Powerline notes

everal liberals emailed us a link to this AP story. As usual, they are gleeful about anything that suggests weakness on the part of the United States or its armed forces. Disgusting.

Absolutely. That the Army having trouble recruiting should come as welcome news to anyone is utterly disgusting. They do truly hate this country.

Now, the real question is why? Why the lack of recruits? Yes, the economy is still going string, and yes, fear about Iraq persist. But that is only part of the story.

There are several factors at play, and the economy and Iraq are but a small part. One, the Army is changing. Today's soldier is entering a far more highly technical force. The simple fact remains that they are not recruiting the lowest common denominator anymore. They can't.

Look at today's weapons systems and the training and skill required by even the privates and corporals. Even artillery, the "Queen of the battlefield" is controlled and guided by satellites and computers. They can drop a shell from fifteen miles and place it not only on the bad guys house, but his bedroom or living room. Every soldier is trakced via GPS, and he is in almost constant communications with his fellow platoon members, his platoon with the other companies, the companies with the batallion, and so on. We have a truly networked infantry.

The fact is that today's Army can't recruit many who otherwise would have seen the Army as an alternative. They don't have the necessary education and skills. This narrows the pool of possible recruits. Perhaps that is why the Army has begun looking for recruits on college campuses. More and more are joining while in college, some after. This is a situation that the Army has never faced.

Then there is another factor, and that is that more and more of today's kids are simply unsuited for military life. We live in the gimme generation, the "I want it all and I want it now" era. Anyone who would compare this generation to the "greatest generation" will be sorely disappointed. We are seeing the effects of a truly modern, in actually, a post-modern society.

They are raised in schools to be "sensitive", to share their feelings, to openly question authority as if it's a God given right at birth. We have grown apathetic in our wealth and vain in our luxuries. We expect more and we expect it with little effort. We pass blame llike a run and shoot offense, yet accept personal responsibility as if a plague. We sue fast food restaurants for greasy food and we sue tobacco companies for a deadly product. Yet, we expect, no, we demand, the freedom to do whatever we want without question or judgement. Any suggestion of moderation is met with "don't impose your values on me" reflexively.

The Army is met with two insurmountable problems both of which contribute to an ever shrinking pool of qualified recruits. Nobody wants to talk about that. Ask any recruiter, and ask him what his biggest problems are. They still get many to walk in, just not nearly as many who can qualify.

The Army is faced with a compunding problem. If one investigates the changes in Army doctorine and training, from basic and beyond, it becomes clear that the Army of the movies we all know and love is long since gone. Soldiers are given more training and less correction, even in basic. From early on in basic, recruits are given real world scenarios, added responsibiltiies, and challenges that stress the mind as much, if not more than the body. Today's soldier is a thinking soldier, a team player, himself truly an "Army of one".

When they cheer about the lack of recruits, will they also cheer a society that cannot produce enough warriors to protect us?

So close, yet so far.

The NEA's monthly, NEAToday, has a piece titled The Bill's Come Due about low teacher salaries. I know, teachers complaining about low salaries. What's new? Sadly, not much.

Educators...know they shouldn't have to choose between serving the public and enjoying a standard of living decent enough to raise a family. Yet far too many do. Drawn by their desire to mold young minds, teachers and education support professionals (ESPs) too often are forced to swallow subpar wages in the bargain.

NEA has set out to change that with a new salary initiative to win a $40,000 minimum salary for every teacher and an "appropriate living wage" as starting pay for all ESPs. The campaign aims to establish NEA as the national advocate and "go-to" organization on professional-level pay for public education employees—through research, negotiator training, and partnerships with state affiliates bargaining or lobbying for better pay.

"If we in NEA don't start talking about professional pay now, we're never going to do it," argues Bill Raabe, director of NEA Collective Bargaining and Member Advocacy. "We've got to talk about this issue in every forum, not just where it's comfortable."

Let's examine this for a moment. Why $40,000? Why not $50,000? Or perhaps $60,000? And an "appropriate living wage"? How does one go about determining appropriate?

Let's take another look at this. Perhaps you've heard the old bromide about ballplayer getting millions while teachers get so little. I have a simple question: how many people will pay to watch me teach? Chances are not too many. When you hear this, just remember where the criticism really is aimed: you. See, you watch pro sports, you support the advertisers, and you demand being entertained by athletes. How dare you!! It's actually the same thing with WalMart. Sure, attack the company, but what about the millions of shoppers? Is it really WalMart that destroys towns, or isn't it actually Sam's customers?

