Reason Magazine - Topics > Government Reform

I've Been Collecting Disability from the Long Island Rail Road, All the Live-Long Day...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:18:00 EDT

Alan Vanneman tips us toward this story of a different sort of government-funded bailout:

As former [Long Island Rail Road] workers were arriving to file new disability claims, investigators showed up and closed the office in Westbury, eventually carting out nine file boxes and five personal computers.
The raid came two days after The New York Times reported that nearly all career employees of the railroad—from 93 percent to 97 percent of retirees every year since 2000—retire early and soon after begin getting disability payments from the federal agency [the Railroad Retirement Board, which adminsters such claims]. The retirement board almost never turns down a claim, and since 2000 has paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars in disability checks to former Long Island Rail Road workers, The Times found.

More here.

Serve, Protect, and Ignore

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:00:00 EDT

The Republican platform unveiled last week notes in passing that "the Constitution assigns the federal government no role in local education." Yet the same document offers opinions on all manner of local educational issues, including the virtues of phonics, the evils of sex education, the wisdom of merit pay for teachers, and the folly of social promotion.

That contradiction illustrates the hollowness of the Republican commitment to "constrain the federal government to its legitimate constitutional functions." The Republicans (like the Democrats) respect the Constitution only when it's convenient.

You might say that's old news. Yet while campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education. So did Bob Dole in 1996. After two terms of a Republican president who proudly charged in the opposite direction, the most John McCain can muster is a promise to "identify and eliminate ineffective programs"—that is, to make unconstitutional activities more efficient.

Although the Department of Education is still with us, by threatening to eliminate it Reagan and like-minded Republicans signaled that they understood some matters are beyond the purview of the federal government. It's hard to find evidence of that understanding in the current GOP platform.

In 1887 Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, vetoed a bill allocating $10,000 to help drought-stricken farmers in Texas, saying, "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution." Nowadays the Republican Party takes for granted the propriety of both "a natural disaster insurance policy" and an "economic safety net for farmers."

Likewise, the GOP platform does not question the legitimacy of the federal government's enormous entitlement programs, saying only that they should be "reformed" and "modernized." Regarding Social Security, McCain does not go even as far as George W. Bush, who proposed letting Americans shift some of their payroll taxes to private accounts. By contrast, the current platform calls for "personal investment accounts which are distinct from and supplemental to" the existing system of intergenerational income redistribution.

Far from shrinking the federal government, the Republicans want to enlarge it, providing "aid to those hurt by the housing crisis," solving "the energy crisis" (undeterred by the Carteresque connotations of that phrase), "expanding access to higher education," seeking "a major expansion of support" for certain kinds of stem cell research, even "returning Americans to the moon as a step toward a mission to Mars." The platform does not explain how these initiatives qualify as "legitimate constitutional functions."

The Republicans are committed to "continuing the fight against illegal drugs," even though that fight, unlike alcohol prohibition, was never authorized by a constitutional amendment. They want to impose national bans on gay marriage, human cloning, assisted suicide, and online gambling, even while declaring that "Congress must respect the limits imposed by the Tenth Amendment," which reserves to the states or the people "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution." Despite their eagerness to trample individual freedom in all these areas, Republicans claim "the other party wants more government control over people's lives," but "Republicans do not."

The Republicans "lament that judges have denied the people their right to set abortion policies in the states." Yet their position that "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life" guaranteed by the 14th Amendment implies that the Constitution not only allows but requires a national ban on abortion, which also would override state policy choices.

Defending "the free-speech right to devote one's resources to whatever cause or candidate one supports," the Republicans say they "oppose any restrictions or conditions upon those activities that would discourage Americans from exercising their constitutional right to enter the political fray or limit their commitment to their ideals." Yet their presidential nominee is famous for pushing precisely such restrictions and conditions in the name of "campaign finance reform."

As an indicator of where McCain would take the country after eight years of big-government conservatism, the 2008 Republican platform is not just disappointing. It's incoherent.

Cooking Show Ousts Thai Leader

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:26:00 EDT

Wouldn't you like to live in a country that takes its constitution seriously?

Thailand's prime minister was forced to resign along with his Cabinet on Tuesday after a court ruled that he had violated the constitution by hosting TV cooking shows while in office.
His party later unanimously agreed to re-nominate him as a candidate for prime minister, indicating that Thailand is still not free from its deep political crisis that has virtually paralyzed the government, spooked the financial markets and scared away tourists.
"The defendant has violated Article 267 of the constitution, and his position as prime minister has ended," the head of the nine-judge panel, Chat Chonlaworn, said. He said the Cabinet will remain in a caretaker position until a new administration is installed.

More here.

Memo to Anthony Bourdain: Fuggedaboutit.

Policy Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:34:00 EDT

As the big storm Gustav peters out and memories of Hurricane Katrina recede, it's a good time to recall reason's special December 2005 issue, which was dedicated to exploring policy failures related to that event.

Go here for the full table of contents.

Press 1 for English, Press 0 and Holler "Operator" for a Human

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:03:00 EDT

Wondering how to get an actual human being without fighting your way down each branch of a phone tree? Check out Dial-A-Human, which lays out the proper sequence of buttons to push to get a human being as quickly as possible.

The most interesting, and often the most complex sequences: Government offices. My favorites include Department of Homeland Security/INS "Select language. Press 2 6 2 4. Press 0 at each prompt," the U.S. Postal Service " Press 5 4 2 2 at each prompt," and perhaps best of all, the IRS "Don't press or say anything."

Via the indispensable Lifehacker blog.

Perestroika Begins in the Cafeteria

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:41:00 EDT

Who says privatization in Washington is dead?

Last week, in a late-night voice vote, the Senate agreed to privatize the operation of its food service, a decision that would, for the first time, put it under the control of a contractor[.]

It only took two decades of losing more than $1 million per year selling crap food to a captive audience for the World's Greatest Digestive Body to catch up to the junior privateers in the House. But not without a few ridiculous quotes from Democratic senators!

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), speaking for the group of senators who opposed privatizing the restaurants, said that "you cannot stand on the Senate floor and condemn the privatization of workers, and then turn around and privatize the workers here in the Senate and leave them out on their own." [...]
"I know what happens with privatization. Workers lose jobs, and the next generation of workers make less in wages. These are some of the lowest-paid workers in our country, and I want to help them," Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a staunch labor union ally, said recently.

Washington Post story here.

