Steven Taylor’s “Makers and Takers?” has generated an enormous amount of commentary, especially for a posting late on Super Bowl Sunday. That it takes on a column written by Glenn Reynolds, and that he not only linked the post (always appreciated) but engaged in the comments discussion (I believe a first for us) were major factors in that.

Given the enormous help that Glenn Reynolds and Bill Quick were in helping to launch OTB back in early 2003 and their kindnesses during some hard times in my personal and professional life, I’m a bit distressed at how they’ve reacted to the piece and have a few thoughts on the matter.

First, Glenn’s summary on Steven’s post–”and I should kill myself or something”–is great for driving traffic (thanks, again!) but an unfair reading, to put it mildly. Rather, Steven found the core argument of the column simplistic and expected more nuance from someone of Glenn’s stature. Yes, Glenn is most famous as a pundit–an insta-pundit, no less–but he’s an enormously accomplished legal thinker, not a talk radio host.

Second, I think a lot of Steven’s frustration with the piece stems from the headline (“It’s takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning”) itself. I don’t read the column itself making the black-and-white claim that the headline suggests. Having been on the other side of that in a few pieces I’ve placed elsewhere, it’s a pretty common occurrence for readers to frame their reaction to it by the headline–which the column author almost never writes. So, I think Steven’s reacting as much to the general argument being made too often by talk radio hosts, columnists, and political candidates that there’s a huge class of non-contributors that the rest of us are having to support as to the column itself.

Third, in terms of Glenn’s column itself, my own objections are largely over framing rather than substance. We agree that farm subsidies, corporate welfare, and bailouts for those who make stupid business choices are really bad public policy. Further, we agree on the pernicious effects of rent seeking in the system, particularly the enormous incentives to spend a lot of time and money lobbying for special treatment in the tax and regulatory code.

While reflexively sympathetic, however, I’m less sure that subsidizing or otherwise providing some government assistance to those who are underwater in their mortgages is necessarily problematic. It largely depends on what form the policies take.

Likewise, I almost completely disagree that unemployment insurance provides some enormous incentive to permanent mooching. While it’s probably true that providing long-term benefits provides a disincentive for those at the bottom of the economic ladder to seek gainful employment (why bust your ass doing a lousy job for minimum wage when you can get 2/3 as much for doing nothing) the benefits are so meager that almost anyone else is much better off finding a job.

Further, framing as makers vs. takers “People who took jobs they didn’t particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn’t getting extended unemployment benefits” implies that it’s a no-brainer that people should take whatever job comes their way. Someone laid off from an $80,000 job in a field they’ve spent years preparing for really shouldn’t be expected to take a $24,000 job doing manual labor and lose everything they’ve worked for prior to a serious effort over a few months to get back on their career path and thereby exhausting other options. Doing so not only wastes human capital but it makes it much harder for that person to get back on track, since they not only lack the time and energy to look for more suitable jobs but they’ve devalued their resume by taking those steps back.

On the other hand, I’m much more sympathetic than Steven to Glenn’s argument that an underlying problem in the debate is that the federal government has become so powerful that rent-seeking and other corrupting behaviors are natural consequences. Just as people rob banks because that’s where the money is, people lobby government because it controls so many of the outcomes of the system.

But I think Steven’s right that the observation falls short of substantive policy analysis, for a variety of reasons. Like it or not, the political structures of 1789–or even 1936–simply won’t work in our modern society. The United States isn’t and hasn’t for well over a century been an outpost of 13 more-or-less separate states that had little interaction. While I’d like to see the federal government generally smaller, the serious debate is within a margin of 15 to 20 percent, not 85 or 90 percent.

Fourth, Bill Quick’s suggestion that OTB has shifted its ideological views over the years and is much less friendly to right-libertarians than it once was is one I’ve seen made by many others who were allies in the heady days of the fight over the Iraq War. There’s probably some truth in it. First,  because we’ve gone from a solo blog to a group blog that I dominated content-wise to one where the vagaries of time leave me as a much less frequent contributor, there’s a widening scope of views seen here. Second, my own views on some issues have in fact evolved over time.

I reject, however, the notion that the shift is a function of my having “burrowed ever deeper into the Washington establishment.” While it’s true that I now work just off of K Street in downtown Washington, I’m at a non-ideological foreign policy think tank and we spend less time talking about US domestic politics here than in perhaps any other job I’ve ever had.

Instead, the fact that I’ve spent a little over nine years writing on an almost daily basis about politics in a public forum having to defend my views while being intellectually honest has made me realize that some things that I once fervently believed were true are either outright false or a hell of a lot more complicated than I once thought. That Steven Taylor, who has remained back teaching at the small town Alabama campus where we first met as colleagues some fourteen years ago has had a very similar evolution reinforces my sense that it’s not DC that’s changed me but rather blogging.

