Random Info Chart - DC Schools Test Results

Google public data explorer has a slew of interesting datasets, including test scores for DC schools.  It goes to show that you can’t judge every DC school with a single statement, other than perhaps to state that the achievement gap between good and bad DC schools is far too wide:

Health care - An open letter to Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (MD-7)

Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland's 7th congressional district organized a town-hall style conference call this evening, and ours was one of the phone numbers called.  Below is my response.

To the Honorable Elijah E. Cummings

I'm listening to your town-hall phone call this evening, thank you for organizing this discussion on the healthcare bill. As the President said in his recent press conference - our status quo is a horrible option. But it strikes me that we are facing two main issues here: 1. efficiency, and 2. access.

It is generally agreed upon that in order to afford universal coverage, we will have to lower the cost of coverage. Why is the President and a large portion of the Democratic congressional delegation rushing to increase coverage before proving that we can first improve efficiency?

Your last caller was concerned that increased legislation would only be a source of additional cost rather than savings. Would it not be more prudent - and easier - to first pass a bill that addresses the efficiency question, and then based on the success of that first bill, gradually increases coverage? Would decreasing costs first not also allow people and companies who currently can't afford coverage to finally do so?

You said America is the country that put a man on the moon, but we didn't do it on the first try - we proved the efficiency of the program (and had missteps along the way) before we shot for the moon. I have two kids, and our current national debt is now $11 trillion. With a current budget deficit adding to this debt at a record pace, I find it irresponsible to bet on the efficiency of an unproven program at this time.

Please work with the Blue Dog coalition and the Republicans in Congress and the Senate to emphasize efficiency and cost reduction first and foremost before adding to our bet.

Thank you,

Oskar Austegard

For more information on the need for health care reform, see the non-partisan organization The National Coalition on Health Care.

How about this for a business idea

Seth Godin makes some excellent points in his blog post “Graduate school for unemployed college students”.  Basically he says unemployed college grads should just approach the next 12 months as if it was another year of school, and spend the time contributing to the community while learning marketable skills.  Great concept, but as 3rdgirl and snappers15 point out, this is hard to pull off when faced with student loans or other financial responsibilities.  Seth acknowledges this in his followup-post, “Tough!”, but doesn’t offer these people any actual solutions.

How about this for a business idea - and solution to the grad’s financial problem - :

A joint recruiting and student-loan firm that does four things: 

1. places college grads with non-profits for part time, minimum-wage paid work ($7,540 per year for a 20hr workweek), plus bare-bones health insurance.
2. provides study-sessions/instruction/seminars/workshops for real world, marketable skills
3. provides some form of student-loan deferment for the candidate’s current loans, removing that burden for one year from the grad’s shoulders
4. acts as a recruiter for the grads, generating recruiting fees (to cover costs)

Come to think of it, why can’t our colleges do this, already?  Or why can’t they provide real-world marketable skills in the first place?

Morgan Stanley/Mary Meeker: State of the Web Economy

Mary Meeker Web 2.0 Presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web 2.0)

Presentation in PDF Format
(Via TechCrunch)

Another XPLANATiON for the Credit Mess

The folks from Xplane take a stab at explaining the mortgage meltdown: (also via Tad)

Insanity

…and that’s all I have to say about that.

The Economy: Who’s to blame?

Image via Wikipedia

Amen to FactCheck.org who lays out a list of some of the causes for the current calamity:

 

 

 

 

MoveOn.org blames McCain advisers. He blames Obama and Democrats in Congress. Both are wrong.

So who is to blame?  There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.
–by Joe Miller and Brooks Jackson

 Thank you.

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The Pendulum Swings/It's All Clinton's Fault

With all the blaming of Pelosi/McCain/Obama for the failure of the bailout bill, it is kind of odd that someone hasn’t brought up every Republican’s favorite whipping boy, Bill Clinton; after all, his HUD was part of starting the whole mess, as reported nine years ago today:

New York Times, September 30, 1999:  ‘Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending’

Of course it was all well intentioned – a backlash against allegations of racial discrimination by Fannie and Freddie.  The result?

“The action […] will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.

“Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

“In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

“In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.”

You can’t cry about a deregulated market not working when the government has its hands all over the cookie jar, tweaking here, muddling there.

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Economics: Trade (and Trade Deficits) <> Wealth Transfer

The otherwise excellent Pickens Plan contains one notable misstatement:

"At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone — that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.

"Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion — it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind."

Pickens Plan, The Plan (emphasis mine)

The local blogger FreeMarket has picked up on this in his Pay us like you owe us piece - this is simply commodity trade, not wealth transfer.  It might best be argued that a) trading dollars for oil unduly affects our balance of trade, and b) we might find better things to trade our dollars for...