Voice For Liberty

Tag: Wichita Eagle opinion watch

  • World Health Organization ranking biased, not reliable

    A letter in the Wichita Eagle written by Brad Beachy of Wichita makes the case for “so-called socialized medicine” to be brought to the United States. Part of Beachy’s argument relies on a ranking produced by the World Health Organization. That ranking has a number of problems.

    The ranking Beachy refers to was produced in 2000, and hasn’t been updated since then. So it’s getting a little old. Worse than that, it contains a number of techniques and biases that work against countries that rely on markets instead of government to provide health care.

    A recent paper from the Cato Institute provides some useful analysis of the World Health Organization rankings. (See WHO’s Fooling Who? The World Health Organization’s Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems)

    For example, there are two sets of rankings. As the Cato report explains: “One ranking claims to measure “overall attainment” (OA) while another claims to measure “overall performance” (OP). These two indices are constructed from the same underlying data, but the OP index is adjusted to reflect a country’s performance relative to how well it theoretically could have performed.”

    Using the OP rankings, the United States is number 37. But using the OA rankings, the United States is 15.

    25% of a country’s ranking is based on “financial fairness,” which is determined by looking at the “dispersion in the percentage of household income spent on health care.” As the reports says “The FF factor is not an objective measure of health attainment, but rather reflects a value judgment that rich people should pay more for health care, even if they consume the same amount.”

    The report notes this introduces a bias against countries that rely on market mechanisms for paying for health care.

    There’s another problem with FF, too: “Put more simply, the FF penalizes a country because some households are especially likely to become impoverished from health costs—but it also penalizes a country because some households are especially unlikely to become impoverished from health costs. In short, the FF factor can cause a country’s rank to suffer because of desirable outcomes.”

    The Cato study goes on to document additional problems with the WHO ranking. Problems with the rankings were noticed earlier, too. An earlier analysis of this report from Cato (We’re Number 37 in Health Care! concluded this:

    Overall, the WHO rankings’ mathematical formulations serve only to distract attention from the authors’ underlying distaste for individual choice in health care. The report largely ignores the extraordinary benefits the American marketplace brings to health care worldwide, such as new drugs, advanced diagnostic instruments such as MRIs and CAT scans, and lifesaving therapies for cancer and heart-disease patients. Under a WHO-style health care system, lifesaving research and innovation would be stifled and individual choice would be discarded in favor of collective control. Bureaucrats would decide who receives care — and who does not — on the basis of statistical tallies that devalue the lives of the elderly, the disabled and the chronically ill.

    By contrast, a free-market health care system upholds the right of every person to make his own decisions. Patients are given choices, not issued numbers, and doctors are freed from impersonal “expert panels” dictating what care they can and cannot provide. The WHO’s idea of government-provided universal health care is a fantasy that masks a system of dangerous, formula-based rationing. If you value your health, don’t trust the WHO.

  • Wichita Eagle’s school cheerleading isn’t helpful

    Now that Mark McCormick is no longer with the Wichita Eagle, I think we can say that Rhonda Holman has taken over the role of chief cheerleader for USD 259, the Wichita public school district.

    Not that she needed much of a push in that direction. But claims made in a recent opinion piece of hers (Hard times forcing hard choices) deserve some examination.

    After praising President Obama’s stimulus spending — claiming that it will keep things from becoming worse — she writes this: “And thank goodness that school district voters had the foresight in November to approve a well-timed local economic stimulus plan — the $370 million bond issue for athletics and fine arts facilities, technical education and new schools.”

    There’s so many untruths in this statement that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s try.

    First, did the school district know that we’d be in a recession this year? If so, they foresaw something that no one else did.

    Second, does government spending stimulate anything except the school system? It’s true that there will be spending going on that probably wouldn’t have happened had the bond issue not passed. But right now Wichitans pay millions of dollars each year to retire the bonds from a past school bond, and soon we’ll have to start paying for this bond. These payments are a drag on the local economy. See Wichita school bond issue economic fallacy and Wichita school district economic impact for more.

