tell, we were cooking with gas, ideas
flying back and forth. We were pumped.
Finally, Belle said, "We are really on our game
today."
"It must have been the strawberries,"
quipped Secretary of the Commonwealth Anita Rimler,
doing her imitation of Humphrey Bogart in his last
great role, that of Captain Queeg from Herman Wouk's
novel.
At which point Belle said: "Of course, the
food!"
The rest of us looked at each other, not knowing
what Belle meant. We watched as she ran down to the
kitchen and talked to the Mansion Chef.
Upon her return, she was carrying a tray with a huge
chocolate cake, four gallons of Rocky Road ice-cream
and a big jar filled with double-fudge cookies. Plus
a quart of chocolate syrup.
"What's all that for?" asked
Transportation Secretary Whitt Clement. Health and
Human Services Secretary Jane Woods seemed puzzled
too, having just come for a meeting with Goldman
where he was challenging us about the deals between
local school districts and junk food companies.
Belle smiled and then declared: "This is our
strategy for passing tax reform!"
Secretary of Administration Sandy Bowen seemed to
understand immediately, having lobbied the General
Assembly for ten years before joining the cabinet.
"You go girl!" she said to Belle.
Frankly, I admit to being skeptical at first. But my
assistant, Kevin Hall, logged onto iVillage.co.uk
and soon found an article entitled "Eating for
success." Now I know why Prime Minister Blair
was the only one smart enough to stick with the US
on the Iraq War.
Belle's plan is rather ingenious. The governor has
told us time and time again that state legislators
act like children most of the time, with about the
same attention span to substantive things as your
average fifth grader.
Belle said several studies showed you could raise
SAT scores by increasing the level of glucose in
high school seniors by changing their lunch menu
prior to taking the exam.
So, she naturally asked: If such lunch manipulation
could work to boost SAT brainpower, why not SOL's
that we give fifth graders?
We all immediately got her point: If it could work
on fifth graders, then why not General Assembly
members, especially those the GUV feels
are...well...out to lunch, so to speak.
Under the USDA School Meals Initiative for Healthy
Children, schools must meet nutritional guidelines
over a seven-day period. So we got Finance Secretary
Bennett to snooker the feds into giving us a free
lunch: Uncle Sugar agreed to pick up the check for
funding a study of 23 randomly selected Virginia
school districts to see if this lunch manipulation
theory worked.
AND IT DID. An analysis of working paper #9319
concluded:
"In Food For Thought: The Effects of School
Accountability Plans on School Nutrition" (NBER
Working Paper No. 9319), authors David Figlio
and Joshua Winicki examine whether [some VA] schools
exploit a ... subtle method to increase test scores:
changing their lunch menus... Figlio and
Winicki [found] that ...[i]n those districts, school
lunches averaged 863 calories during testing
periods, 761 calories before, and 745 calories
after. Though calories increased, nutrients did not.
Nor was the calorie increase a result of serving
students their favorite meals -- pizza,
cheeseburgers, and tacos, as measured by sales data
-- on test days. School districts that increased
calories on test days experienced increases in 5th
grade pass rates of 11, 6, and 6 percent
respectively on the mathematics, English, and
history/social studies tests."
Manna from heaven!
That proved it, Bill: The key to our "tax
reform" plan was less logic and more Twinkies!
We must have been clueless not to see it before.
Since the average member of the General Assembly was
a poor performer in elementary school, Belle was
confident her plan would work perfectly.
Then Commerce Secretary Mike Schewel piped in:
"Of course! This is just like Reagan's Food For
Progress program passed in 1985."
He was referring to the 1985 creation of the program
we use to help poor countries improve their school
children's learning ability.
Bill, you got to love the politics here: We are
using a Reagan-era style program, overwhelmingly
supported by all the Congressional Democrats running
for President in 2004, to raise the IQ's, even if
only for a day, of the Virginia General Assembly.
This is the best thing since sliced bread ... and,
of course, plenty of butter, got to get that calorie
intake up!
We know that most legislators eat at Chicken's, the
snack shop on the first floor of the Capitol, during
the Session, or the cafeteria over at the GA
Building.
So our "tax reform" strategy was obvious:
We let the General Assembly members settle into
their usual lunch routine when they return for
the 2004 Session. Then, the week before the big vote
on the Warner "tax reform" plan, we get
Terrorism Czar John Hager to close down Chicken's
and the GA lunch room on the pretext a CIA intercept
had revealed a possible terrorist plot to poison the
GA members as a preliminary test for their planned
attack in 2007 on the 400th anniversary of
Jamestown.
Huge headlines! Then, like a good guy, the governor
offers to prepare GA lunches in the Mansion kitchen
and have the staff take them over to the GA.
Great
gesture and no way legislators refuse a freebie.
Presto: We control the lunch menu, and those 4 p.m.
legislative snacks as they sit on the GA floor
debating our "tax reform" plan!
Using the Figlio/Winicki data, we simply increase
the caloric intake of the GA until it produces
glucose levels that can even make Republican
Majority Leader Morgan Griffith think smart, perhaps
even Sen. Bill Bolling. True, we will have to
prepare special extra boosts for most of the newer
GOP legislators since they seem brain-dead, and
lower the dose for Democrats like Sen. Dick
Saslaw who know everything already because we don't
want to make them into an Einstein.
But generally, using the NBER lunch data, we can
manipulate the meals so that the General Assembly
will finally be able to appreciate the substance of
the governor's tax reform plan, and then vote for it
after a week of brainpower-boosting lunches!
Piece of cake!
It worked on 5th graders.
So why not the General Assembly?
This "tax reform" stuff is easy. All we
have to do is hand the GOP their lunch.
--
April 28, 2003
(c) Copyright. All rights reserved. Paul Goldman.
2003.
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