Indiana–Aspiring To Be Mississippi

I frequently begin these daily rants by promising to “connect the dots.” That’s because Americans have a distressing tendency to argue policy in silos–ignoring the fact that the effects of policy A will often have a significant effect on policies B, C and D.

A friend recently sent me a column by Michael Hicks that connected our state’s disastrous education policies with our efforts at economic development. Hicks is a conservative and an economist, and his observations are based on data, not ideology. As he reports, Indiana’s economy is not keeping up with national trends. (Evidently, keeping taxes too low to provide the infrastructure necessary to an attractive quality of life isn’t the most intelligent approach. But then, that’s my snarky take.)

First, the data.

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation turns 20 years old in early 2025. In 2005, Indiana had 104,854 businesses, 2.96 million jobs and 6.28 million people.

In the most recent year for all these data, 2021, Indiana had 99,280 businesses, 3.23 million jobs and 6.81 million residents.

If the state had grown at the same pace as the rest of the nation, we would have 110,305 businesses, 3.23 million jobs and 7.05 million people. That leaves Indiana with a two-decade growth shortfall of more than 11,000 businesses, 151,000 jobs and 240,000 people.

Hicks says the reality is even worse than these numbers suggest.

Since its formation in 2005, Hoosier factory employment has declined by almost 55,000 jobs, or 10%. Indeed, since Indiana’s LEAP district was announced, the state has shed a further 14,000 factory jobs, while the nation as a whole added 166,000 manufacturing positions.

Over the past two decades, average real wages for manufacturing workers in Indiana dropped by a stunning 14.4%. Nationwide, they rose by just under 1%.

This performance–as Hicks acknowledges– is “policy failure in its purest, most unadulterated form.” But as he also acknowledges, the failures aren’t attributable to poor performance by the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, which he says is one of the better such concerns. The problem is that the IEDC represents a “state with increasingly poor economic fundamentals”.

Hicks predicts a future performance that is even worse, thanks to Indiana’s war on education. There is, to begin with, 15 years of funding cuts to state universities–funding cuts that have left us with 10 years of declining attendance and graduation. Our legislature’s failure to reverse that decline places us behind Mississippi, of all places,  where one-third more high school graduates attempt college each year than here in Indiana.

The lack of action on college completion removes from our economic development organizations the single most important aspect of a region’s future economic performance — educated young people.

To illustrate this disaster, we can look to the recent past. Since 1980, 72% of population growth, and almost all job growth, went to the 15% of U.S. counties with the highest educational attainment. There are only six of those in Indiana — four in the Indianapolis suburbs and the host counties of Purdue and Indiana University.

Over the same four decades, the least well-educated half of Indiana counties lost 13,764 people. This will inevitably worsen in the decades to come. Education is now more, rather than less, important to economic growth and prosperity.

Indiana’s education failures aren’t limited to higher education. There’s a reason fewer of our high school graduates to to college.

Indiana spends less per student on K-12 education than we did in 2010. One result is the average college graduate working in one of Indiana’s public schools is paid less than they were in 2004. On top of that, Indiana’s proposed high school curriculum will make it among the weakest in the nation…Either Indiana gets a lot more kids to finish college each year, or it gets used to slow growth, declining relative incomes, fewer businesses, wage declines and economic stagnation.

If Indiana’s goal is to be worse than Mississippi, then we’re doing great. Not only are we spending less on education at all levels, we are siphoning off what we do spend on educational vouchers that have done nothing to improve educational outcomes, but have deprived the public school system of critically-needed resources in order to support religious schools and enrich upper-middle-class families.

Early voting in Indiana begins on October 8th. By November 5th, Hoosiers will have made a choice between Jennifer McCormick, a gubernatorial candidate who understands the importance of education to economic development and overall quality of life, and Mike Braun, a candidate who wants to destroy public education by using our tax dollars to fund a “universal voucher” program.

McCormick has consistently done her homework. Braun clearly has not.

We will either elect someone who can begin to reverse Indiana’s steady decline, or we can continue to vie with Mississippi for the title of America’s most failed state.