Help Set "The Copenhagen Consensus"!

info@reason.com (Bjorn Lomborg) — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

A note from Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Project, which seeks to prioritize global policy decisions according to sound science and rational cost-benefit analysis rather than media-driven hysteria:

The pain caused by the global food crisis has led many people to belatedly realize that we have prioritized growing crops to feed cars instead of people. That is only a small part of the real problem.
The crisis demonstrates what happens when we focus doggedly on one specific—and inefficient—solution to one particular global challenge. A reduction in carbon emissions has become an end in itself. The fortune spent on this exercise could achieve an astounding amount of good elsewhere.
In a year, malnutrition in mothers and their young children will cause 3.5 million deaths. Conflict will wreak havoc and cause untold suffering. Malaria will take a million lives—most of them among children.
Yet famine, war, and disease are rated poorly when residents of the First World are asked to name the planetary challenges causing them the most concern. Along with climate change, the issue that creates the most anxiety is terrorism.
The Copenhagen Consensus 2008 project is designed to put fear to one side and highlight the best solutions among all of the world's biggest problems. The research on these pages reveals our stark spending choices in 10 areas.
Comparing costs and benefits is a transparent and practical way to show whether expenditure is futile or worthwhile. It gives us a means to step back and weigh competing options for the public purse or philanthropist's checkbook. It prompts us to take another look at our current priorities and ask: is this really the best that we can do?
Acknowledging that some investments shouldn't be our topmost priority isn't the same as saying that the challenges don't exist. It simply means working out how to do the most good with our limited resources, right now.
In the last week of May, top economists—including five Nobel Laureates—will gather in Copenhagen to weigh the costs and benefits of each policy option, and make a prioritized list showing the best and worst choices.
Have your say ahead of their decision. With limited resources, which challenge do you think global decision-makers should tackle first?—Bjorn Lomborg

What follows are short discussions about how to deal with 10 areas, ranging from air pollution to global warming to women and development. Each topic section includes two options to ameliorate the situation. Each solution has been assigned a benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR) by researchers commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Project 2008. For information about the researchers for each section, please go here.

reason online readers are invited to rank which areas of concern they think are most important and which solutions you prefer. You may submit your rankings here. The results will be tabulated and announced on the site next week.

1. Air Pollution

The Olympic Games has given China the motivation to get serious about the smog that chokes its capital city.

Major polluters have been shifted away from Beijing. Coal-burning boilers have been converted to cleaner fuels, and vehicle emission standards have been introduced. All this so that athletes—and the world's media—see clear skies. Sadly, few other cities in the developing world have similar motivation to clear the air. Air pollution—in the form of outdoor urban pollution and of ‘indoor' pollution caused by old-fashioned cooking methods—kills nearly 2.5 million people each year; 90 percent of the fatalities happen in developing nations.

Option One: Improved Stoves

There are simple, cheap solutions to the problem of indoor air pollution.

More than 3 billion people are exposed to household pollution. Women and young children are especially affected because they spend more time indoors, near cooking stoves using solid fuels like wood, charcoal, peat, and coal.

The answer is surprisingly simple: improved stoves with good venting of smoke and the use of alternative fuels.

For $2.3 billion in U.S. dollars, we could provide a rocket stove to half the people using unhealthy, old-fashioned stoves. A rocket stove is easy to construct, and uses low-cost materials, and cuts out the negative health effects caused by solid fuel use by a third.

The economic spin-offs from improved health would be 4.6 times higher than the costs.

Option Two: Diesel vehicle technology

In many developing countries, road vehicles are generally found to be the major source of outdoor polution, partly because of high levels of diesel use, badly maintained engine, and little or no emission control technology.

Particulate emissions from diesel vehicles can be reduced by a diesel particulate filter, a device designed to remove diesel particulate matter or soot from the exhaust gas of a diesel engine. A diesel-powered vehicle equipped with functioning filter will emit no visible smoke from its exhaust pipe. Another option is to use a chemical process to break down pollutants in the exhaust stream into less harmful components.

Diesel vehicle particulate control technology is, unfortunately, very expensive, so the benefits are very low compared to the costs.

Experience from several developing city studies shows that retrofitting older and newer diesel-fuelled buses and delivery trucks with particulate control devices has economic benefits worth only 50 cents for every $1.00 spent.

2. Conflict

The food crisis is further increasing global political instability at a time when, according to research by Paul Collier, the risk of new civil wars is already rising. Many recently negotiated peace settlements have left nations fragile, while the commodity boom and the discovery of mineral resources in countries with weak governments have sown seeds for discord.

Since Iraq, the developed world has lost faith in using military force to reduce conflict. However, Iraq is a misleading guide to the effectiveness of intervention. Unlike the vast majority of conflicts, its civil war was sparked by an international war.

The far more typical scenario is a relapse of political violence within a small, low-income, low-growth nation already troubled by fighting. This is the real security challenge that developed nations must deal with this decade.

Option One: Aid

Post-conflict aid designed to stop violence recurring is much more politically acceptable than the use of force.

If it proves just as cost-effective—or more so—than military intervention, then it is clearly a more attractive option.

In a nation recovering from violence, each additional percentage point of national growth lowers the risk of conflict re-emerging by around 1.5 percentage points. In a typical case, achieving a one percentage point lift in national growth requires annual aid of $400 million: Aid is very expensive.

This investment doesn't just reduce the risk of civil war, but also boosts growth. The overall benefits are worth nearly three times more than the costs.

Post-conflict aid therefore looks to be a good use for aid money, but not so spectacular that it would trump most other calls on scarce international public resources.

Option Two: Military intervention

Four new civil wars are expected to break out in the next decade in low-income nations.

The real problem with most peacekeeping interventions is that they are too short—the risk of renewed civil war in post-conflict situations declines slowly with time.

The degree of risk reduction depends, not surprisingly, on the scale of deployment.

Compared with no deployment, spending $850 million on a peacekeeping initiative reduces the ten-year risk of conflict re-emerging from around 38 percent to 7 percent. A smaller military intervention would reduce the risk by a smaller amount.

Because of war's horrendous and lasting costs, each percentage point of risk reduction is worth around $2.5 billion to the world.

The economic benefits to the world from spending $1 billion each year to reduce the risk of conflict add up to $12.6 billion: Each dollar achieves $12.60 of good.

3. Disease

Life expectancy is decreasing in some parts of the world. Ten million children will die this year in poor nations; this figure would be just 1 million if rates were the same as in rich countries.

The hurdle is not just poverty—some poor nations have reasonably good health conditions—but getting cheap treatment and prevention methods to the Third World.

Some health problems receive a lot of publicity. But in areas that we hear less about, we could invest wisely to make a big difference. The two options here (out of seven being looked at by the Copenhagen Consensus's expert panel) are two where the benefits significantly outstrip the costs.

Option One: Tackling Malaria

In poor countries, malaria will claim more than 1 million lives this year—most of them among children under five.

Measures to reduce its transmission are simple. We need to expand the coverage of insecticide-treated bed nets. We need to get more preventive treatment to pregnant women so they don't transmit malaria to their children. And we need to ensure there is more indoor spraying with the much-maligned pesticide DDT.

Treating malaria is becoming harder than it was because of growing resistance of the malaria parasite to the cheapest, most common anti-malarial drugs. Some poor nations cannot afford the new ‘combination' treatments.

It makes sense to combine prevention options like bed-nets with subsidies on the new treatments for poor nations. Spending $500 million would save 500,000 lives a year—most of them children.

The economic benefits from ensuring people are healthier and more productive would be 20 times higher than the costs.

Option Two: Reducing Heart Disease

Third World heart disease seldom makes the news agenda in developed nations. Though not a "sexy" problem, the rewards for investment are high.

Heart disease represents more than a quarter of the death toll in poor countries. Developed nations treat acute heart attacks with inexpensive drugs that aren't available in the developing world.

Spending just $200 million getting these cheap drugs to poor countries would avert 300,000 deaths in a year.

Put into economic terms, the lower burden on the health system and other economic benefits mean that a dollar spent on heart disease in a developing nation will achieve $25 worth of good.

4. Education

A fortune is spent in an effort to get more—and better—education to children in the developing world. A lot of this money could be better spent.

