Bacon's Rebellion

Crime in the United States has receded to the lowest ebb in 40 years, according to the latest Federal Bureau of Investigation uniform crime reports. In a world where everything seems to be falling apart, it’s reassuring to know that one of the country’s great social scourges is relenting.

The decline in crime is occurring across the board, from the largest metropolitan areas to the smallest towns, and it is occurring across all categories, including murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, theft and arson. Most remarkably, the downturn has gained momentum in the past two years. Violent crime fell 5.5% nationally in 2010, following a 5.3% decline the year before, 1.9% in 2008 and 0.7% the year before that. (Major crime tumbled 6.2% in the Richmond region, reports the Times-Dispatch.)

The drop in crime during the most severe, most prolonged economic downturn since the Great Depression demolishes the conventional wisdom that crime is a response to high unemployment and economic hardship, or as the Jets in West Side Story mocked Officer Krupke, “We’re depraved because we’re deprived.”

The incredible plummeting crime rate has baffled social scientists, none of whose theories stand up very well. James Q. Wilson argued recently in the Wall Street Journal that the increase in the incarceration rate can explain only one quarter of the decline. Putting criminals in jail takes them off the streets where they commit crimes. Others have pointed to the aging of the population: A person’s proclivity to commit a crime, especially a violent one, peaks in the 15-to-25 age range and then declines steadily with age. That idea has some appeal but it can’t begin to explain the dramatic fall-off in the past two years.

Better policing — hot spot policing, in particular — has held down crime rates by breaking up criminal hot spots before crime becomes rampant. Other analysts point to the declining use of crack cocaine, which induces violent behavior. Others, noting that that children with high levels of lead in their blood are more likely to be aggressive and violent, cite the banning of lead in gasoline and paint years ago.

Whatever the reason, we can all be thankful. And we can infer that significant social and economic consequences will follow — just as decades of rising crime had social and economic implications. Since World War II, three main conditions drove the middle class out of America’s core urban areas: poor schools, high taxes and high crime rates. Fearing crime, Americans sought the tranquility of what they called the “suburbs,” or, more precisely, the ring of counties outside the core urban jurisdiction. While poor schools and high taxes will continue to deter some families from urban living, the decreased prevalence of crime will encourage empty nesters to move closer to the urban core where they can avail themselves of cultural attractions and other amenities.

Declining crime constitutes one more reason, along with rising energy prices, traffic congestion and the popping of the housing-finance bubble, to believe that population growth and development in Virginia’s metropolitan areas will stop pushing inexorably outward. Developers’ attention will shift from building auto-centric subdivisions, shopping centers and office parks in the middle of nowhere to creating walkable, mixed-use communities closer to the urban core.

If, as I suspect, Virginia will see more re-development and less greenfield development, state transportation policy should reflect this reality, and so should the comprehensive plans of Virginia’s fast-growth counties. We’re not in the 2000s anymore. It’s time to update our thinking.

Abuse and Neglect in Programs for Troubled Youth
Government Accountability Office
There have been thousands of allegations of abuse and neglect in residential treatment programs over the past two decades, including many deaths. Ineffective management and staff training typically played a role.

Fraud and Abuse in the Head Start Program? Who Would Have Thought?
Government Accountability Office
In 15 undercover operations, staff with Head Start programs frequently misreported income-eligibility information for the families of applicants, with the result that qualifying, low-income children were put on waiting lists.

Joseph E. Gagnon and Marc Hinterschweiger have gone where no man has gone before. Well, maybe not no man, but very few… I went there in my book “Boomergeddon,” but I’m not a trained economist so in the parlors of power I don’t count.

In a new book, “The Global Outlook for Government Debt over the Next 25 Years,” Gagnon and Hinterschweiger do three things: (1) project the global debt outlook to 2035, (2) ask whether the combination of debts and deficits among a large number of countries at the same time produces a different impact from the traditional crisis affecting only a handful of countries, and (3) analyze the impact on global interest rates and growth rates.