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Lev’s Regrets

The other day, a judge whom I greatly admire recommended that I watch a new documentary.

Talk about drawing back the curtain! That documentary, “From Russia With Lev” may be the tell-all of all time, and–assuming there are still uncommitted voters–the timing of its disclosures couldn’t be better. For those who haven’t yet seen it, don’t walk–run to your television and watch it on MSNBC.

The documentary tells the complete story behind the events that precipitated Trump’s first impeachment, and it does so from the perspective of Lev Parnas, one of the main characters in that travesty, who has clearly come to regret his participation in what can only be described as a Mafia-like enterprise.

In the process of telling the story behind Trump’s effort to blackmail the President of Ukraine, we learn a lot of things that I, for one, would rather I didn’t know.

What we learn about Trump isn’t surprising (although much of what we already did know was supplemented with data amply confirming his unfitness for any office, let alone the Presidency), but the film revealed an extent of rot in the upper echelons of the GOP that shocked me. Despite my distaste for several of the people shown to be “on the take” in one way or another, I would not have predicted the depths to which they fell, morally and legally. The documentary reinforced the mendacity of Bill Barr’s “summary” of the Special Prosecutor’s investigation of Trump’s acquiescence into widespread Russian meddling in the election; it focused, in passing, on Kevin McCarthy’s money-grubbing, and on the equally dishonorable actions of several others. And it confirmed the knowing mendacity of Fox “News.”

Most of all, the documentary displayed the pathetic, grasping, total degeneracy of Rudy Giuliani.

It would be a disservice to offer a Cliff Notes version of the film. You really, really need to see it, to understand–intellectually and viscerally–that for a period of four years, the United States was run by a gang of thuggish con men and Mafiosas who cared nothing about the security or honor of the United States and everything about personal wealth and power.

What I do want to emphasize are the reasons to believe Lev Parnas and his recitation of these events. Rachel Maddow, the executive producer, was asked that question in an interview, and her answer was convincing.

First of all, Parnas was forthcoming about his own life. He was admittedly a con man who ran around with hoodlums and wheeler-dealers, a man who knowingly and enthusiastically took part of a variety of illegal activities. It was thanks to those prior contacts that he eventually fell into a relationship that took him into the inner precincts of Trump’s White House. He forthrightly admits that being welcomed into these powerful circles went to his head. In his narratives, he doesn’t try to excuse or whitewash either his very checkered past or his role in Trump and Giuliani’s effort to withhold the weapons that Congress had authorized for Ukraine–weapons desperately needed to fight the Russian invasion– unless Zelensky announced a bogus investigation into Hunter Biden.

But even if you discount his accuracy or sincerity, Parnas provided the producer and director of the film (as well as the prosecutors who eventually sent him to prison) with extensive documentary evidence. His cellphone contained thousands of emails, texts and photographs confirming his version of events–evidence that simply could not have been manufactured, and that is not capable of being explained away. (There were also numerous photos of him with Trump, who continues to claim he never met Lev.)

Ordinarily, a film offering the bombshells that this one does would destroy a Presidential candidate. But we occupy a weird time. The MAGA cult, Christian Nationalists and racists who stubbornly support a demented criminal are not open to persuasion, and I seriously doubt that there are, at this point in the electoral cycle, any truly “uncommitted” voters. As David Sedaris has noted (his language), to be undecided between these two candidates is like having the stewardess on a plane offer you a meal choice between chicken and shit with broken glass in it–and, after a pause, to ask how the chicken was cooked.

Those of us who reside in the “reality-based community” already had ample reason to reject Donald Trump. “From Russia with Lev” makes the prospect of a Trump victory even more terrifying.

Watch it. And if you know anyone who really is trying to decide between the chicken and the shit with broken glass, make sure they see it too.

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PLEASE IGNORE LINK

Sorry–I just hit a wrong button. Ignore the link you just received, and my apology for littering your inboxes.