Fifth, I’m befuddled by the early commenters on the post–who, contrary to some suggestions are actually not OTB regulars–who make the argument that Reynolds and/or Taylor are unqualified to comment on the matter because they’re employees at state universities and therefore somehow on the government teat themselves. Granted, I’m sensitive to the matter having worked for government–as a military officer, as a college professor, and indirectly as a military contractor–but providing honest services to the taxpayer for hire isn’t remotely equivalent to being on the dole.

Employees of the US Federal Government earn substantially more in salary and benefits than their private sector comparables, according to the new Congressional Budget Office report “COMPARING THE COMPENSATION OF FEDERAL AND PRIVATE-SECTOR EMPLOYEES.”

Wages

Differences in wages between federal employees and similar private-sector employees in the 2005-2010 period varied widely depending on the employees’ level of education.

• Federal civilian workers with no more than a high school education earned about 21 percent more, on average, than similar workers in the private sector.
• Workers whose highest level of education was a bachelor’s degree earned roughly the same hourly wages, on average, in both the federal government and the private sector.
• Federal workers with a professional degree or doctorate earned about 23 percent less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts.

Overall, the federal government paid 2 percent more in total wages than it would have if average wages had been comparable with those in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.

Benefits

The cost of providing benefits—including health insurance, retirement benefits, and paid vacation—differed more for federal and private-sector employees than wages did, but measuring benefits was also more uncertain.

• Average benefits for federal workers with no more than a high school diploma were 72 percent higher than for their private-sector counterparts.
• Average benefits for federal workers whose education ended in a bachelor’s degree were 46 percent higher than for similar workers in the private sector.
• Workers with a professional degree or doctorate received roughly the same level of average benefits in both sectors.

On average, the benefits earned by federal civilian employees cost 48 percent more than the benefits earned by private-sector employees with certain similar observable characteristics.

Total Compensation

Differences in total compensation—the sum of wages and benefits—between federal and private-sector employees also varied according to workers’ education level.

• Federal civilian employees with no more than a high school education averaged 36 percent higher total compensation than similar private-sector employees.
• Federal workers whose education culminated in a bachelor’s degree averaged 15 percent higher total compensation than their private-sector counterparts.
• Federal employees with a professional degree or doctorate received 18 percent lower total compensation than their private-sector counterparts, on average.

Overall, the federal government paid 16 percent more in total compensation than it would have if average compensation had been comparable with that in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.

So, overall, federal employees earn only fractionally more than their civilian counterparts in terms of salary but significantly more when benefits are factored in. But the difference is mostly seen at the bottom of the education curve–and actually flips for those with graduate and professional degrees. Note that the survey excludes the uniformed military; otherwise, the skew would be even higher, as junior enlisted personnel make far higher salaries and receive phenomenally better benefits than their high school graduate peers.

Public sector employment is much closer to the progressive ideal than employment in the private sector. For one thing, it’s capped at the upper end. Even the president only makes $400,000 and no civil service employee makes more than the $179,700 ceiling. On the lower end, even the most junior person (a GS-1, Step 1) makes $17,803 a year–roughly $8.55 an hour. Further, the benefits are comparable across the board, so even those at the bottom of the scale get good health coverage, paid vacation, and retirement benefits.

Medical doctors and attorneys who work for the federal government make a decent living and have tremendous protections unavailable in the private sector. But most start as GS-12s making $60,274 a year; an entry level attorney at a top DC law firm makes as much as the president.  Then again, the study likely doesn’t factor in that many of the professionals working for the federal government got a free ride through very expensive schooling.

If you sell bottled water in the European Union, you’ll no longer be able to make the seemingly self-evident claim that drinking your product will prevent dehydration, and it’s a decision that is earning no small degree of ridicule from the British press:

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.

Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.

Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large.

“The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.

“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.”

The ruling came about in response to a proposal by two German scientists who are critical of many of the EU’s food safety regulations:

German professors Dr Andreas Hahn and Dr Moritz Hagenmeyer, who advise food manufacturers on how to advertise their products, asked the European Commission if the claim could be made on labels.

They compiled what they assumed was an uncontroversial statement in order to test new laws which allow products to claim they can reduce the risk of disease, subject to EU approval.

They applied for the right to state that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration” as well as preventing a decrease in performance.

However, last February, the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) refused to approve the statement.

A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.

Now the EFSA verdict has been turned into an EU directive which was issued on Wednesday.