But where my good friends at the NEA (yes, I am a member. Long story...) err is that they fail to see what is so patently obvious.

The salary gap between teaching and other careers starts early. For example, the latest employer survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers documented an alarming gap between average starting pay for teaching and that for professions such as accounting ($44,564) and software design/development ($53,729).

Both accounting and software design have in many cases, much more challenging curriculum. One needn't even be a history major, or even have taken a history class to teach history.

According to data from National Center for Educational Statistics (Table 252), the top ten degrees granted in 2002 were:
1) Business 281,000
2) Social Sciences and History 132,000
3) Education 106,000
4) Psychology 76,000
5) Health professions and related sciences 66,000
6) Visual and performing arts 66,000
7) Communications 62,000
8) Biological and life sciences 60,000
9) Engineering 59,000
10) English and literature 53,000

For reference, there were only 17,000 physical science and 12,000 math degrees conferred.

The basic principles of supply and demand are at work here. The demand for psych, education, history, and communication majors is not terribly high, while the supply of those is excessive. There are more than 25 times as many of those than math majors, and more than 18 times as many as physical science majors. In other words, many teachers are just not employable outside of education.

"Educators should be adequately compensated—so they don't have to worry about paying bills while teaching other people's kids," says Washington State Teacher of the Year Tamara Steen

In truth, most are. if they can find another job that will pay them more, than...

"One decided to become a nurse because she'd get paid more," Musch notes, "and another who wanted to be a biology teacher—he was passionate and loved working with kids—decided to become a doctor instead.

That's called the free market. Someone was ready, willing, and able to pay more for their services. And they were ready, willing, and able to work.

The article describes a fact that any economist (except for one who works for the NY Times) would understand:

The same could be said about the teaching profession as a whole. Simply put, it's hard to hang on to quality folks if you don't pay them enough.

This is called the law of supply. The higher the price (here, the salary), the greater the quantity supplied (here, teachers). But, let's stop here for a moment.

Nobody is going to argue that teachers aren't important. However, consider this: I am contracted to work 185 days per year. Take a typical work year for most other jobs: 50 weeks (two week vacation) is 350 days - weekends (100 days) - holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. call it 10 days) and most jobs are 240 days per year. In other words, as a teacher, I work 3/4 of the time of most jobs. Yet, after two years I am tenured and basically cannot be fired (even for blogging!!!). I have a guaranteed paycheck, outstanding retirement (CalSTRS instead of Soc. Sec, hmmm...), generous health benefits, and honestly, the job is challenging but not stressful.

There is another factor which the article completely misses. In comparing an accountant or software engineer, the daily pressure is simply not there. An accountant or a software engineer doesn't have the luxury of missing a deadline, not completing all the requirements, etc.

Clearly, there are compelling reasons to hike educator salaries—and considerable room for growth to reach the goals of NEA's salary initiative.

It's a give and take world, something economists call trade-offs. There is an opportunity cost to everything. For us, job security, nice benefits, generous retirement, fewer work days, control over curriculum, site based decisions, etc., come with a reduced salary. But there is another cost as well. By ensuring job security, we make it nearly impossible to remove bad teachers. No, I don't believe there are many, but there are enough. But sadly, it only takes one.

We can't have it both ways. If we want salaries comparable to other professions, than we're going to have to yield on some things. Here are a few things we can do:

1) in all secondary schools, you can teach only in the area of your major
In California, one needs only a minor, 10 upper division units, or successfully passing a content based test. One needs to teach a subject they have demonstrated mastery of, not just proficiency.

2) in all elementary schools, require a non-education major
Most elementary school teachers will have a degree in elementary education. They need to demonstrate they completed a degree with a little more academic rigor.

3) eliminate tenure, or make it conditionally renewable
Once tenured, teachers are more secure than gerrymandered congressmen. Without the need to perform, what incentive is there.

4) Eliminate equal pay guidelines
As it stands, pay is dependent upon years of service and degree earned. No consideration is taken for actual supply and demand of certain degrees. Pay math and science majors more than history majors.

5) Give principles more control, yet hold them more accountable
Require the schools, and administration, to produce results. Give them the control to move, and remove, teachers as necessary. Yet, if the schools don't perform, the administrators need replacing.

6) Change the credentialing process and make it more transitional friendly
As of right now, it is a long process to become a teacher. To earn a credential, one must take a plethora of nonsensical education courses which have little to do with instruction and much to do with professorial employment. If we want to attract people to go into teaching, those with real world and valuable life experiences, than they need a faster transition process.