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The Chevron Doctrine And Public Health

http://view.sc.hks.harvard.edu/?qs=1082fe68ab2035ae196ba611a4d398b6e567fd248ea3b45e4662b93569df64250dfb81101923705bcfd451836e78a481503ca70e09762a9498367ca8bf67d126f64129f4c8e9147a997c8a65c751c8d6

https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-chevron-deference-loper-bright-guns-abortion-pending-cases?emci=ee1dfe1a-de7c-ef11-8474-6045bda8aae9&emdi=4aeca557-e57c-ef11-8474-6045bda8aae9&ceid=81745

Let’s Talk About Choice

A reader of this blog recently asked me why Americans seem so confused about whether individual “choice” is an essential element of freedom. Why, for example, do many Americans see reproductive choice as a critical human right, but oppose school choice, or the individual’s choice to own lethal weapons? Why did people during a pandemic oppose rules requiring them to wear masks, claiming their right to choose? Can we make sense of these differences?

I think we can.

I have frequently alluded to the libertarian principle that underlies America’s constitutional system. Those who crafted America’s constituent documents were significantly influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and its then-new approach to the proper role of the state. They endorsed the principle that Individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–their own life goals–so long as they did not thereby harm the person or property of another, and so long as they were willing to accord an equal liberty to their fellow citizens.

The principle seems straightforward, but it requires a measure of consensus about the nature of harm to others.

To use a relatively recent example, lots of folks were enraged when local governments imposed smoking bans in public places. They insisted that the choice to smoke or not was an individual one. The bans, however, resulted from medical research documenting the harms done by passive smoke. The ordinances were based upon lawmakers’ agreement that individuals should retain the choice to smoke in their homes or cars or similar venues, but not where they would be polluting the air of non-consenting others.

Essentially, the libertarian premise asks: What is the nature of the “harm to others” that justifies government intervention? When may government disallow a seemingly personal choice? How certain does the harm have to be? Does harm to others include harms to non-persons (fetuses)?

Most sentient Americans understood that a rule requiring people to wear masks in public places during a pandemic was essential to preventing harm to unconsenting others, just as the ordinances against smoking in a local bar protected non-smokers from the hazards of passive smoke, and laws against speeding protect against potentially deadly accidents.

When we get to issues like gun ownership and educational vouchers, there is considerably less agreement–although survey research suggests that most Americans favor considerable tightening of the laws governing who can own weapons, given the daily evidence that lax regulation is responsible for considerable and often deadly harm to others.

What about allowing “parental choice” in the use of tax dollars to send one’s children to private and religious schools? Or, for that matter, “parental choice” to control what books the local library can include on its shelves?

The evidence strongly suggests that “educational choice” is harming both civic cohesion and the public school systems that serve some 90% of the nation’s children. (Given the large percentage of voucher users who choose religious schools, there is also a strong argument to be made that these programs violate the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State.) There is also a significant difference between exercising choice with one’s own resources–which parents can absolutely do–and requiring taxpayers to fund those choices.

With respect to libraries, parents can certainly choose to prevent their own children from accessing books of which they disapprove, but efforts to keep libraries from offering those books to others is a clear violation of the portion of the libertarian principle that requires willingness to accord equal liberty to others.

Whether to impose on an individual’s right to choose a course of action will often depend upon a weighing of harms. With respect to a woman’s right to choose an abortion, even people who claim that a fertilized egg is a person should understand that an abortion ban demonstrably harms already-living women–physically, emotionally and economically. (It has become abundantly clear that very few of the “pro life” activists really believe that a fertilized egg is equivalent to a born child; they are far more likely to favor a return to a patriarchal time and a reversal of women’s rights. But even giving them the benefit of the doubt, a weighing of the harms clearly favors women’s autonomy.)

Bottom line: a free society will accord individuals the maximum degree of individual choice consistent with the prevention of harm to others. There will always be good-faith debates about the nature and extent of the harms justifying government prohibitions, but those debates should start with a decent respect for–and understanding of– the philosophical bases of our constitutional system and the relevant credible evidence.

A good society chooses wisely.

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