    The future tax burden is worse than the Wichita school district would admit to, and Holman doesn’t either. That’s because besides the capital expense of building new schools and more classrooms, there’s the ongoing cost of running the new classrooms. The bond issue doesn’t pay those expenses. Wichitans can expect the school district to propose tax increases as these new classrooms and schools come online.

    Third, if we were getting something truly worthwhile from this extra spending, that might be one thing. But the Wichita school district’s goal — smaller class sizes — is not a goal worth pursuing. Well, it is if you’re part of the public school bureaucracy or the teachers union. But the narrow self-interest of these groups shouldn’t count in this debate.

    If you’re interested in improving the prospects of Wichita’s schoolchildren, this extra spending is a distraction.

    I wonder if Holman has read research like this: “Surprisingly, the data show that academic achievement cannot be accounted for by any of the measures of public investment used in this study (pupil-teacher ratio, per pupil expenditures, teacher salaries, and funds received from the federal government), either singly or as a blend.” It’s in the post Wichita-area school superintendents make flawed case.

    Here’s some reporting by Malcolm Gladwell on what education researches are starting to realize about the effectiveness of class size, one of the goals of the bond issue:

    What’s more — and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world — the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast. … Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

    That’s reported in my post Wichita public school district’s path: not fruitful. In that post, you can also read that the current ways that teachers can advance their careers and salaries (longevity and obtaining extra education) aren’t relevant to their teaching effectiveness:

    The problem is that the current standards for teachers don’t “track what we care about.” The path to increased pay as a teacher — longevity and more education credentials — doesn’t produce better teachers. But because of union contracts that govern pay, that’s the only way to earn more as a teacher. This is one of the reasons why teachers unions are harmful to schools.

    Yet according to the contract with the teachers union in Wichita, longevity and more education credentials are the ways to earn a higher salary.

    Innovations such as differential teacher pay and charter schools are being promoted by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan as a way to improve our nation’s schools. But in Wichita, the existing public education bureaucracy and teachers unions are firmly opposed to these reforms. It’s too bad we don’t have opinion writers at the Wichita Eagle who are willing to look past these entrenched interests and consider what’s best for Wichita schoolchildren.

  • Kansas’ tax system is broken, according to spending advocates

    According to Gary Brunk, executive director of Kansas Action for Children, the Kansas tax system is broken. It’s the same message you hear from other organizations that depend on state funding, such as the public school spending lobby. In their eyes, the problem that needs fixing is that Kansans aren’t taxed enough to support their spending goals.

    (State needs tax system that is efficient, fair, July 28, 2009 Wichita Eagle.)

    Brunk writes: “We all rely on services paid for in the state budget, so it’s common sense that we should all contribute fairly toward the costs of providing those services.” He then mentions the public school system as one such service. I wonder what parents who have decided they can’t use the product that Kansas public schools produce think about that statement. They pay doubly: once in tuition to a private or parochial school, and then again to support the public schools.

    Brunk complains that “sales-tax loopholes alone drain more than $4 billion from state revenues.” I think the Wichita Eagle needs to ask Brunk the basis for this claim. According to the Governor’s Budget Report, in fiscal year 2008 the state collected $1.7 billion in retail sales tax. For Brunk to claim that loopholes cost the state 2.4 times the amount of actual collections is absurd.

    Or, you can look at Brunk’s complaint another way: He wants to raise taxes by $4 billion. The state collected (in 2008) just short of $6 billion in taxes, so Brunk thinks taxes need to be raised by 50%. That’s what is necessary to fix the tax system, according to him.

    There’s also the perverse idea that letting people keep more of their money “costs” the state. I guess it depends on who you think has first claim on the money that Kansans earn. If you believe that it first belongs to the state, then yes, tax breaks are a cost to the state. I view taxes as a cost that we have to pay, and tax breaks help reduce that cost.