The Guardian’s Martin Robbins calls some of the reaction to the decision “daft hysteria”:

Firstly, “regular consumption” of water doesn’t reduce the risk of dehydration any more than eating a pork pie a day reduces the risk of starvation. If I drink half a pint of bottled water while running through a desert in the blistering sun, I’ll still end up dehydrated, and if I drink several bottles today, that won’t prevent me from dehydrating tomorrow. The key is to drink enough water when you need it, and you’re not going to get that from any bottled water product unless it’s mounted on a drip.

Secondly, dehydration doesn’t just mean a lack of water, or ‘being thirsty’; electrolytes like sodium are important too. If salt levels fall too far, the body struggles to regulate fluid levels in the first place. That’s why hospitals use saline drips to prevent dehydration in patients who can’t take fluids orally, and why people with diarhhoea are treated with salt-containing oral rehydration fluids. Presumably the next big investigation at the Express will expose the shocking waste of NHS money on needless quantities of saline solution, when jolly old tap water would work just as well.

So the ruling seems pretty sensible to me, or at least as sensible as a ruling can be when the claim being tested is vexatious in the first place. It’s accurate advice, and it prevents companies selling bottled water from making exaggerated claims for their products, which is a good thing.

Exaggerated? Seriously?

Like regulators on this side of the Atlantic, the EU regulators and people like Robbins apparently believe that consumers are too stupid to think for themselves and that they blindly accept whatever claims are made by manufacturers. They also believe that they know better than the average person what’s good for them, and that the government exists to protect them, not so much from those venal, evil corporations, but from their own stupidity. Does Robbins truly believe that the average European is too dumb to realize that you need to do more than just drink water to stay healthy? Sadly, based on my own observations of people like him here on this side of the pond, I think he does.

What, exactly, would be wrong with permitting bottled water manufacturers from mentioning dehydration in their ads? Personally, I don’t see it, and I see far more evil in empowering a centralized state with the right to regulate the information that businesses are permitted to provide to consumers to such an absurd, paternalistic degree. People are smart enough to evaluate claims like this own their own, I say let them do it.

The most amusing thing about all of this, of course, is that, while the EU’s financial system continues to descend into chaos, the EU’s bureaucrats are wasting their time on nonsense like this. If Europe does survive as a united entity through all of this, it won’t be because of people like Martin Robbins who apparently find regulating the advertisement claims for bottled water more important than, well, fixing the broken system that they see all around them.

Two years ago, South Carolina Boeing workers voted 199-68 to decertify their union. The NLRB has filed suit against the company for choosing to locate a new plant there instead of Washington state. And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thinks it’s just fine if those jobs go the way of the dodo if they’re not proper union jobs.

“Do you think it’s right that Boeing has to close down that plant in South Carolina because it’s non union?” asked host Maria Bartiromo. Pelosi’s reply: “Yes.”

The minority leader quickly added that she would rather it simply unionize and stay open. But barring unionization, by Pelosi’s reasoning, it should simply shut down.

Bartiromo followed up by asking if government should be getting involved in such corporate decisions. Pelosi dodged the question by saying “you asked me what I thought and I told you what I thought.” In short, Pelosi strongly supports every citizen’s right to choose–so long as the choices they make are one of which Pelosi approves. Otherwise, not so much.

Government has been a booming business over the last decade or so, and the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area has benefited greatly:

Washington, D.C., is now the country’s wealthiest metro area, jumping ahead of Silicon Valley, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

The average household income for residents of D.C. metro area was $84,523 in 2010, when the median income for the whole country was $50,046, Bloomberg reported in an analysis of census data.

This means the nation’s capital is now in first place in household earning, taking Silicon Valley’s top spot — Bloomberg reports that San Jose had an average income of $83,944 in 2010, dropping from $84,483 in 2009. The average household income for Washington, D.C., last year also fell from 2009, when the average was $85,168.

Federal workers last year had an average total compensation of $126,369, higher than the average of $122,697 in 2009. As of June, the Washington, D.C., area had 170,467 federal employees, the analysis says.

This isn’t entirely surprising. Although some counties in Virginia and Maryland were hard hit by the real estate crash, for the most part the D.C. area has fared better than most other parts of the country over the past three years. Additionally, the always present Federal bureaucracy, expanded quite significantly in the ten years since September 11th via the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, is a huge source of employment for the entire area. Unfortunately, while the D.C. area has benefited over the past several years, the rest of the country hasn’t been so lucky.

Keith Humphries explains “How ‘Overpaid’ Government Professionals Reduce Public Expenditures” by virtue of an anecdote about a government construction engineer whose insights saved the taxpayers from buying several ridiculously expensive buildings with hidden defects in a single day.