The analysis concludes that the public debt profiles in most advanced economies will grow to dangerous and unsustainable levels over the next couple of decades unless major changes are made in projected spending and revenue levels. The United States and Japan, in particular, need to start planning now for significant future budget cuts to minimize the risk of a crisis. Acting soon will enable the adjustment to be phased in over an extended period, which will cushion the inevitable adjustment costs.

If government debt continues to follow current trend lines, interest rates eventually will rise, “crowding out productive investments and slowing down the rate of economic growth,” the authors write. High levels of debt will make it impossible for governments to respond forcefully to future economic downturns.

In other words, the duo sees Boomergeddon on the horizon. But they’re economists, and they write like economists, so they don’t have a memorable name to call it. But the message is the same.

“Although we have time to act,” write Gagnon and Hinterschweiger, “time is not on our side.” They argue that spending cuts and tax increases should not be implemented in the next two years so as to avoid derailing the economic recovery. But policy makers need to begin planning now to make major adjustments very soon thereafter. “In the most advanced economies and some developing economies,” they conclude, “failure to act probably will result in a fiscal crisis of some form in the next 25 years.”

Here in Virginia, we can hope that Congress will get its act together and do the responsible thing. Yeah, right. And we can hope that fairies will sprinkle pixie dust on us so we have physiques like Brad Pitt’s. Alternatively, we can trust in ourselves by fiscally fortifying the Old Dominion to survive Boomergeddon.

Let’s weigh the options: Trust Congress to do the right thing… Trust Congress to follow the path of least resistance and put off the hard choices. You decide.

In an article republished in today’s Bacon’s Rebellion newsletter (a product of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy), the Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole discusses the bankruptcy of two public-private partnership toll projects, one in Brisbane, Australia, and the other in San Diego. In both cases, taxpayers emerged whole.

The bottom line here is that start-up toll projects are inherently risky. They are not for the faint-hearted nor for well-meaning amateurs. The best way to deal with that riskiness is to shift it from general taxpayers to sophisticated investors who are prepared to balance the occasional loss in exchange for solid, long-term returns in other cases.

There’s a lesson for Virginia as the McDonnell administration ramps up plans to finance more highway construction by means of public-private partnerships: Watch the risk!

As an aside, TJI soon will be moving its newsletter from the db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com domain, where it has resided since the days I published it, to TJI’s own website and will rename it the Thomas Jefferson Journal. At that point, I will move this blog to the dev.baconsrebellion.com domain. So, brace yourselves for a change in address… and design.

JARC Programs Making More Use of Federal Funds
Government Accountability Office
The Job Access and Reverse Commute program helps low-income people get to work. The number of local grantees who let their funding lapse has shrunk in recent years, the GAO reports. Phew! For a while, I was really worried people might find their own rides.

Same Day Voting Increases Voter Turnout
Demos
It turns out that letting voters register on election day increases voter turnout. No word on whether it also increases voter fraud.

Always follow the Koch money.

A two-year-old conservative outfit coyly named the “American Tradition Institute” has forced the University of Virginia to “cough up” thousands of emails through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit focusing on Michael Mann, a former U.Va. climatologist who has been hounded for more than a year for his research and positions on global warming.

The charge has been led by Virginia’s ultra-right-wing Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli who has hit Mr. Jefferson’s University with “investigative demands’ for the emails of some 39 scientists around the world who may have communicated with Dr. Mann, who left U.Va. for Penn State several years ago. Cuccinelli, you see, doesn’t believe that humans have anything to do with global warming.

Never mind that Mann has been cleared repeatedly by his peers of any wrongdoing. U.Va. has tried to support academic freedom by blocking Cuccinelli’s politically motivated fishing trip.