Building more schools isn't the smartest approach. Indonesia doubled its number of schools in six years, leading only to a 3 percent rise in the amount of time kids spent at school. In much of the world, schools already exist where most children live. New ones can just divert them from other schools.

Similarly, many attempts to increase the quality of education go wrong because there's still no agreement on what constitutes "quality."

A quarter of children in developing nations do not complete their first five years at school—but more than half of these kids did start. One cost-effective approach is to focus on eliminating grade school drop-outs in developing nations before we try to attract children who have never attended school.

Option One: Health and nutrition spending

Thirty percent of children in developing countries are moderately or severely undernourished, and nutritional supplements or treatments for intestinal parasites can be an inexpensive way to raise school attendance and increase physical and mental capacity.

Children who are better nourished in their first years of life stay in school longer and learn more each year they are there. In areas where malnutrition or worm infestations are common, nutritional supplements or treatments for intestinal parasites offer an inexpensive way to raise attendance and physical and mental capacity.

A Bolivian program providing support for day care, nutritional supplements, and preschool activities for low-income children resulted in permanent gains in cognitive development and motor skills. The cost per child is $1,300 to $1,400, while the monetary value of the increase in the children's future wages is between 2.5 and 3.6 times higher than the amount spent.

A school-based de-worming program in Kenya had even more remarkable results with benefits at least 450 times higher than the costs.

Most opportunities will not be as rewarding, but it is safe to assume the benefits are around 25 times higher than the costs in many cases.

Option Two: Conditional Cash Transfers

Another option proven to work is the provision of cash payments to poor households whose children attend school regularly. These are known as Conditional Cash Transfer Programs, and increase enrolment and attendance in program areas.

These programs can go wrong when they are not targeted at the right households. In a Brazilian program, self-selection allowed families whose children would have been in school anyway to receive the money. The most careful evaluation of the Brazilian program failed to show significant benefits.

Families in some rural communities of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico get monthly hand-outs if their children attend 85 percent of school days. The Nicaraguan program increased school enrolment rates by about 23 percentage points. The benefits from increased future earnings are four times higher than the costs of around $3,000 per child.

5. Global Warming

There is unequivocal evidence that humans are changing the planet's climate.

We are already committed to average temperature increases of about 0.6°C, even without further rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

The world has focused on mitigation—reducing carbon emissions—but when we take a close look at the costs and benefits, relying on mitigation alone is a very poor approach.

Option One: Continue to focus on mitigation

Even if mitigation—economic measures like taxes or trading systems—succeeded in capping emissions at 2010 levels, then the world would pump out 55 billion tons of carbon emissions in 2100, instead of 67 billion tons.

It's a difference of 18 percent; the benefits would remain smaller than 0.5 percent of the world's GDP for more than 200 years. These benefits simply aren't large enough to make the investment worthwhile.

Spending $800 billion over 100 years solely on mitigating emissions would lose money overall.

When you add up the benefits of that spending—from the slightly lower temperatures that would result—the returns are only $685 billion. For each dollar spent, we would get 90 cents of ‘good' back.

Mitigation alone will clearly not "solve" the climate problem.

Option Two: Combining mitigation with other policies

In addition to mitigation, policy-makers must ensure that we adapt to climate change. Adaptation can mean doing things like growing drought tolerant crops, spending more on irrigation, developing rainwater storage systems, or proactively preventing the health issues that climate change poses.

But to make a real difference, the world needs to increase its research and development into carbon saving and sequestering technology.

Instead of spending $800 billion (in total present-day terms) solely on mitigation, we could keep the investment the same size but direct a small amount to adaptation policies, and $50 billion each year to research into greener technology.

This research spend would add up to about 0.1 percent of global GDP.

As the gap between the cost of carbon-free and carbon-emitting technology decreases, any tax on emissions should become smaller. This allows the research and development to essentially pay for itself.

With research and development in the mix, the total benefits from this $800 billion investment would add up to more than $2,129 billion. That is a more respectable $2.70 return on each dollar spent.

6. Hunger

The food crisis has reminded rich nations of the hunger and malnutrition that is a daily reality for many in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Malnutrition in mothers and their young children will claim 3.5 million lives this year. Global food stocks are at historic lows. Progress is distressingly slow on the United Nations goal of halving the proportion of hungry people by 2015.

Tragedy on an individual scale adds up to hardship on a national level. Shortened lives mean less economic output and income. Hunger leaves people more susceptible to disease so that more money has to be spent on health care.

Those who survive the effects of malnutrition are less productive; physical and mental impairment means children benefit less from education.

Option One: Micronutrient supplements

Improving the quality of developing nation diets is as important as improving the quantity of food.

More than a 100 million children are deficient in Vitamin A, which causes eyesight and immunity problems.

It is estimated that one-fifth of the world's population is at risk of zinc deficiency, which puts young children at risk of stunted growth.

Providing Vitamin A capsules to one person for a year costs just 20 cents; zinc supplements cost a dollar.

Reaching 80 percent of all children aged under-two in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia would require annual spending of just $2.4 million for Vitamin A and $58 million for zinc.

The economic benefits from improved future earnings and reduced health care spending would add up to $240 million each year. In other words, every $1.00 spent would generate economic benefits worth $17.

Option Two: Nutritional education

Another tack to consider is to encourage developing nation households to change their food practices, to create lasting dietary improvements.

Education would be more expensive than any of the shorter-term interventions like micronutrient supplements, but could create enduring improvements among the world's poorest billion people.

Pregnancy and post-pregnancy are an opportune time to provide nutritional education to mothers, and can lead to a reduction in the probability of underweight babies and an increase in growth-rates for infants.

Creating community-based, volunteer-managed education campaigns to cover 80 percent of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa for one year would cost $798 million.

This would reach eight out of 10 children aged under two. The annual benefits from a reduced burden on the health care system and healthier population would equal $10 billion: The benefits are 12 times higher than the costs.

7. Terrorism

Harsh security measures at airports make us feel safer, but what we see as a visible reassurance is a display of billions of dollars poorly invested.

Trans-national terrorists take, on average, just 420 lives each year and cause relatively little economic damage.

An extra $70 billion has been spent annually on homeland security since 2001. Although there has been a 34 percent drop in trans-national terrorist attacks, there have been 67 more deaths, on average, each year. This is entirely predictable. Terrorists have responded rationally to the higher risks imposed by tougher security measures and shifted to fewer attacks that create more carnage.

Hardening targets is a poor way to save lives. Policymakers who want to reduce the terrorists' toll have stark options.

Option One: Greater international cooperation

While many terrorist groups share knowledge, governments jealously guard their autonomy over police and security matters.

If political obstacles could be overcome, nations could work together more coherently to clamp down on the charitable contributions, drug trafficking, counterfeit goods, and illicit activities that fund terrorist attacks.

This would be ineffectual at reducing small events such as "routine" bombings or political assassinations, but would significantly hamper spectacular attacks requiring a lot of planning and serious resources.

Doubling the Interpol budget and allocating one-tenth of the International Monetary Fund's yearly financial monitoring and capacity-building budget to tracing terrorist funds would cost about $128 million annually. Stopping one catastrophic terrorist event would save the world at least $1 billion. Under these assumptions, this would mean a return of around $9.00 on each dollar spent.

Option Two: Increased proactive response

Some argue that the United States and its allies should "take the war to the terrorists."

To see what extra money on proactive measures would achieve, we can look at the effects of Operation Enduring Freedom, an offensive campaign that included the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan.