This talented government professional’s annual salary was less than one third of the commission that the realtor stood to make on the sale of the building. How much money he saved the taxpayer that day would be hard to estimate, but it was certainly many times his annual salary and perhaps as much as his lifetime salary.

Imagine now that “overpaid government workers” like him continue to be denigrated in the public square and continue to have their wages cut. How long will it be until one of them decides that a donation from a slimy realtor to their kid’s college fund is enough reason to overlook a few pesky 9-framis rebolted I-frame lattice Acme doo-hickey beams? Or even more likely, how long will it be before the best professionals leave the public sector, and the only people who will take poor paying (by private sector standards) professional jobs in government are those who don’t even know what a 9-framis rebolted I-frame lattice Acme doo-hickey beams is?

Now, there  doesn’t seem to be a dearth of people signing up to take government jobs. And the pay and benefits are generally quite competitive, especially when one factors in security. But, otherwise, Humphries is right: There are a lot of these folks employed by government at all levels and they’re unfairly tarred by a weird notion that people in the public sector are worthless slugs living on the taxpayer dole.

Federal government employees include the 1.6 million members of the uniformed military, FBI agents, CIA officers, NSA analysts, and all manner of other dedicated professionals that Americans actually like. And then there are the vast numbers of engineers, accountants, and other technical experts that most people don’t even know about. At the state and local level, there are legions of schoolteachers, cops, firefighters, safety inspectors, and others who provide valuable services. For whatever reason, they’re not what people think of when they’re villainizing the “faceless bureaucrats.”

People have come to despise “government bureaucrats” because of bad experiences with the DMV and the Post Office and a general sense that governments employ a lot of lazy people with bad attitudes who are impervious from being fired. And they’re right! Then again, so does the private sector.

Customer service is generally awful as businesses seek to economize and treat low-end interactions with customers as an expense to be minimized rather than a vital part of the business. It’s why, despite universal frustration with voice-operated customer service systems, they’re proliferating rather than disappearing. Or why check-out clerks are being replaced by frustrating machines that most customers can’t figure out how to operate. When one does get to deal with a person, they’re often surly and seem miffed to have to do their job.

This is the price we pay for an efficiency mentality, where everything is judged by the bottom line. Good customer service is much more expensive to provide and yet, if the success of Wal-Mart and Costco and Amazon are any indication, people are generally not willing to pay for it.

And that’s in the private sector, where people can lose their jobs and face competition in the marketplace. It’s hardly shocking that people with guaranteed jobs dealing with customers who have no choice but put up with whatever inconveniences and inefficiencies are doled out are no better if not worse. Especially when the employees in question are poorly paid and treated.

Most interactions with government, frankly, are unpleasant. Whether it’s the DMV, the post office, the IRS, licensing agencies, or the court system, someone in a position of authority is able deny us things we want, compel us to be places we don’t want to be, and otherwise make our lives miserable.

It’s also true that the combination of a massive workforce, a lack of a profit motive, and incredible protection from the vagaries of the job market create a certain amount of deadwood in the system. Any of us with experience in the government sector have stories of the “retired on active duty” senior NCO or the GS-12 who spends her days reading the newspaper and surfing the Internet. Whether those people are any less prevalent in the private sector, I couldn’t say; but we naturally resent the government workers not pulling their weight more, since they’re on our payroll. And maybe the system should be fixed to get rid of the bad apples–although making it too easy to fire people is not without costs.

But the deadwood are far outnumbered by dedicated professionals doing incredibly important–and sometimes, dangerous–jobs that even most of us “small government” types want done. It’s useful to remind ourselves of that from time to time.

The government is exploring whether to turn off social networks or stop people texting during times of social unrest.

David Cameron said the intelligence services and the police were exploring whether it was “right and possible” to cut off those plotting violence.

Texting and Blackberry Messenger are said to have been used by some during this week’s riots.

Rights groups said such a measure would be abused and hit the civil liberties of people who have done nothing wrong.

The prime minister told MPs the government was exploring the turn-off in a statement made to the House of Commons during an emergency recall of Parliament.

Mr Cameron said anyone watching the riots would be “struck by how they were organised via social media”.

What I’m really struck by, actually, is the utter fecklessness of his government. It took–what?–five days for him to agree to let the police use water cannons to quell the violence? And then they weren’t even going to be available for another 24 hours. And that was after it took him three days to come home from vacation. President Obama must be grateful a “leader” of a major power would go so far out of his way to make him look good by comparison.