There are other things we can do, but that would be a good place to start. These suggestions would have the effect of increasing demand for certain degrees. This will raise prices, i.e. salaries. In addition, it will encourage more people to enter the fields like math and science.

Also, by giving up certain protections, we can justify a salary increase by making our jobs more comparable to other professions that don't enjoy such security.

There is one last factor that isn't considered but certainly must be. Schools often work against the public will and public interest. One needs only look at the conduct of teachers unions in California as they rail against Governor Schwarzenegger. Or they can look at schools that refuse to follow the law regarding bilingual education and state testing, that demonstrate blatant hostility towards students of faith, promote the divisive multiculturalism, teach sex education absent any parental involvement, or churn out graduates that can barely read their diplomas.

We cannot tell the public that teachers can't be evaluated and expect to get paid more. We cannot tell the public that teachers who are not able to earn a similar salary in the real world are somehow deserving of higher salaries. We cannot expect that an institution which ignores every other principle of economics will be able to overlook by the laws of supply and demand.

The simple truth about teachers and salaries is this: they pay us what they do because if one quits, there are usually ten more qualified people ready to step in. And if someone is ready, willing, and able to work for the salary offered, he or she is not underpaid. If they cannot find gainful employment at an equivalent salary elsewhere, then the market has spoken. They are not underpaid and perhaps they are even overpaid.

Let's see how "innocent until proven guilty" Tom DeLay is treated by his opponents enemies.

If he's guilty, then he's gone. But what if this all turns out to be a witch hunt and he's totally exonerated?

It couldn't be possible that a double standard exists.

Time for another installment.

John Stossel always does a great job investigating and reporting. Today is no different in Why Don't People Trust the Market?

He (NY's senior senator Chuck Schumer) is eager to spend your money to cure his panic. Schumer wants a new "Manhattan Project" that would use huge amounts of your money to fund "independent energy sources." I reminded him that the last time government tried that, it wasted billions on the totally failed synfuels project. Schumer said that was a failure because "political leaders" chose synfuels, but this time Congress would have "non-politicians" decide what projects to fund.

Sure they would.

If non-politicians are going to decide what projects to fund, why do we need Chuck Schumer? We already have a system in which non-politicians decide what projects to fund. It's called "the market."

If the price of a barrel of oil stays above $50, lots of entrepreneurs will scramble for ways to supply cheaper energy. They'll come up with alternative energy sources or better ways to get oil out of the ground. At $50 a barrel, it's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. As Peter Huber points out in his book, "The Bottomless Well," the Athabasca tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for 100 years.

But Schumer and other politicians don't trust the market.

Extracting oil requires huge outlays of capital making it an economy of scale. What that also means is that costs decline continuously with production, i.e. the marginal cost decreases with output. In addition, you almost never reach what is known as the point of diminishing marginal returns, or when you do, it is at capacity.

For example, an electric company (a hot topic here in So. California) can keep adding more homes and business as long as it has excess production capacity, and the cost of each new home is very very small. In other words, the marginal cost (the cost of the next unit) keeps declining. That is until it reaches capacity as happened a couple of years ago.

At that point, the marginal cost goes from pennies to billions of dollars. Why? Adding one more house requires a new factory.

The result: we had blackouts and paid huge prices for out of state electricity.

Now, most firms will produce where the marginal cost is equal to the market price. Though this is not entirely perfect, in a competitive market, as prices rise (and with it, profits) the units with a higher marginal cost can be produced. Thus, it is only natural that we'd see production of hard to extract oil only after the price has risen to cover costs.

The car industry fought federal efforts to mandate air bags in new cars for years. Today, no such law exists, yet almost every new car sold comes with air bags standard. No federal law exists mandating that American auto manufacturers build more hybrids and fewer SUV's. Yet today, the big three are all shifting productive capacity to hybrid engines while customers wait sometimes months for a new hybrid.

Why? Drivers are demanding more hybrids and are willing to pay higher prices for them. The suppliers are simply responding to the corresponding shift (i.e. increase) in demand, much of it due to higher prices for a complementary good, gasoline..

It's not voodoo or gouging or trickery. It's just thinking an economist.

Glenn Reynolds notes that Mickey Kaus wonders why the NY Times hates poor people.

Simple. Poor people aren't their target demographic. They target feel good, wealthy, uptown liberals who proclaim solidarity with the poor and think that by tipping the waiter a few more bucks and only buying their $4 lattes from "responsible" companies, that they are somehow absolved of their guilt when they pull their $75,000 Mercedes into their gated communities.

Brendan Miniter details what many people, including myself have been arguing, and that is that the Republicans are now the party of big government. And a corollary to that is that the democrats have a golden opportunity to exploit it.