In the two years after 2001 (when there was the greatest proactive anti-terrorism campaign, and before other countries started to pull out), Operation Enduring Freedom resulted in a 13 percent reduction in attacks—but 159 more annual deaths and 916 more injuries, on average, than in the 10 years before. The exercise shifted attacks around.

Policymakers undaunted by the extra bloodshed might pause when they consider the economics of the exercise. Converting the effects of that carnage into monetary terms, each dollar of the Operation's $35.5 billion cost over this time achieved only around ten cents worth of good.

8. Trade Barriers

Protectionist sentiment and fear of globalization are on the rise. When the Doha trade round was launched shortly after September 11, 2001, there was plenty of international goodwill. But disenchantment with globalization has since set in.

Free trade would lead to an overwhelming boost to welfare everywhere, especially in the developing world. Grasping these benefits is potentially one of this generation's greatest challenges.

Increased negative sentiment could have the worst possible result: not just Doha's failure, but also the raising of trade and immigration barriers.

Option One: Doha Development Agenda

The greatest hope is getting the Doha round back on track.

If developing countries cut their tariffs by the same proportion as high-income countries, and services and investment were also liberalized, the global annual gains could be as high as $120 billion, with $17 billion going to the world's poorest countries.

The long-term impact of free trade is huge. Recast after calculating the net present value of the stream of future benefits, a realistic Doha outcome could increase global income by more than $3,000 billion per year, $2,500 billion of which would go to today's developing countries.

In addition, the experiences of successful reformers like Korea, China, India, and Chile suggest that trade liberalization immediately boosts annual economic growth rates by several percentage points for many years.

There would, of course, be costs. In addition to social costs, firms and workers would need to adjust as reform forces some industries to downsize or close and allows others to expand. Yet the benefits of a successful Doha round are around a staggering 1,027 times higher than these costs.

Option Two: Freeing international labor movement

The benefits of liberalizing international labor flows is worth contemplating—not least because otherwise illegal migration is likely to increase. Historical experience shows that migration is the fastest way to bring about a convergence in living standards.

Migrants and host countries incur direct costs in making and processing applications, finding housing, etc. The costs to a migrant in the year of migration are estimated to be in the range of $7,000 to $21,000, and the costs to the host country (including social welfare benefits) are in the same range. After the first year, we assume migrants to be fiscally neutral for their host country.

Increasing the rate of migration sufficient to boost the labor force in high-income countries by a total of three percent over a 25-year period would lead to global gains at the end of the period of $674 billion annually, with all but $50 billion accruing to current citizens of developing countries, either as migrants or via their remittances.

Depending on the economic assumptions used, the benefits are estimated to be around 224 times higher than the costs. Citizens of today's developing countries (particularly the migrants) would be the major beneficiaries.

9. Sanitation and Water

At the turn of the 21^st century, about 1.1 billion people lacked improved water supplies and more than 2.7 billion had no sanitation service.

The Millennium Development Goals includes the goal of halving the proportion of people without access to water or sanitation by 2015. This may be difficult to achieve, partly because the need to ensure the benefits of improved access are large enough to cover the costs of those who bear them is often overlooked.

The incremental benefit of improved water supply may simply not cover the large cost of providing it, since by definition everyone has some access to water in order to live, and the willingness to pay for an improvement may be low.

Rather than focusing on expensive piped network solutions, non-network interventions could prove helpful as intermediate solutions.

Option One: Rural water supply

Where deep groundwater is the best available water source, a borehole and communal hand pump is usually considered a low-cost and appropriate technology.

Following the failure of many rural water supply projects, a new and more successful planning model emerged in the 1990s. This is based on "demand-driven" community management where households are involved in decision-making and pay for all of the costs of providing and maintaining the service plus at least some of the capital cost.

The capital costs are $6,500 on average, and program overhead is $3,500; a total of typically $10,000. Adding the necessary costs for labor and maintenance, the total annual cost is $1,630, or about $135 per month. We assume 60 households will share the borehole, which gives a monthly cost of $2.26 per household.

Benefits come from time savings for water collection, increased use of higher quality supply and the monetary value of health improvements.

These benefits together add up to $7.19 for a typical rural household in a month, compared to a cost of $2.26, implying a benefit-cost ratio of about 3.2.

Option Two: Biosand filters

Biosand filters are a technology to remove contaminants in raw water supplies. There are now close to 100,000 biosand filters in use by households in developing countries. They use commonly available materials and are inexpensive, convenient and simple to use. A filter can easily produce hundreds of liters of clean water a day.

While only a partial solution to a wider problem, biosand filters do help to provide clean water from traditional sources. They do however have disadvantages. They must be cleaned periodically, and are quite large, so are more appropriate for rural areas than urban slums.

We assume a base case of $75 for the filter manufacture plus $25 for transport and delivery. There are no time savings for this intervention, but health benefits from a reduction in diarrhea incidence. Total household benefits are $3.86 a month, and costs $1.40.

10. Women and Development

Gender equity is not only an important goal in its own right, but also a factor in overall economic development. Gender issues have become increasingly prominent in the last 30 years, and gender equality is now included in the Millennium Development Goals. National constitutions affirm the principles of basic human rights, and even explicitly refer to non-discrimination by gender. However, in practice there are still multiple barriers to these goals.

Option One: Affirmative Action

Gender inequalities in political representation remain large. Some countries have mandated quotas for political representation at various levels, with some success.

Quotas must be matched with the launch and maintenance for at least 30 years of a nationwide, systematic public information or advocacy campaign. It is hard for women to win elections. Campaigns can be effective, but must be a long-term commitment.

There should also be an investment in leadership and management training for female politicians, since many who aspire to political office will have had little opportunity for previous involvement.

Evidence from an Indian reform at the village council level suggests that where leadership is reserved for women, the supply of safe drinking water is higher by 0.95 percent, children between one and five have a 2 percent higher chance of completing the immunization program, and are two percent more likely to attend a community child care center. The condition of rural roads is better, which could increase work opportunities and reduce barriers to schooling.

Because women, on average, have relatively less political experience and less political capital than male politicians, electing women may mean short- to medium-term productivity losses.

Taking into account these assumptions, the benefits are around 2.7 times higher than the costs.

Option Two: Microfinance

Microfinance institutions such as Bangladesh's Grameen Bank allow self-employed women to build successful businesses in the informal sector, lending to individuals, groups or villages. Women have better repayment records than men, and when they have greater bargaining power in the household, a larger share of the household's limited resources are devoted to children's human capital. Women's access to credit also tends to increase their labor force participation.

We assume that the number of loans would increase annually by 35 percent, which was the experience of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The average annual number of members reached by the Grameen Bank in 1992 was 1.4 million, of whom 1.3 million were women, and 348,000 new borrowers. We assume that each year the program would lend only to new borrowers, as the evidence points to diminishing marginal returns to credit.

We assume $285 to be the average loan to each new borrower. Microfinance programs are costly and typically require extensive subsidies. Based on a number of studies, we assume that each dollar loaned per year will increase household expenditures by about 10 percent in the first year, and that benefits will continue to accrue annually by about 1 percent for an average 30 year lifespan of the borrower. Bringing together these assumptions, the benefit-cost ratio is around 3.2.

Read reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey's dispatches from the Copenhagen Consensus Conference 2008 here.