Now comes the so-called “American Tradition Institute” with Prince William Del. Robert G. Marshall cheering them, to set up a lawsuit to get more than 34,000 emails also related to Michael Mann. A circuit court judge in Prince William County, a hotbed of conservatism, has gone along with the lawsuit and U.Va. has begun releasing the emails, some of which have to do with such weighty matters relating to the integrity of the scientific process as personal plans for Halloween parties.

So, who is the “American Tradition Institute” anyway? One place to look is who its “executive director” is. He is Paul Chesser, a journalist originally from Rhode Island who edited some community newspapers in North Carolina and is a conservative blogger and columnist.

Chesser is listed on the John Locke Foundation website as being a “special correspondent” for the Heartland Institute as well. The Intitute, a right-wing, Chicago-based think tank and advocacy group, has been massively funded by Koch brothers Charles and David who run a Wichita-based firm that is the second-largest privately held conglomerate in the U.S.

The ultra-conservative Kochs have bankrolled everything from Lincoln Center in New York to a host of far-right organizations. In a revealing article, The New Yorker outlined last year the Kochs’ well- organized plans to discredit President Barack Obama.

It isn’t certain if Chesser is funded directly by the Kochs or if the American Tradition Institute is. Contributions to non-profits like it are supposed to be available on demand to the public and often they are available online through guidestar.org. I somehow couldn’t find them online and haven’t had time yet to drive to downtown Washington to their offices and ask to see them.

There is enough, however, to wonder who this two-year-old outfit is. Plus, one wonders what Chesser’s qualifications are to play expert in climatology. He seems like a journalist such as myself.

So, before you read any more breathless blog postings about U.Va. having to “cough up” damning documents about climate change or Halloween parties, consider who is making the request and consider how much the university is going to have to pay to comply with these right-wing fishing trips.

Peter Galuszka

The California School-Aid Deregulation Experiment
Rand Corporation
In 2008, California’s legislature combined 50 K-12 school programs totaling $4.5 billion in spending, cut 20% and gave school districts more flexibility on how to spend what remained. Lesson learned: Set clearer goals.

Spurring Growth through Innovation
Brookings Institution
Want to spur innovation in the U.S.? Stabilize the federal budget, support research and intellectual property, promote exports and green energy and get government to go digital.

Adopt More Foster Children, Reduce Support Costs
Brookings Institution
Governments spend more than $9 billion yearly on foster care, not including supplemental support through poverty programs. Making it easier for foster children to be adopted could improve their lives — and save taxpayer dollars.

Del. Bob Marshall, R-Manassas, and the American Tradition Institute (ATI) won a circuit court order Tuesday ordering the University of Virginia to disgorge emails and other communications sent and received by Dr. Michael Mann, creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph. The graph, which purported to show a dramatic spike in global temperatures in the late 20th century, provided vivid confirmation of the fears of many scientists that Global Warming is a real and accelerating phenomenon.

Mann was one of the key players involved in the East Anglia Climate Research Unit scandal that did so much to discredit Global Warming alarmism a couple of years ago by showing how a small cadre of scientists manipulated data and used their clout to stifle opposing viewpoints from the U.N.’s supposedly definitive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Now, Global Warming skeptics are hoping that Mann’s correspondence during his time as an environmental science professor at UVa will yield more embarrassing revelations.

As ATI noted in its press release, “There … already appears — from records AT has received — to be additional information of the kind released in the ‘Climategate’ emails that originated from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University.”

UVa had stonewalled the release of the records for months, at one point denying that they even existed, and later insisting that ATI be charged in excess of $8,000 for copying and reproduction charges. The university also fought a parallel probe by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to gain access to the records in an investigation of possible fraud on Mann’s part in the use of state research funds.

As of yesterday, ATI had received one fifth of the 9,000 pages that UVA says are responsive to ATI’s request. Most of what ATI has received so far is junk: “ads for Halloween costumes, public news releases from lay and scientific journals, and a few emails that were printed in computer code so as to be unintelligible in that form.” However, some material made it through UVa’s “filter,” stated ATI, which the institute will reveal to the public in the future.