Blackstone is spinning in his grave so fast it must surely be affecting the axial tilt of the planet. But, after a couple of generations (at least) of allowing their government to steadily erode their natural rights, there can be little doubt the British have the government they deserve. The only real question is, have they now had enough of it to demand that their rights be restored or will they just accept this, too?

According to the Wall Street Journal, House Majority Whip Eric Cantor stands to gain financially from a U.S. default on the debt ceiling.

Putting his money where his mouth is? Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF last December, according to his 2009 financial disclosure statement. The exchange-traded fund takes a short position in long-dated government bonds. In effect, it is a bet against U.S. government bonds—and perhaps on inflation in the future.

You may recall that last week, Cantor pulled out of debt ceiling talks, increasing the possibility of default. And why shouldn’t he? If the U.S. defaults, he’ll make money on his investments. He’ll still have a job because he’s in a safe seat. And an economic collapse makes it more likely that a Republican wins the White House in 2012, which would make Eric Cantor more powerful.

In short, every conceivable incentive is aligned for Eric Cantor to allow the U.S. to default except an altruistic desire to not cause suffering to his fellow citizens.

This is deeply troubling.

The biggest frustration involved infrastructure. Obama said later that he learned that “one of the biggest lies in government is the idea of ‘shovel-ready’ projects.” It turned out that only about $20 billion to $40 billion in construction contracts were truly ready to go. The rest were tied up in the endless contracting delays and bureaucratic hassles associated with building anything in America. [E.A.]–Link

Well now we get this story. Obama is joking about the problems with shovel ready jokes.

While meeting with his Jobs and Competitiveness Council today in Durham, N.C., President Obama cracked wise about one of his administration’s early catchphrases.

Remember “shovel-ready projects.”

Those were construction projects in the 2009 stimulus bill that were supposed to get moving right away — but jobs council members told Obama today that some got held up because of elaborate government regulations and permitting procedures.

“Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” Obama said.

Whoops. Sorry Brummagem Joe. More here,

President Obama handed GOP operatives everywhere a gift at the Jobs Council meeting today. With a big grin, he noted, “Shovel-ready was not as — uh — shovel ready as we expected.” His remark prompted hearty laughter from others on the panel, including GE’s Jeffrey Immelt.

This was, by the way, one of the complaints about fiscal stimulus spending. That the idea of getting that money spent quickly and on shovel-ready jobs is more of a myth than fact.

What makes the WPA constitutionally problematic, though, is mostly its legislative veto provision, which purports to enable Congress to direct the president to withdraw forces by a joint resolution. (See this 2004 CRS analysis, here.) Joint resolutions are not binding law because, under the Constitution, law can only be enacted if the president signs a bill passed by both houses of Congress, or if Congress overrides a presidential veto of that bill by the required super-majority. (As Rich points out, the veto-override is how the WPA was enacted in the first place.) Putting aside the knottier question whether Congress has the authority to order a president to withdraw forces (i.e., could Congress constitutionally direct a president to withdraw forces by overriding the presidential veto of a bill directing him to do so?), Congress certainly cannot direct a president to do anything by a mere resolution.

I’d answer the parenthetical question in the affirmative. But that’s all but irrelevant to the thornier issue of the WPA’s general Constitutional infirmity. The Founders envisioned each of the co-equal branches interpreting the Constitution on their own. The notion that time and the political process would tend to lead to optimal solutions suited their overall scheme of providing a general document setting forth the powers and limits on government rather than an all-encompassing one that dealt with every scenario imaginable.

Marbury v. Madison merely provided the missing arbiter of last resort for most such inter-branch tensions. It didn’t eradicate it. And, as Mr. McCarthy notes, some questions are inherently non-justiciable (though I am not as certain as he is that this is one of them).

Position is policy. Presidents qua Commanders-In-Chief naturally have a broader view of their power and authority (a nice distinction made by Mr. McCarthy) than Congress, in which the power to declare war and pay for its instrumentalities is vested. And clearly there’s a large ambiguity in the Constitutional gap between the two separate functions. The WPA can be seen as an attempt to resolve it. But it cannot do so if it is itself unconstitutional.

And it is. As Schoolhouse Rock taught us all, bills only become laws when they get signed by the President (or a veto overridden). That the Founders imagined war as something that usually happens slowly and with plenty of time to gather and debate speaks both to their agrarian mindset and their entirely laudable belief that that’s the only way wars should happen. One could argue that the modern world of instantaneous global communication and fast-rising threats render that faith as outdated as its socio-political context. But even if that were true, the proper means of updating the Constitution is the one set forth within it, not by passing laws that, on their face, abrogate proper Constitutional process.

The question also arose when Clinton was ignoring the WPA in Kosovo on the grounds that Congress had funded, and therefore implicitly approved, it. But since the WPA expressly states that appropriations for military action do not constitute such WPA approval, Clinton’s argument was simply a frivolous cover for doing as he wished.