Help set the Copenhagen Consensus for 2008! Follow directions below to rank global problems and solutions. The results will be tabulated and announced next week at reason online.

Here's $10,000. Now Go Away.

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:29:00 EDT

I've long nurtured a Capitol Hill crush on Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). I profiled him in 2003, when he won my heart by talking about his love of bow-hunting (see snapshot at right) and his tradition of handing out copies of Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents for his staff. Plus, he referred to Friedrich Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit" as "a good ol' classic."

At the time, he boasted that he was going to use his time in Congress to "turn entitlements into programs that can actually encourage individualism and self-reliance and financial freedom." Political puppy love aside, I know a tall tale when I hear one, so I didn't think much of that particular pledge.

But lo and behold, in today's Wall Street Journal Ryan proposes a couple of genuinely fresh ideas on entitlements that might (maybe, just maybe) have political legs. He's on the Budget and Ways and Means committees, so that helps the odds a little. For instance, check out this thought on Medicare:

The bill secures the existing Medicare program for those over 55 – so Americans can receive the benefits they planned for throughout most of their working lives. Those 55 and younger will, when they retire, receive an annual payment of up to $9,500 to purchase health coverage – either from a list of Medicare-certified plans, or any plan in the individual market, in any state.
The payment is adjusted for inflation and based on income, with low-income individuals receiving greater support and a funded medical savings account.

Will dangling almost $10,000 in front of grabby Americans win their hearts and minds? Is this scheme just crazy enough to work?

Via Arnold Kling

From the Top: City of Rats

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Washington, D.C., is lousy with rats, and not just of the human variety. I knew that before moving here—you’d always see them scampering around sidewalks and alleys when walking around town—but it took living full-time in the city to appreciate both the awe-inspiring magnitude of the infestation and the jaw-dropping indifference of a municipal government more focused on giving free money to billionaires than addressing the capital’s legendary civic rot.

On my very first trip to the supermarket as a bona fide Beltway resident, a little black rat darted between the feet of everyone in the checkout line. While the customers eeked, the Safeway employees just laughed and laughed. At my new rowhouse, I noticed packs of the critters clattering through the neighborhood’s front yards, including my own. There were scores of gaping rat-holes in the dirt, and the trees were full of day-rats (otherwise known as squirrels) during sunlight hours. Some time soon after the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Rat, my pregnant wife walked downstairs and reached for her bag on the couch, and out jumped a plump young rodent.

I began making inquiries to exterminators, colleagues, and panicky urban websites, and what came back was a Stephen King hellscape. “We can trap what’s inside right now and plug up some holes and establish a perimeter outside,” the first rat-assessor told us. “But there’s no way to keep them out of your house in this neighborhood—they just come right up through the sewers.” Yep, the old rat-in-the-toilet urban legend, only this time it was true. Another exterminator just shrugged and told us to “put pressure on the city,” though he knew it was futile.

My colleague Michael Moynihan had rats build a complicated nest inside the engine of his car, chewing through various wires and hoses. While throwing the contents of a second engine-nest into an open dumpster (D.C.’s trash-management tidiness being just a step or two above that of Naples, Italy) he noticed dozens of beady rat-eyes inside staring up at him disapprovingly. Recently, his wife slammed on her brakes in front of an intersection, and a rat plopped out from under the hood.

Vermin complaints to the city government were up 8 percent in 2007. In October of that year, self-described “rodent experts” Dale Kaukeinen and Bruce Colvin released a nationwide study naming Washington the fifth-most- vulnerable city to a major spike in rat population, a prediction that seems more likely than ever after yet another mild winter. The National Zoo has such a bad infestation that two adult pandas were killed by rat poison a few years back. “Mayor Anthony A. Williams declared war on the rats in the late 1990s,” Washington Times columnist Tom Knott wrote in February, “and the rats won.”

What made my reacquaintance with rodents much more difficult to accept was that it came during the very month that the city was congratulating itself for a gleaming new expenditure of local taxpayers’ money—a $611 million stadium to house the Washington Nationals baseball team. Actually, that figure is much too low: Eminent domain settlements with in-the-way property owners added $43 million to the cost, and a handful of outstanding cases could tack on $24 million more. There were also $32 million in municipal infrastructure improvements.

So how much is $710 million in the scheme of D.C.? More than 12 percent of the city’s annual local budget. (It receives an additional $4 billion or so from the federal government.) It’s almost as much as the $773 million that Mayor Adrian Fenty is proposing this year to spend on the District’s notoriously awful public schools. Less than 10 days before Nationals Stadium first flung open its doors, Fenty announced various remedies for a $96 million budget shortfall: postponing a tax cut on commercial property, doubling the cost of a business license, increasing ambulance fees, charging an extra 23 cents for every phone line that can call 911.

Oddly, the Washington Post and other local newspapers didn’t draw any connections to the stadium, despite the $38 million in annual debt service it requires—a figure certain to go up during the current credit crunch. Perhaps the paper was too busy with its multiple gushing special sections about the facility, including such headlines as “The City Opens the Ballpark, And the Fans Come Up Winners.”

It’s not like the non-baseball services Washington provides are famous for their effectiveness. The potholes in the roads would embarrass a Romanian. The neighborhood papers are filled with complaints that violent crimes like carjacking and assault don’t rise to the level of police interest. (In 2000, when I reported being mugged during my first visit to the city, the police told me there was nothing they could do except check the Lost and Found once in a while for my wallet.) Our local library admitted that the online book-reservation system is not tethered to physical reality, and that in fact they have no real idea at any given time whether or not they have a book.
It has taken us four visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles to come even close to registering our car locally.

Unfortunately for the rest of you, the chasm between unsexy nuts-and-bolts services and dazzling new municipal-built edifices is the rule, not the exception, of big-city governance. In Los Angeles, my former city representative, Tom LaBonge, was tolerated as an eccentric for being the only member of the 15-member City Council to express genuine interest in street repairs (though the road in front of my house still had craters large enough to hide a baby). When a coalition of black, brown, and lefty-white politicians took over city government early this decade, one local alternative weekly urged the council to “think big” and not get bogged down in mere “pothole politics.”

It’s a startling mindset to observe up close, as I did for two years of jawboning with civic leaders on the L.A. Times editorial board. Councilmen always talk of “doing deals” and “putting together projects,” by which they mean real estate. Nearly two dozen governmental authorities—city, regional, county, state—have some power of eminent domain over the area, and they use it to build five-star hotels, reward campaign contributors, and erect schools that declining enrollment levels have rendered utterly unnecessary. Civic leaders are always proposing some new property-related “moratorium”—on converting apartments into condominiums, fleabag hotels into attractive rentals, and unused patches of hillside into homes. “Thinking big” inevitably means horse-trading bits of the city’s famously onerous red tape in return for developers delivering preferred social goals, such as guaranteeing “living wage” union jobs, building “green” rooftops, and providing for “affordable housing” units.

After a while, one starts to feel like a lonely crank constantly criticizing a city for delivering ever-worse essential services while spending ever-more money on government salaries and ever-more time butting into the private sector. Especially when the private sector has given up the intellectual fight.