    Here’s another of Brunk’s complaints: “… the level of spending in Kansas has changed very little in comparison with personal income trends. In fact, in 1960, our taxes were equal to 10.5 percent of personal income. Nearly six decades later, taxes in Kansas are roughly 12 percent of personal income.”

    If you’re not thinking as you read this, you might be persuaded to believe that spending in Kansas has increased by only 1.5 percentage points over a long period of time. But he’s using a clever ruse of expressing taxes as a percent of income instead of in actual dollars.

    The truth is that since 1960, personal income has grown rapidly, even after adjusting for inflation. That’s a good thing. Government, according to Brunk’s analysis, has grown even faster, consuming a larger portion of what the people of Kansas produce. That’s not good. Then, according to Brunk, Kansans need to pay more, because the tax system is broken.

    At the start of this piece, Brunk complained of “rhetoric and half-truths,” presumably referring to claims made by taxpayer advocates. He wants a “fiscally responsible, commonsense approach.” After reading this piece — full of its own brand of nonsense and doubletalk — I wish that Brunk and other state spending advocates would just say what they really want: more taxes and more spending. Then we could at least have an honest discussion.

  • Faust-Goudeau’s concern selective

    In today’s Wichita Eagle, Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a Democratic member of the Kansas Senate representing parts of north-central and northeast Wichita, writes this in a letter to the editor:

    I would like to commend Mayor Carl Brewer and the Wichita City Council for having the courage to vote down a rate increase for water and sewer charges for customers in our city (“Water rates to hold steady,” June 17 Local & State). As we continue to face economic down times, I am very concerned about our senior citizens and people with disabilities who are on fixed incomes and struggling to make ends meet. This increase would have certainly added an additional financial burden for them in paying utility bills.

    The proposed rate increase Faust-Goudeau refers to was in the amount of $2.00 per month.

    I suppose it’s admirable that she’s looking out for the interests of her constituents in this matter. But her concern is selective.

    The problem is that Faust-Goudeau voted against the expansion of the Holcomb Station coal-fired electricity generating plant. Her votes mean that Kansas would have to rely on wind power backed by natural gas, which is much more expensive than relying on electricity generated by coal.

    Wind power is very expensive, despite being heavily subsidized by the federal government through the production tax credit.

    It’s so expensive that Westar, the electrical utility that serves Wichita and Faust-Goudeau’s constituents, has had to ask for several rate increases recently. The cost of wind power was cited in some of the requests.

    One of these rate increases was estimated to add $10 per month to the cost of electricity for the average house.

    Part of the reason for the water department’s rate increase request is to fund capital improvements the department needs to make sure it can continue to deliver water now and well into the future.

    Paying much higher electric bills just so we can build more windmills to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, and even if it did exist, can’t be solved with windmills in Kansas: that’s a burden that no one should have to pay.

    Not even Faust-Goudeau herself, no matter how she votes in the Kansas Senate.

  • Sedgwick County solid waste fee criticized

    Today’s Wichita Eagle column by Rhonda Holman is a two-fer. Two issues for the price of one column, and two issues she’s wrong on. The first issue is explained in Wichita water economics.

    She criticizes Commissioner Karl Peterjohn and Board Chairman Kelly Parks for the opposition of a solid waste management fee that would add a relatively small amount to property tax bills.

    (When writing about Peterjohn, do I need to disclose that he and I are friends, and that I helped manage his campaign last year? I’d feel more compelled to do so if Holman would start writing editorials using her entire name.)

    Holman pokes fun at Peterjohn and Parks for “operating on anti-tax autopilot” and at Peterjohn specifically for fulfilling a campaign pledge.

    Anti-tax ought to be the first instinct of politicians. To me, that’s axiomatic and not a basis for criticism. There are always plenty of people in government like Commissioner Dave Unruh who are nuanced enough to recognize — as Holman reports — “with an admirable lack of exasperation: ‘It’s 69 cents.’”