EJ Dionne, in a temporary bout of sanity, lays out the the biggest problem for th edemocrats:

But the party's problems are structural and can be explained by three numbers: 21, 34, and 45. According to the network exit polls, 21 percent of the voters who cast ballots in 2004 called themselves liberal, 34 percent said they were conservative and 45 percent called themselves moderate.

Those numbers mean that liberal-leaning Democrats are far more dependent than conservatively inclined Republicans on alliances with the political center. Democrats second-guess themselves because they have to.

What he fails to mention is this: the country is far more "conservative" than "liberal". However, what is obvious to most is this: there is a natural Republican majority. For years, people registered democrat and voted Republican for president (Reagan, Bush), and only recently began registering Republican. In addition, many democrats were only so nominally. Zel Miller might be an extreme case, but Sam Nunn, John Breaux, and practically every democrat from a rural southern district hardly represented a moderate democrat nowhere to be found today.

For Republicans, the real problem lies not in the national angst, but in conservative angst. In other words, people like me. I am very willing, in fact, I am hoping, to vote for a democrat who is tough on national security. He, or she, will almost surely have spending plans curtailed in a Republican congress, as Clinton had happen in the 1990's.

As Dionne notes:

Or consider the lay of the land for the 2006 congressional elections. It takes 218 seats to form a majority in the House of Representatives. Kerry carried only 180 congressional districts, according to the Almanac of American Politics. Put another way, Democrats, according to the Almanac, now hold and have to defend 41 House districts that Bush carried. Republicans are defending only 18 districts that Kerry carried.

In other words, the chances are very slim that the democrats can retake the House. More to the point, if they hope to do so, they need my vote. I am ready to oblige for sure, but this highlights their dilemma: they are beholden to the far left to a much greater degree than the Republicans are beholden to the far right.

Their base is far more left than the Republican's is right. Any national message would countermand the lefty blogosphere, the Deaniacs, the MoveOn-atics, and the general assortment of coalitions they rely on. Their union support, once the backbone of the party, is comprised solely of public employees, a group deovted to even more spending and even larger government.

Their dilemma is thus: they can't win without my vote, and even more depressing, they can't win with my vote. To get my vote, they need to be fiscally responsible and strong on defense. But being so will jeopardize their core constituencies. And along with that, their financial coffers.

What a sad state we're in. One party that doesn't have to act responsibly, and the other that can't.

Call me callous, cold hearted, even mean spirited, but I have just run out of any compassion for Cindy Sheehan. Let's just call her what she really is, an opportunist. Everyone has sympathy for a mother whose child has been killed in war. It is human nature. But when a grieving mother turns her pain and suffering into opportunity, one has to pause.

Does she even remember why she began, or is she so consumed with all the attention? Does she really believe she's honoring her son's memory, or is she aware of how crassly she's exploiting him?

To rehash, she met with the president, was apparently not upset afterwards, and went home. Only much later did she discover that she needed a second audience. And only much later did she discover her deep seated anti-war sentiments. Or was it that she thought as public sentiment turned against the war, that she could capitalize?

As she turned her Texas girl scout jamboree into a national three ring circus, she has collected an odd assortment of lunatics, fringe cases, and far left causes. She is joined by the likes of Cynthia McKinney, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson who are equally as egregious in grabbing whatever camera time they can then promptly leaving.

I don't know which is the sorrier spectacle: the press who've latched onto to her in another attempt to destroy the president, the nut cases she's attracted, the shameless political hacks who've used her for cheap publicity, or Ms. Sheehan herself, so oblivious to the tool she's become to all of them.

So call me whatever you want, I have no more compassion for Cindy Sheehan. She doesn't deserve any.

The real story behind this is not the prisoner abuse scandal, but the fact that a soldier was arrested, tried, convicted, and will go to jail and that entire process was thoroughly transparent. While the administration's opponents enemies used Abu Ghraib to attack the war effort, and by proxy the president and his war policies, they seem to forgot, how conveniently too, that in few other countries would this even have happened.

Were Dutch soldiers punished for Srebrenica? Were UN troops punished for the rapes in the Congo? What about the French troops in the Ivory Coast? Not a word was heard.

In what turned out to be far more hope than fact, there really were no mass killings and Abu Ghraib was not reopened under US management.

For all the criticism of the US, both here and abroad, it turns out that the surest way to achieve justice is in fact the the very country and her system that is most castigated. Lyndie England, had she been in any other country, would never had stood trial. Either way, she gets off clean or gets a bullet to the head.