One of my last editorial board visits was with Tim Leiweke, who owns the Staples Center, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, and the largest new real estate development in town, a project called L.A. Live. I expected a guy who works with the famous conservative tycoon Phil Anschutz to be at least halfway skeptical about the intersection of City Hall and private real estate development, but when I asked him about his biggest frustration with public policy downtown, he replied: “The gap between the haves and the have-nots.” If we don’t have more affordable housing and living wage union jobs, Leiweke warned, “There’s gonna be a day of reckoning here that’s not going to be pretty.”

Maybe that’s why local politicians line the pockets of billionaire sports tycoons like Leiweke: Give ’em enough money, and intrude enough into their business, and they’re almost bound to go native. Now if only they could be trained to care a little less about stadiums and a little more about rats.

Matt Welch is reason’s editor in chief.

Office of Thrift Supervision: Now With More Thrift!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:08:00 EDT

Walking by the large, ugly Office of Thrift Supervision, situated on some prime real estate near the White House on G Street, I always figured it was one of those edifices to irony--like the little notice about the Paperwork Reduction Act that's printed at the bottom of umpteen billion sheets of government paper.

Turns out they're actually in charge of thrifts over there--savings and loans and the like. Still, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson seems to think it's just as useless as my imagined lumpy government-owned structure dedicated to efficiency.

Among changes, Treasury wants to merge the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. markets watchdog, with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that is charged with overseeing the activities of the nation's futures market.
It also recommends getting rid of a Depression-era charter for thrifts that was intended to make it easier to obtain mortgage loans, saying it is no longer necessary. That would mean closing the Office of Thrift Supervision and transferring its duties to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that oversees national banks.

Thrifty, indeed.

Regulate it and They Will Lobby

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:32:00 EDT

Writing in New Hampshire's Union Leader, 20/20 star and friend o' reason John Stossel makes a familiar-to-reason-readers yet always underappreciated point about the influence of lobbyists and perversity of reform. Clip 'n' save for the Naderite (or McCainiac, or Obamaphile) in your family.

The Public Choice school of economics calls this the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Individual members of relatively small interest groups stand to gain huge rewards when they lobby for government favors, but each taxpayer will pay only a tiny portion of the cost of any particular program, making opposition pointless. [...]
"Good government" types rightly abhor this influence-peddling, but they propose pointless reforms like bans on lobbyist-sponsored gifts, junkets and rides on corporate jets. They also back a vicious assault on free speech: campaign-finance restrictions designed to reduce the influence of lobbyists in political campaigns. Despite all these "reforms," influence-peddling goes on.
For good reason. None of the reforms gets near root of the problem.
The root is government power. When government is free to meddle in every corner of our lives and regulate the economy through taxes, regulation and subsidies, then "special interests" have every incentive to work on the politicians to preserve their turf or gain an advantage. [...]
The irony is that the "good government" types favor big government, so they undermine their own efforts to eliminate corruption. [...]
There is one way to rid the political system of this sort of corruption: severely restrict government power as the founders intended. Only when we eliminate the state's ability to meddle in business will business will stop meddling in government.

Whole thing here. Stossel in reason here.

Being in Congress Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:48:00 EST

Rep. Henry Waxman, the mastermind behind the latest waste of congressional time (and taxpayers' money), says that he's sorry about this week's idiotic foray into whether Major League Baseball players, most notably Roger "The Rocket" Clemens, used performance-enhancing drugs.

Then again, it's not the Congressman's fault:

"I'm sorry we had the hearing. I regret that we had the hearing. And the only reason we had the hearing was because Roger Clemens and his lawyers insisted on it," Waxman said.

Clemens' lawyer says that Waxman is dishing junk:

Clemens' lawyer, Rusty Hardin, disputes Waxman's claims, calling the congressman's statements, "unbelievable, disingenuous and outrageous."
"He is the one who created this circus in the first place," Hardin said.

More here.

And some recent reason stuff on the matter here.

Here, Matt Welch raises the question of why Congress was wondering if Clemens' buttocks ever hosted a "palpable mass," which sounds like something that happens between confession and Easter services

Once More, with FEMA

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:21:00 EST

Mike "Brownie" Brown's past agency is still doing a heckuva job, says the AP. Trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency literally stink--with the fumes of formaldehyde:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency came under new withering criticism Thursday after tests found dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes in many of the trailers the agency used to house hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi....
FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison said Thursday the agency would rush to find temporary housing for roughly 35,000 families now in its trailers. "We're moving as fast as we can," he said.
The agency was forced to act after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that formaldehyde fumes from hundreds of trailers and mobile homes were, on average, about five times what people are exposed to in most modern homes.

More here.

I've got no idea whether five times the fumes of "most modern homes" really means anything--I'm assuming the baseline in the latter is effectively zero. Or what health risks are associated with the formaldehyde. I do know that thousands more trailers have gone unused because FEMA didn't realize the ground they'd be on was too soft for such structures.

In the go-go world, where we eat standing up and are always on the run, looking to save time and do more, more, more in less time, can we agree to this: Let's start saying FEMA instead of SNAFU or FUBAR. We save a letter in each case, and it's clear that the one acronym will do the work of the two other words.

Why Jeff Flake is No Flake

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:39:00 EST

The scurvy scourge (?!?) of bipartisanship has returned to the nation's not-quite-paper-of-record. From the Wash Post:

Exploiting a deep well of voter revulsion over partisan gridlock in Washington, Sen. Barack Obama is promising to do something that has not been done in modern U.S. politics: unite a coalition of Democrats, Republicans and independents behind an agenda of sweeping change....
In Washington, bipartisanship for decades has been synonymous with compromise and incrementalism....
Obama is promising something very different, what skeptics call an oxymoron: sweeping bipartisan change.
"I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes, not incremental changes, not small changes," Obama said Saturday night. "I think that there are a whole host of Republicans, and certainly independents, who have lost trust in their government, who don't believe anybody is listening to them, who are staggering under rising costs of health care, college education, don't believe what politicians say. And we can draw those independents and some Republicans into a working coalition, a working majority for change."

The voice of reason in the story is Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who notes:

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said bipartisanship tends to produce the worst that Washington has to offer -- transactional politics where lawmakers scratch one other's backs without regard to the bigger picture. Pork-barrel spending goes unchallenged because members of both political parties know that by objecting to one project, they jeopardize their own, Flake said.
"Partisanship is underrated. There is a time and place for it, and more time and place than we realize," he said.

You said it, brother. Whole thing here.

If you're desperate for bipartisanship, then remember the Medicare prescription drug benefit and No Child Left Behind, and a thousand other feel-good legislative acts that passed in the just-passed age of bitter partisanship. Note too that the big "bipartisan" successes of the Clinton years, ranging from NAFTA to welfare reform to balanced budgets, were the result of hyper-partisan campaigns and arm-twisting, not any calls to buddy-buddy change.

In 2006, Flake, who does propose annually a bipartisan bill to end the Cuba embargo, explained in reason why the Republicans don't deserve libertarian votes: "There's nothing we've done as Republicans that ought to make libertarians excited about our record." No wonder, then, that the GOP purged him from his post on a big committee in January '07.

Slate's Jack Shafer pours some cold water on bipartisanship too, noting the advantages of its opposite number:

Gridlock was built into our political system to prevent the hasty passage of laws based on someone's good (or bad) intentions. (When Congress does nothing, at least it does nothing wrong.) Political rifts are wonderfully useful. Just as branches of government are supposed to watch other branches, political candidates are supposed to check and balance those they oppose.

In our Feb. 2007 issue, reason prophesied "what to expect from the long-awaited, much-anticipated return of gridlock."