    The problem is that little amounts here and there add up to real money. I think that’s something like the argument Wichita City Council members used in rejecting a $2.00 per month increase in water and sewer bills. Holman supported that action.

    Then, keeping a campaign pledge — what a novel concept! How refreshing!

    We should also look at the public policy aspects of this waste management fee. One of the things it was used for is to fund a Christmas tree recycling program. Here’s a few questions: Is it wise economics to fund recycling projects? Specifically, if natural Christmas trees as such an environmental nuisance that they must be recycled, shouldn’t people who buy them pay for their recycling? Perhaps through a tax — wait, let’s call it a “surcharge” or a “pre-paid environmental mitigation fee” — levied at the corner tree lot?

    Here are comments left to this post that were lost and then reconstructed:

    Wichitatator: What is Rhonda Holman’s legal name? Why doesn’t she use it when she signs her editorials? The Eagle should not have mystery editorial writers without fully disclosing this salient fact.

    Ms. “Holman” could be married to an attorney who is suing the state over school finance or some other public issue. Ms. “Holman” is a public person who wants to enjoy the perks of her editorial position in influencing public policy in this community without assuming the responsibility of publicly disclosing her name.

    For an editorial board that regularly fulminates about “full disclosure” this is an odd position to take. The Eagle regularly criticizes folks who do not fully disclose a lot more than their names in their paper.

    LonnythePlumber: What is her entire name? You imply mystery and wrong motivation if revealed.

  • Wichita water economics

    This week the Wichita City Council declined to raise the fixed portion of customers water bills by $2.00 per month. Today, Wichita Eagle editorial writer Rhonda Holman praises the council for avoiding an illogical water-rate increase. Is she and the city council right on this matter?

    The problem Wichita faces lies in the cost structure of water treatment and delivery. One source estimated that 70 to 80 percent of the costs of a city’s water supply system were fixed, or quasi-fixed, costs.

    These fixed costs don’t vary with the amount of water demanded by customers, at least not in the short run. But the city charges for water based primarily on the amount that customers use. So when demand is low, revenue drops rapidly, but the water department’s costs decrease very little. That’s the source of the problem.

    There is a fixed component to customer’s water bills. One solution would be to increase that fixed charge and drop the cost of a gallon of water. That would make the water department’s revenue less variable. This pricing formula would more accurately reflect the department’s cost structure.

    In retrospect, it appears that the city’s campaign to get people to conserve water has been, to put it kindly, a waste of resources. We’ve conserved — although nature has been the primary force behind this — but we still have to pay. Just because the city council doesn’t want to raise water bills now, someone is still going to have to pay.

    The water department is in control of its fixed costs over the long term, however. The growing demand for water over the long term is what leads it to make capital investment in its plant. Paying for these projects (fixed costs) by relying on revenue from the usage of water (variable revenue), as we now see, is problematic. The solution is to realize that these capital investments are not driven by daily or even yearly usage. Customers should pay for these capital improvements, then, through a fixed charge.

    An alternative would be to charge new connections to the water system a fee that helps pay for the capital investment necessary to expand the water supply. As a matter of fact, the department charges a “Water Plant Equity Fee” just for this purpose. Currently this fee is $1,520. (This is in addition to a fee of $850 for tapping into a water main and installing a meter.) Perhaps the equity fee needs to be raised.

    It appears that it is the desire of the city council to pay for capital improvements to the water system through a way other than raising the fixed portion of water bills. The net effect, whatever the city does, will still be felt by citizens as an increase in the cost of providing water. It would be best if this cost was realized as close as possible to its source, which is the water bill.

    Hopefully the city council will do something to recognize this, regardless of whether Rhonda Holman will support them.