Obama’s assertion that the handing off of leadership in Libya to NATO obviates the need for WPA approval fares even worse. That US involvement is allegedly “limited” does not nullify the applicability of the WPA. American military forces are still engaged; ergo it falls within the ambit of the statute. Likewise Reagan’s attack on Libya and Bush I’s Somalia incursion (contrast to Bush II who, for all that he was so often accused of “rushing to war,” actually spent months making his case, and securing Congressional authorization, for invading Iraq).

So the brazenness with which the President has ignored the statute has forced the question upon us again. Contrary to Mr. McCarthy (and others), I don’t think one can say that the WPA has been rendered a dead letter by Obama’s “kinetic military action” in Libya. It is, after all, still on the books. Had he chosen to forthrightly assert the Executive’s inherent authority rather than resorting to nonsensical semantics and sophistry about the chain of command, that argument might be stronger. But he has made it very difficult indeed to continue to ignore the WPA’s Constitutional handicaps.

The solution to the real problem here, as is so often the case, is to restore the Founders’ vision: Desist from trying to be the world’s policeman and ressurect our general pre-WWII attitude that we only go to war deliberately. That can only be done by following the process the Founders envisioned. Slapping a Band-Aid on an inconvenient ambiguity does more violence to the Constitution than it cures.

Oh, wait….

Never mind.

Matt Yglesias asks “How Big a Deal Is Pedestrian Safety?” He offers the following chart as a conversation starter:

While acknowledging “this is hardly the biggest public health problem the nation faces,” he observes that “pedestrian accidents absolutely dwarf such newsworthy occurrences as plane crashes and hurricanes. These kind of drip drip drip problems are exactly the sort of thing we under-invest in dealing with.”

My first reaction was that newsworthiness is a poor indicator, in that things make the news precisely because they’re novel. “Random 87-year-old Dies”  is unlikely to survive the pitch meeting for the front page, after all.  Additionally, the victims of airliner crashes and hurricanes are much more powerless than the average pedestrian, who can take such precautions as  using crosswalks and looking where the hell they’re going.

But I actually took a peek at the Transportation for America report that Matt links and think he’s got a valid point on under-investment.

[I]t’s shockingly easy to pick out the busy arterial roads where fatalities are strung out in a tidy little line following the path of the road. Nationally speaking, the majority of these deaths occurred along these “arterial” roadways that are dangerous by design — streets engineered for speeding traffic with little or no provision for people on foot, in wheelchairs or on bicycles.

Our federal tax dollars actually go to build these streets that are designed to be perilous to children, older adults and everyone else. And yet, right now, some in Congress are considering the total elimination of funding for projects to make it safer to walk and bicycle.

The highways-only lobby insists that pedestrian safety is a “frill” and a local responsibility. But 67 percent of these fatalities over the last 10 years occurred on federal-aid roads — roads eligible to receive federal funding or with federal guidelines or oversight for their design.

That’s right: Federal programs have encouraged state departments of transportation to prioritize speeding traffic over the safety of people in our neighborhoods and shopping districts. Shouldn’t our tax dollars be used to build streets that are safe for all users, and not deadly for those on foot?

The irony is that fixing these conditions is relatively cheap: Existing funds for that purpose — now targeted for elimination — amount to less than 1.5 percent of the current federal transportation outlay. A policy of giving federal support only to “complete streets” that are designed for the safety of people on foot or bicycle as well as in cars would cost next to nothing.

I happen to live just off such a road, Route 1 or Richmond Highway in Alexandria, Virginia.  Poor people who live in nearby apartments are constantly getting killed crossing the road. Partly, it’s because they seem to have an aversion to crossing at lights, often seeming to go out of their way to cross in the middle of the street even when there’s an intersection governed by a traffic light within 100 feet. But the fact of the matter is that the Route 1 corridor simply isn’t designed for pedestrians and bikers; it’s just assumed that you have a car.

So, what do they have in mind at T4America?

Traffic calming and street design. Traffic calming includes a host of engineering techniques used to physically alter road design for the purpose of slowing traffic and improving safety for bicyclists and pedestrians. Beyond simply installing sidewalks, these improvements enhance safety through a focus on intersections with features such as pedestrian refuge medians, better road geometry, and signals that give pedestrians a “head start” when crossing roads. Depending on the type of measure implemented and speed reductions achieved, traffic calming has reduced collisions by 20 to 70 percent.