Teaching Kids How City Hall Really Works

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:16:00 EST

Eric Dondero hips us to a pretty funny ad for Travis Irvine, who ran for mayor of Bexley, Ohio, and actually pulled in the mid-single digits in this week's elections.

Click below to view the commerical at Reason.tv:

A Simple Plea for Federalism

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:11:00 EDT

Columnist Ron Hart looks at the desires of some folks in Vermont and some in the Southern League who want to secede from the U.S. and each other. He proposes a federalist solution:

My solution to the unworkable yet appealing idea of secession is to devolve more powers to the states and fewer to Washington. It is what our Founding Fathers intended. And if you read the Federalist Papers, you will realize that they never intended our central government in Washington to be this expansive and overbearing.

If you want an abortion, then move to a state that allows it. If you want to smoke weed, then go to California. If you think that we should pay for everything a lazy welfare person demands, then go to a state that gives them flat-screen TVs and, instead of government cheese, offers an assortment of French cheeses that are both delicious and presented in a pleasing manner.
The basic reason that we fought for our independence is to do what we damn well please as long as it does not harm others. Yet at every turn, the federal government seems to want to make us do as they think we should, even if it comes down to using windmills, driving a Toyota Prius, or now, being forced to join the Hillary Health Care Plan....

Our free-spending federal government thinks it is doing things well, and is filled with enough hubris to believe that it should tell other countries what to do - it calls it foreign policy. The real answer is that less money and power need to be vested with them and more at the state level.

Generally speaking, I couldn't agree more. Now, how do we get there?

His whole column here.

Nothing to See, Here

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:23:00 EDT

Josh Marshall reports that the State Department outsourced investigation of the Blackwater incident in Iraq.

To Blackwater.

Calling All Presidential Candidates: Who Will Stand Up and Be Transparent?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:51:00 EDT

Presidential aspirants Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) don't agree on very much.

When it comes to immigration, stem-cell research, abortion, health care, trade--you name it, basically--these three get along about as well as Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, and George Steinbrenner did during the Yankees' legendarily fractious 1977 season.

But they alone among would-be White House occupants have signed a trans-partisan initiative that has the potential to radically transform not just the presidency but the way the federal government does business. Obama, Brownback, and Paul have all signed The Oath of Presidential Transparency, a pledge to follow through on two actions.

First, signatories agree to conduct "THE most transparent Administration in American history--a lofty, laudable, far-reaching goal. This oath signals that whether it's earmarks, directives, or ongoing management of taxpayer expenditures, the goal of transparency will be evident throughout all policy making aspects of your Administration."

Second, signatories commit their presidential administrations "to full and robust implementation of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFAT Act) of 2006." The heart of that legislation, co-sponsored by Obama and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in the Senate and signed into law last year by President Bush, is the creation of a free, searchable website that will list every recipient of every federal award.

Regardless of ideology or partisan affiliation, this is something that every American--with the possible exception of lawmakers who prefer to shroud their activities out of guilt, shame, fear, or some combination of the same--can get behind. Estimated to cost a relatively measly $15 million between now and 2011, the searchable database will give watchdog groups, government reformers, and regular citizens unprecedented amounts of information about where taxpayer dollars are going and how their elected representatives are behaving.

"Knowledge is power," said Francis Bacon. And knowledge of how the federal government is spending our money is a crucial step forward in empowering voters and improving the functioning of American democracy.

The FFAT- authorized database, which will be operated by the Office of Management and Budget, is supposed to be up and running by January 1, 2008. But it's one thing to pass well-intentioned legislation and another thing entirely to implement and enforce it.

Hence, The Oath of Presidential Transparency, a project spearheaded by the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes the print and online editions of reason. Joining together three dozen diverse groups ranging from the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the voter-rights outfit Velvet Revolution, the Oath provides voters with a crystal-clear understanding of the candidates' priorities when it comes to government spending. (Go here for a complete list of participating organizations.)

"Signing the Oath of Presidential Transparency was a no brainer for me," says Rep. Paul, the first candidate to put his name on the pledge. " I will aggressively pursue full openness and accountability within my administration if elected president."

"Every American has the right to know how the government spends their tax dollars, but for too long that information has been largely hidden from public view," says Sen. Obama, whose role in creating FFAT can't be overstated. "This historic law will lift the veil of secrecy in Washington and ensure that our government is transparent and accountable to the American people. And I will be proud to fully implement and enforce this law as president."

"Americans need to feel they can trust their government," says Sen. Brownback. "As president I will continue my record of supporting policies that increase government transparency and boost confidence in our democratic system."

The Reason Foundation's director of policy development, Amanda K. Hydro, tells me that she has repeatedly contacted the campaigns of every declared presidential candidate in the Republican and Democratic parties who met Federal Election Commission filing requirements.

So far, only Obama, Brownback, and Paul stand in the sunlight by supporting transparency in government spending. As the 2008 race for the White House shifts into high gear, perhaps Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, and the other candidates will take the pledge for transparency (if and when they do, you'll read about it on Reason Online).

Or perhaps they will see fit to stay in the shadows.

Which, in its own way, will tell prospective voters all they need to know come November 2008.

Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason.

Honest and Open Thievery

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:49:00 EDT

In a letter posted at Congress.org, a constituent praises Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.) for his "brilliant intellect." As evidence, Mitchell's admirer cites the congressman's vote for the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

The margin by which the act passed—411 to 8 in the House, 83 to 14 in the Senate—takes some of the shine off Mitchell's brilliance. Still, he's probably smart enough to realize what his colleagues evidently understand: Congress's new honesty and openness are not what they're cracked up to be.

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act requires that special appropriations added by individual legislators be listed in an online database at least 48 hours before they come to a vote. Critics such as Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) complained bitterly about a loophole: Congressional leaders can certify that a bill contains no earmarks, and there's no way to challenge that determination.

A deeper problem is that publicity does not deter wasteful, parochial spending that legislators want to publicize. Consider what happened last month when Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) challenged a $100,000 appropriation for a prison museum near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The earmark's sponsor, Rep. Nancy Boyda (D-Kan.), defended the honor of Leavenworth County, bragging that "we probably have more prisons...than any other county in the United States." She indignantly added that "the local residents are proud of their heritage and rightly so," since Leavenworth has hosted the likes of George "Machine Gun" Kelly and Nazi spy Fritz Duquesne.

The House approved Boyda's earmark by a vote of 317 to 112. Later she told The New York Times, "Democracy is a contact sport, and I'm not going to be shy about asking for money for my community."

So far this year the Democratic House has approved spending bills that include some 6,500 earmarks, not quite keeping pace with the Republicans' record of nearly 16,000 in 2005 but more than twice the whole-year total of a decade ago. Far from shaming legislators into fiscal restraint, the Times reports, "the new transparency has raised the value of earmarks as a measure of members' clout" and "intensified competition for projects by letting each member see exactly how many everyone else is receiving."

Congressional shamelessness likewise may undermine the goals of the new Senate ban on anonymous holds. A hold occurs when a senator refuses to let a bill or nomination proceed by unanimous consent, thereby requiring the measure's supporters to muster 60 votes to allow consideration of the measure.

Holds obviously can be used for purposes that offend supporters of limited government—to extort pork, for example, or obstruct fiscal reform. But any tool that blocks legislation is apt to do more good than harm. Notably, the hold's defenders include fiscal conservatives such as Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) as well as big spenders such as Robert Byrd (D-W.V.).