    Here are comments left to this post that were lost and then reconstructed:

    Charlotte: You don’t fully understand. The city water dept. needs this money coming in to pay for their ASR project–which is located up by Burrton along the Arkansas River. They did one part of the project and now they want to do more. ASR, Aquafier S—? Recovery is taking the dirty water out of the Arkansas River when it gets up after a rain, running it through a big above ground filter that creates sludge (which they sell) and then pumping that (supposedly clean water) down into the Halstead Equas Bed. I am not thoroughly convinced that the water they are putting into the clean Equas Bed is all that clean. They say we are drawing water out of the Equas Bed faster than this ASR is putting it back in. They say the city needs to do this for economic development.

    I replied that the aquifer recharge project is an example of the type of capital improvements to plant that I was referring to.

  • Opinion line makes me wonder again

    Sometimes the Wichita Eagle Opinion Line makes me wonder. Here’s something from today’s collection:

    “Wanda Sykes should be given a $400 million contract and radio airtime opposite Rush Limbaugh. Let the free market and capitalism work, and we’ll see which one America really supports.”

    The writer wants the free market to work. At the same time, the writer seems to be saying that someone should give the subject Wanda Sykes $400 million. (I think that’s the same amount as Limbaugh’s recent contract.)

    Where I think this writer is confused is that Limbaugh was not given anything. He earns his pay, as far as I know. No one is forced to listen to or sponsor his show. Should the tastes of his listeners change, his show would fold.

    The writer doesn’t say this, but I suspect the point is that the government should give Sykes this contract, giving her the chance to compete with Limbaugh. This has nothing to do with free markets and capitalism. It is just the opposite.

    In reality, the fact that Sykes has no such contract is evidence of the free market working just perfectly.

  • At Wichita city council, citizens are frustrated

    Yesterday’s meeting of the Wichita City Council provided a lesson in how frustrating it can be for citizens to interact with city government.

    You might even have to endure a slight insult from our mayor.

    The matter in question involved real estate developer Dave Burk and the city’s economic development office.

    Regarding this matter, I wrote Mr. Burk by email early Monday morning with a question. He didn’t reply. I should have followed-up with a telephone call, but I didn’t have time.

    Monday afternoon I called the city’s economic development office with a few questions. The person I talked to was confused by the questions I asked, and suggested that I make records requests to get what I was asking for. There wasn’t time for that.

    So I wrote by email to Allen Bell the city’s economic development director. He didn’t reply. I don’t necessarily fault him for that, as it was around 3:00 Monday afternoon when I wrote. But he still hasn’t replied, and it’s Wednesday afternoon now.

    In my questions before the council, which you can read by clicking on Wichita facade improvement loan program: questions to answer, I asked if Burk had been investigated through background checks by the city, as the city has pledged to conduct thorough background investigations of its partners. Bell replied that he had been through checks in the past with regard to other deals.

    But we now know, based on events from last December, that the checks the city conducted were cursory, and failed to uncover important facts about a developer. At that meeting, the mayor sternly scolded city staff for their lack of diligence in performing these checks.

    Bell said that Burk is “well known in the community.” It hardly bears mentioning that sitting in the Sedgwick County jail at this moment is another developer who was very well known and very highly regarded in his time. So having a familiar face is not sufficient.

    Bell also revealed that now Burk has equity partners, and the city will be vetting them. That’s too late, however. The ordinance has been passed.

    Bell said that the risk analysis has been performed. That was subject of the inquiry I made in my email to Bell. But there was no mention of that in the agenda materials, and Bell didn’t answer my email.

    Mr. Burk then spoke. He said that the fee being paid to the developer ($39,277) is not being paid to him personally, but is instead “overhead and profit for the contractor doing the work.”

    This is hair-splitting at its finest. If that money wasn’t supplied by this loan, Burk would have to pay it himself.

    He also questioned a figure of 6.5% for an interest rate that I used. That figure is from the agenda material Bell’s office prepared. If citizens can’t rely on that — and remember I contacted Burk and Bell’s office too — what can they rely on?