Complete streets. Where traffic calming seeks to improve safety by reducing traffic speeds, Complete Streets policies ensure that future road projects consistently take into account the needs of all users, of all ages and abilities, particularly pedestrians and bicyclists. Complete Streets designs vary from place to place, but they might feature sidewalks, bicycle paths, comfortable bus stops, median islands, frequent crosswalks and pedestrian signals. Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently endorsed the adoption of local and statewide Complete Streets policies as a strategy for improving safety and increasing physical activity among children and adults.

Safe Routes to School programs. Safe Routes to School programs take a comprehensive approach to improving safety around schools for children walking and bicycling. The program funds engineering upgrades like sidewalks and crosswalks, improved traffic enforcement and bicycle and pedestrian safety education. The intent is to address parental concerns about traffic dangers and get more children walking and bicycling to school, which improves their physical fitness and health. From a handful of pilot efforts across the country, Safe Routes to School has grown into a federally-funded program providing more than $600 million over five years for thousands of projects nationwide.

Walkable neighborhoods. Walkable communities are safe and inviting for walking and bicycling, while also featuring compact development and a variety of destinations, such as parks and public space and nearby schools, workplaces and other amenities like restaurants and retail facilities. The tools to increase community livability by improving walkability go beyond investing in pedestrian infrastructure, giving residents and visitors convenient destinations they can walk to.

Now, much of this would be unworkable in the case of the Route 1 corridor, which is a major artery and packed to the gills with traffic. But, certainly, they could paint crosswalks and incorporate pedestrian lights at the existing intersections.

The other thing I seldom see domestically that was commonplace in Germany–including on American military bases–when I was a kid is overhead walkways that allow pedestrians to cross above and thus segregated from automobile traffic. Presumably, they’re expensive. But they make make sense in places where apartment complexes are across a major arterial road from bus stops, strip malls, and other place where high concentrations of pedestrians are likely to travel.

At the same time, pedestrians themselves have primary responsibility for their own safety. I’m constantly shocked by how reckless the most vulnerable people on the road, bicyclists and pedestrians, are in the face of multi-ton vehicles traveling at high speed. T4America uses this horror story to illustrate their case:

Altamesa Walker led her four young children across a major five-lane thoroughfare in suburban Atlanta early morning on November 17. The family had missed its bus and was attempting to reach the bus stop on the opposite side in hopes of catching an alternate route. There was no crosswalk between the two bus stops, and both are located several hundred feet from the nearest intersection with crosswalks. They stopped midway across the road, in a turning lane they hoped would offer the protection of a (nonexistent) median. Resuming their crossing, and assuming safety, Walker’s four-year-old daughter was fatally struck by a car.

Should there have been a light and crosswalk connecting these bus stops? Quite possibly. But there wasn’t. I’m sorry but “several hundred feet” isn’t that far to walk to avoid dragging four small children across five lanes of vehicular traffic. Drivers are trained to expect pedestrians, bicyclists, and other slow movers at intersections and to keep moving otherwise. When we’re not at an intersection, we’re looking to see whether there’s space to change lanes, not whether someone’s bringing their kids across the highway. Walker took a stupid risk that cost her daughter her life and herself a life of grief and guilt. Indeed, Walker was charged with involuntary manslaughter and reckless conduct; I’ve not been able to find the disposition of the case.*

The driver was not cited. But he’ll have to live with this child’s death the rest of his life.

UPDATE: T4America’s Steve Davis points me to this interesting video about a portion of Route 1 a few miles south of me in Woodbridge, Virginia and the problem of “Careless Interference With Traffic.”

In many cases, the narrator rightly points out, it’s simply unrealistic to expect people to walk to the nearest crosswalk because of how inconvenient we’ve made it in these sorts of places.

______________

*Yes, this seems heartless under the circumstances.

Margaret Soltan tells us about the former number two guy at the Baltimore City Schools, fired after it was discovered that his BA and MBA were from unaccredited institutions and observes:

Remember. Public schools, fire departments, the military: None of these places gives a shit about diploma mill degrees. They don’t even know what they are.

But that rather begs the question: Should they care? If a guy is functioning perfectly well as the deputy CEO with a fraudulent MBA, it would seem a pretty fair indicator that one doesn’t really need an MBA to do the job.

Frankly, I can’t think of a single reason fire departments should care about degrees, period. Indeed, charging into burning buildings is a young man’s game; why spend four of them studying about things that have zero bearing on the job.

There’s a legitimate need for formal education for military officers, although we’ve pushed credentialism too far. I finished my master’s degree before my first real job as an Army officer and am always happy when I see senior officers with PhDs. But a master’s degree is a virtual requirement from promotion to lieutenant colonel. Outside of some technical specialties and certain aspects of counterinsurgency and stability operations, there’s no obvious rationale for that. Especially when any old master’s degree will do.