Still, it's hard to find fault with the new requirement that senators publicly identify themselves and state their reasons when they block legislation. We just shouldn't expect too much as a result of this openness. As with earmarks, legislators don't try to hide their actions when they're proud of them, even if they shouldn't be. Interestingly, no one put a secret hold on the secret hold ban.

Transparency may also prove overrated as a way of preventing lobbyists from influencing legislators by arranging campaign contributions. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act requires public disclosure of "bundles" totaling $15,000 or more in a six-month period. Like the new attention to earmarks, highlighting these donations may simply spur competition, as K Street's denizens strive to keep up with their neighbors.

Although honesty and openness are surely preferable to dishonesty and secrecy (in politics, at least), they're not an adequate solution to a government that does too much and is therefore a magnet for people seeking gifts and favors. If a pickpocket becomes a mugger, he becomes more open and honest, but that doesn't make him more admirable.

Will Someone Put a Secret Hold on the Abolition of Secret Holds?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:14:00 EDT

The Senate version of the ethics bill that Katherine Mangu-Ward mentioned earlier today includes a rule change that would abolish anonymous "holds" on legislation. "Over the past 50 years," says The New York Times, "the Senate hold—one of the most secretive backroom weapons in Congress—[has] been used to tie the chamber in knots by allowing senators to block legislation and nominations anonymously, and to do so for reasons as simple as pique or payback." That sounds pretty bad, but a hold is simply a senator's refusal to go along with legislation to which he objects. By preventing a bill from advancing by consensus, he forces his colleagues to muster 60 votes in its favor. "Though leaders can break a hold with a 60-vote majority," says the Times, "they have often been reluctant to do so out of respect for the tradition—and the chance they might want to impose a hold of their own some day."

Holds obviously can be used for purposes that offend supporters of limited government—to block earmark reform or to extort pork, for example. The Times notes that in 2003 "Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, openly put holds on 850 Air Force promotions while he demanded cargo planes for the Air National Guard in his state." But any maneuver that helps block legislation is apt to do more good than harm. Notably, both fiscal conservatives like Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and big spenders like Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) are fans of the hold.

Still, it's hard to see how requiring senators to publicly identify themselves and state their reasons for blocking a bill can hurt, although it may not help much. The abolition of secret holds suffers from the same weakness as the abolition of secret earmarks. As the Craig example illustrates, legislators don't try to hide their actions when they're proud of them, even if they shouldn't be.

Congress: Now With More Ethics!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:50:00 EDT

The House just passed a "sweeping" ethics bill, and the Senate plans to do the same this week. (Question: Why are ethics bills always "sweeping"? Is there something about ethics that brings to mine pre-vacuum housekeeping in particular?) Dems say the bill was aimed at "repairing Congress' corruption-sullied image." The bill requires disclosure of "bundled contributions," where lobbyists raise and take credit for many individual contributions that are currently reported separately. It also requires disclosure for earmarks, ending the practice of congressman adding pork without attaching their names.

Apparently, almost everyone wants more ethics:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., all but dared Republicans to try to block the proposal when it comes to a vote as early as Thursday. "With that resounding vote in the House, 411-8, I think people ought to be concerned about voting against it," he said.

The unethical eight:

Democratic Reps. Lacy Clay (Mo.), Allen Boyd (Fla.), John Tanner (Tenn.), Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), Neil Abercrombie (Hawaii) and John Murtha (Pa.) opposed the measure. GOP Reps. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Joe Barton (Texas) also voted against the bill. Murtha, who has gotten into ethical scrapes with one lawmaker this year, routinely has opposed ethics changes.

Kelo-a-Go-Go

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:09:00 EDT

Here's good news on the eminent domain front in Ohio:

Cincinnati must pay $335,000 in attorney and witness fees to the owners of two fast-food restaurants in Clifton Heights who successfully challenged Cincinnati's right to use eminent domain.
That's the ruling by Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Ralph Winkler, whose written decision included a stern scolding of Cincinnati for the way it tried to take the owners' properties.
"The City of Cincinnati should in the future be very careful when it initiates eminent domain proceedings against private-property owners," he wrote. "In this case, the city lost taxpayers' money to legal fees and expenses."

The city was trying to demolish an Arby's and a Hardee's in an area they bogusly claimed was blighted. More here.

Read reason's interview with Scott Bullock, the attorney who argued Kelo v. New London in front of the U.S. Supreme Court here.

And here's our whole megillah on eminent domain abuse.

Is This Anyway To Run the War on Terrorism?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:55:00 EDT

Hoo-larious hijinks from the Maxwell Smarts at Transportation Security Adminstration. Turns out when they're not seizing breast milk from airline passengers, they're throwing out sensitive documents improperly:

Homeland Security officials are being warned not to toss secret documents that could compromise transportation security into the ordinary trash after hundreds of such papers marked "sensitive" reportedly were found in a city trash container near the Orlando International Airport in Florida.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) used its most recent newsletter to tell employees not to throw away outdated materials stamped as "Sensitive Security Information" (SSI).
"There have been recent news stories about a young person who went Dumpster diving near a major airport and found an airport binder that contained documents marked as [SSI]", the newsletter said.

More here.

TSA Follies in detail here.

Hillary Clinton: Liberaltarian?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:03:00 EDT

It hurt just typing that. And it's really just a shameful ploy to get you to read this post.

But NTU reports :

Presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has proposed cutting 500,000 government contractors and saving taxpayers $18 billion a year.

Senator Clinton also wants to create a government database that would track the effectives of government agencies. The federal government, to some extent, already performs this service. But, there’s always room for more accountability and less spending.

Taxpayers should be happy that the Democratic frontrunner has called for more accountability and an $18 billion cut in federal spending. We’ll be waiting patiently for her tax reform and entitlement overhaul proposals.

I've heard some policy people suggest we establish a BRAC -like commission to hunt down anachroisitc and ineffective government agencies and programs for elimination. Seems like a good idea.

The obvious question with Hillary's proposal is if the jobs those contractors perform would also be eliminated, or if they'd merely be transfered back to full-time federal employees. And take any calls from Mrs. Clinton for "more transparent" government with a fistful of salt. On the other hand, Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" program actually did quite a bit of good.

Hurricane Katrina: A Full Employment Act for Federal Fraud-Busters

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 06:59:00 EDT

More than 18 months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, authorities are chipping away at a mountain of fraud cases that, by some estimates, involve thousands of people who bilked the federal government and charities out of hundreds of millions of dollars intended to aid storm victims.
The full scope of Katrina fraud may never be known, but this much is clear: It stretches far beyond the Gulf Coast, like the hurricane evacuees themselves. So far, more than 600 people have been charged in federal cases in 22 states - from Florida to Oregon - and the District of Columbia.
The frauds range in value from a few thousand dollars to more than $700,000. Complaints are still pouring in and several thousand possible cases are in the pipeline - enough work to keep authorities busy for five to eight years, maybe more.

The AP reports that 150 to 250 new cases continue to be referred to investigators a week and that some 9,600 cases are being investigated. More here.

In a special section in our December 2005 issue, Reason looked at Katrina and the failure of public policy. And in our December 2006 issue, Neille Ilel looked at how unconventional groups plugged the gap left by traditional aid groups in New Orleans. Read all about it here.