    Burk said that in today’s market it’s difficult to borrow adequate funds from commercial banks. There’s a reason for that, I would submit.

    He mentioned also that he’d been vetted. Again, this would have been from the time when the vetting process wasn’t rigorous enough to be meaningful.

    Additionally, any vetting process of Burk should take into account his involvement as part of the development team for Waterwalk. This highly-subsidized development in downtown Wichita is recognized as a failure by even the Wichita Eagle editorial board.

    Mayor Carl Brewer thanked Burk for answering questions, because “sometimes information is put out there that’s inaccurate and that’s the way it’s left, as being inaccurate.”

    To the extent that my questions were based on inaccurate information — and that something that’s far from true — some things could have been cleared up if my inquiries the day before had been successful. While it may seem that inquiring the day before a meeting is waiting until the last minute, the agenda and accompanying material for the Tuesday meetings of the council isn’t available until the Thursday or Friday before. So there’s not a lot of time for citizens to act.

    In the end, anything I might have said or questions I might have raised probably would have made little difference in the council’s action. Burk and his wife have made generous campaign contributions to most members of the council, including a total of $2,000 to Janet Miller’s recent successful campaign (that’s the maximum amount it’s possible for two people to contribute). If I’d paid that much, I’d probably feel like I didn’t have to answer questions from pesky citizens.

    A question to raise, and one that needs answering, is if this is a new strategy the city will use in the future: Don’t answer questions from citizens. Provide incomplete or erroneous information in the material you make available. Then, if citizens ask questions, you get to point out all the ways they’re wrong — and on television, too.

  • Fraud, deceit, and misinformation regarding carbon dioxide

    An edited version of this editorial by Dennis Hedke appeared in the Wichita Eagle today. This is the original version.

    EPA declares greenhouse gases a threat, (Renee Shoof, McClatchy Newspapers, 4/18/09). This pronouncement follows a U.S. Supreme Court conclusion that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant, with a directive to the EPA to study whether this gas posed a threat to our health and welfare, or whether the science was too uncertain to make a judgment.

    Let me be unequivocal. CO2 is not now, has never been, and will never be a “pollutant.” It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, harmless gas that is one of the essential components to the life of all plants and animals on this planet. Current concentrations of the gas in earth’s atmosphere average about 380 parts per million (ppm), or about 0.04 %. Current estimates of the human-induced fraction are about 5% of the 0.04%, or about 0.002%.

    Let’s talk economics. The US government has defined a strategy (McCain-Lieberman) which on best-case seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of CO2 by 31,400 tons/year by 2050. The calculated temperature reduction due to this “improvement”: 0.04 degrees Celsius, or 0.08 degrees Fahrenheit. The calculated cost: $1.3 trillion. Another one of those trillion dollar “deals” for America.

    Earth’s temperature has been rising steadily since around 1750, the end of the Little Ice Age. This temperature increase is independent of CO2 concentration. In fact, what the data shows is that CO2 concentration increases well after the temperature increases on a global scale. Water vapor makes up 90% of the greenhouse gas mix, and is the dominant factor in any greenhouse effects.

    If CO2 were a pollutant, then why would our US submarines allow an environmental concentration of this very same gas in the neighborhood of 8,000 ppm? It is unconscionable that our government is demanding that we try to regulate the concentration of this gas in the atmosphere, knowing full well that concentrations more than 20 times that amount produce absolutely no ill effects on American sailors.

    34,000 American scientists, including myself, have signed a Petition demanding that the United States disassociate from the Kyoto Protocol, and instead follow the actual data and evidence which clearly shows that CO2 presents not even the slightest potential for damage or risk to our environment. It is high time the fraud, deceit and misinformation being disseminated and thrust upon the American public be brought to a screeching halt.

    If any government representative wishes to debate any aspect of this matter, I would welcome that opportunity, anytime, anywhere.

    Dennis Hedke
    Geophysicist
    Wichita, KS