Seems that this doesn't make the news. I guess it's not damaging to the president or the war. Since she's going to jail, thus no way to help the enemy, best to let the story die.

As I mentioned last post, the leftists march under a banner of peace, something they now absolutely nothing about. Which begs the question, what is peace?

I know I've written about this before. Peace is conditional not situational. France and Germany were not shooting at each other in 1869, 1913, or 1938 yet all but the most ignorant could rightly argue they were at peace. For the most lucid and compete exposition of war and peace, read Donald Kagan's masterpiece Origins of War and Preservations of Peace.

The mere fact that two nations are not shooting at each other, a situation, does not guarantee that there is a peaceful condition. In fact, it can be quite the opposite. It is well acknowledged that Hitler responded not to French and British aggressiveness, but rather to their declared and expressed pasivity. The failure to use force in the small led to war on a global scale.

Recently I saw a woman wearing a shirt that said "Code Pink Women for peace" and thought to myself how painful it must be to be so ignorant. My original feeling was one of pity and sorrow. I couldn't imagine being so naive yet so brazen as to put it on public display. I guess the only thing to compare would be to wear a shirt that proclaimed the earth is flat.

Glenn Reynolds links to an excellent article from UC Berkeley's paper in which the author states that the protesters aren't even protesting the same war as in 2003. While it is sage advice, it displays the complete idiocy and vacuousness of the anti-war left. They truly don't know they don't know.

As even the author, an original war opponent, notes:

For one thing, Saddam Hussein has been out of power for some time, and we have long ago given up hope of finding weapons of mass destruction. For another, there now actually are foreign insurgents in the country, working with Sunni Arabs in the resistance, finally making Iraq part of Bush's "War on Terror," albeit after the fact.

There are so many problems with this statement, but the obvious intent is that yes, Iraq is now part of the war on terror. But here again, the left displays it's ignorance and/or intellectual dishonesty. There were terrorists in Iraq, even al Qaeda. This is not "Bush's war on terror", but the entire free world's. Iraq is not "after the fact" but a long time player in international terror. And lastly, there is not one shred of evidence to conclude that Saddam did not possess WMD's prior to the invasion.

But no matter.

The moronic belief that somehow removing the troops from Iraq is peace, or that the situation in March 2003 was peace goes to the heart of the problem. For the left doesn't know what peace is, nor how it is achieved. And what is saddest, and scariest, of all, is that what they desire is not peace, but simply another prelude to larger conflict.

If you don't think so, remember who said America is a paper tiger. We weren't attacked because we were strong, but because we were presumed to be weak. In all their bellowing, the left reinforces this belief, and in doing so, invites more war, not less. And unless I'm mistaken, more war is not peace.

The news seems so slow these days. Sure there's plenty of disasters but an odd thing has happened, a movement against wasteful government spending is rising. Instead of the "spend whatever it takes" mentality, people are asking some very serious questions abotu where all that federal money goes and how it's spent. I say it's about time. So, what is the left left with?

Always an interesting amalgam of disparate interests united by a common hatred, they find themselves in an unusual dilemma. The very same government which allowed the disasters to happen is oddly enough the only source of salvation. Yet people aren't buying it anymore. How can the threat be the cure?

In Washington, or wherever they congregate, the same littany of complaints and grievances are heard. The anti-war movement is exposed for it's true nature, with Cindy Sheehan simply the latest trick up their sleeves. She provided a focal point for rallies, but nothing of substance. Perhaps that is why her rallies draw little public support and descend into the typical mish mash of causes.

There's the Palestinian cause, the environmental cause, the race/gender militants, comunists, anarchists, and every assorted fringe element. Were there any resonance with the public, were there any gains politically, we'd see leading democrats there. There were none. Whether by conviction or convenience, they want nothing to do with Ms. Sheehan or her cadre. Even kos has criticized the protesters.

As GayPatriot asks If Iraq is like Vietnam, how come the rallies keep getting smaller? . He's exactly right. Iraq is nothing like Vietnam. Then, there was a unified opposition that for whatever reasons, had a moral foundation. Though I rightly believe that they hurt (possibly purposefully) our war effort, and condemned millions to unimaginable suffereing and death, theirs was backdropped by the civil rights movement, a just and noble venture.

Today nothing of the sort exists. We see no difference between the protests "for peace" and the anti-globalization rioters in Seattle. In fact, the anti-war rallies are simply a continuation of the previous efforts. The war provides the means, not the motive. All we get are leftists on parade, a sad and disgusting mix of worn out bromides hiding under tha banner of a cause they know nothing about: peace.