Offhand, you’d certainly think a degree–indeed, several of them–would be necessary to run a school system. After all, if you don’t love education, you probably have no business there. And it stands to reason that an MBA or a JD or a PhD would confer highly useful skills. But so does career experience. Here’s some background on Kevin Seawright, the official in question, from the Baltimore Sun:

On Wednesday, Seawright defended his credentials and qualifications for the deputy chief operating officer position, saying they fit the job description — overseeing, among other things, school facilities, maintenance, transportation, food and nutrition. The deputy COO’s responsibilities include managing up to 1,500 personnel, a $150 million operating budget and a $52 million capital budget. The deputy position is the only one of its kind throughout the school system.

According to public personnel reports, Seawright was hired as a special assistant in the Office of the Chief Operating Officer on Jan. 24, 2006, at a salary of $96,000. Seawright had previously worked as the chief fiscal officer for Baltimore City’s Department of Parks and Recreation for about six years.

In 2008, he was promoted to the deputy chief operating officer at a salary of $130,000 and received a cost-of-living adjustment that brought him to his current salary of $135,200, city school officials said. City school officials said that Seawright was promoted based on his performance, not his credentials.

Both positions require a bachelor’s degree in business, management, finance or a related field, but a master’s degree is preferred, according to the job descriptions. On Wednesday, Seawright said he believed he was “more than qualified to do the job.” “There’s nothing about accredited degrees in my job,” he said. “It was based on experience, too.”

It’s worth noting, too, that he committed no fraud: He listed the bogus degrees on his CV every step of the way and no one seemed to care until the Sun published an investigative report noting that the two schools were unaccredited.

Now, I have no idea how well he was doing his job or how he stacked up against others in similar positions in terms of competency. But it’s not immediately obvious to me why he should have been forced to resign simply because, years into his tenure, someone questioned the quality of his degrees.

Note that I hold the same position in the case of prestige degrees. At some point, the fact that Barack Obama was president of Harvard Law Review or that George W. Bush had his MBA from Harvard ceases to matter. The idea that they should be permanent Get Out of Jail Free cards is absurd. Yet, quite a few people continue to point to decades-old degrees as evidence of competence.

In one Chicago school, it’s the end of the lunchbox and the brown paper bag:

Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.

“Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?” the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.

Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: “We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!”

Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: “Do you see the situation?”

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona said. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”

Carmona said she created the policy six years ago after watching students bring “bottles of soda and flaming hot chips” on field trips for their lunch. Although she would not name any other schools that employ such practices, she said it was fairly common.

A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman said she could not say how many schools prohibit packed lunches and that decision is left to the judgment of the principals.

“While there is no formal policy, principals use common sense judgment based on their individual school environments,” Monique Bond wrote in an email. “In this case, this principal is encouraging the healthier choices and attempting to make an impact that extends beyond the classroom.”

Of course, there might be other reasons for this decision:

Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.

At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. During a recent visit to the school, dozens of students took the lunch but threw most of it in the garbage uneaten. Though CPS has improved the nutritional quality of its meals this year, it also has seen a drop-off in meal participation among students, many of whom say the food tastes bad.

“Some of the kids don’t like the food they give at our school for lunch or breakfast,” said Little Village parent Erica Martinez. “So it would be a good idea if they could bring their lunch so they could at least eat something.”

“(My grandson) is really picky about what he eats,” said Anna Torrez, who was picking up the boy from school. “I think they should be able to bring their lunch. Other schools let them. But at this school, they don’t.”

Ms. Torrez, that’s because the bureaucrats at the school think they know what’s good for your grandson better than you do. After all, it takes someone who got a Bachelors Degree in Education to raise a child.

UPDATE (James Joyner): A YahooNews version of the story includes this nugget:

For parents whose kids do not qualify for free or reduced price school lunches, the $2.25 daily cafeteria price can also tally more than a homemade lunch. “We don’t spend anywhere close to that on my son’s daily intake of a sandwich (lovingly cut into the shape of a Star Wars ship), Goldfish crackers and milk,” Northwestern education policy professor Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach told the paper in an email. She told The Lookout parents at her child’s public school would be upset if they tried to ban homemade lunches.

So, in addition to the objections noted by Doug in the original, this will be a financial burden on some working class parents, especially those with multiple kids in school.

Amusingly, this photo accompanies that story:

My recollection of school lunches, which I occasionally bought, was that they were often built around a main course of hot dogs, sloppy Joes, pizza, and the like. The kid might as well bring in a bologna sandwich and some chips from home if that’s the healthy alternative provided by the school.