UVa has done itself no favors by its conduct in this matter. I am somewhat sympathetic to the university’s decision to fight Cuccinelli’s probe, which could be viewed as a politically motivated fishing expedition on the spurious grounds that Mann might have committed fraud in his use of state research funds. As sympathetic as I am to those who wish to expose Mann for committing intellectual fraud, not criminal fraud, I did fret that Cuccinelli’s action set a dangerous precedent for politicizing and criminalizing academic discourse.

But releasing emails under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act is a very different matter. The ATI is a private institute seeking information of a type that the University had released previously — specifically, the emails of Patrick Michaels, a Global Warming skeptic, under an FOIA request from a leftist group. The data will not be used to criminalize Mann but to expose any machinations in stifling opposing academic views that he might have been engaged in. Justice will be served, and it will be served in a way that does not involve the Attorney General’s office, which has no business being involved in a dispute of this nature.

Now, I can only hope that UVa, my alma mater, does not become discredited by the ClimateGate scandal in the same way that East Anglia University in the United Kingdom has been. If administrators had simply handed over the emails, as they did in Michaels’ case, they would have avoided any taint if the emails contained scandalous content. But by trying to hush potential revelations, administrators will be seen as complicit with Mann and will be tarred along with him.

Reforming Virginia Health Care
The Virginia Newsletter
Federal health care reform will have a big impact on Virginia by 2014. Here’s what the state is doing to get ready for it.

Reform the Healthcare Payments System
Brookings Institution
It is possible to tame rising healthcare costs without sacrificing quality: Change the payments system from a fee-for-service arrangement to one that rewards positive outcomes and incentivizes patients to seek health plans that offer value.

The Funding of State and Local Pensions
Center for Retirement Research
Funding of state pension plans continued to deteriorate in 2010: The ratio of assets to liabilities fell to 77% and states made only 78% of needed payments. Meanwhile, states are making optimistic assumptions about future investment performance on existing assets.

Asians in Virginia
Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service
As of 2010, Asians constituted 5.5% of Virginia’s populations. Asians are prospering here. Better educated than native-born citizens, they earn considerably more.

U.S. Immigration Courts: An Exercise in Futility
Center for Immigration Studies
Federal immigration courts are a joke. Millions of immigrants never show up for trial. Judges are powerless. Unenforced removal orders now exceed 1.1 million.

Immigrants to the United States from Canada and the Philippines are the most assimilated of major immigrant groups, according to a new Manhattan Institute report, “Comparing Immigrant Assimilation in North America and Europe.” The report ranked populations based on measures of economic, cultural and civic assimilation.

For the most part, the United States does a better job of assimilating immigrants than Europe, notes the author Jacob L. Vigdor, although Canada does the best job of all. Assimilation rates also vary within the U.S. by metropolitan area.

Speaking of assimilating Asians, see the Weldon Cooper Center’s new statistical snapshot of the Asian population in Virginia. There are 400,000 Asians living in the state now, 5.5% of the population. Better educated than the native-born population, Asians also make significantly higher incomes.

Just how successful is Bob McDonnell at being the “Jobs Governor?”

Over at the Score, Norm Leahy continues his battle against incentives or, as he calls it, “corporate welfare” by subjecting a recent op-ed piece by Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling to withering scrutiny. Read the blog post.

There is so much to say on this topic, but I’ll let Norm carry the ball right now.

Cutting Women and Children First
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Proposed congressional cuts to the WIC nutrition program could deny benefits to between 325,000 and 475,000 eligible women, infants and children under five.

For what it’s worth: It appears that I can no longer post comments to my own blog. I get an “bX-rynfwe” message, whatever that is. Others who report that error message on Blogger’s forum appear to get no satisfaction. So, as much as I would like to respond to some comments, I am not able. Hopefully, the problem will go away as mysteriously as it appeared.

Update: Larry Gross has reported that he cannot post comments either.