A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Congressional Pensions

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Maureen Groppe and Paul Barton have an article about Congressional pensions. Long time lawmakers Sen. Richard Lugar and Rep. Dan Burton will be getting pensions with the fairly eye-popping numbers of $125,000 and $117,000, respectively. These numbers are big if you go with the political fiction that these are just ordinary schmoes doing an ordinary job, and nobody I know gets a pension like that. (Nobody I know gets a pension anymore — no move to a defined contribution plan?) But, if you go the other route, and look at these folks as being more like senior vice-presidents of a $2.7 trillion company, then their benefit package is fairly small.

I get it: why should we suffering taxpayers have to pay so that these public servants can live better than we do? One rationale is that, if we don’t, then companies well-positioned to exploit their lawmaking powers will. A lawmaker will have a choice between playing ball and, when he leaves office, being taken care of by lucrative, easy private sector jobs or, standing up for the public interest and, once bounced out of office, unemployed with no obvious source of income. The public will never be in a position to offer benefits packages that are anywhere near as lucrative as those that can be offered by big businesses with an interest in having the government look the other way or providing big subsidies. But, with a house payment and basic needs taken care of, a Congressperson at least has a solid option of taking the high ground.

Still and all, it grates to see that a guy like Mike Pence – who hasn’t done a damn thing in eleven years – is entitled to $32,000 per year once he turns 62.

Hatred is Learned

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This clip shows a church in Greenfield, Greensburg, Indiana where a young child gets a hooting, hollering, cheering ovation for getting up in front of the congregation to sing “ain’t no homos in heaven.”

The delighted, amused reaction of the jackass behind the kid is what makes my blood boil. The kids don’t know any better. The rest of the congregation is faceless. But, that guy is clearly proud and happy that the child is using a slur to declare that gay people are excluded from heaven (and presumably condemned to hell.) So much for the pretense about loving the sinner but hating the sin.

Someone said that this does not reflect Christianity. That may well be correct. In fact, my reading of the Bible suggests that the ministry of Jesus does not particularly require any antipathy toward homosexuality. Paul Loebe suggests that the homophobic component of modern Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with the “sexually insecure, homophobic” Apostle Paul. Even if No True Scotsman Christian would act in such a fashion, I think some account has to be taken of the fact that homophobia is frequently expressed in the name of Christianity. Many congregations take the position that gays are God’s children too and, if they are sinful, so is everyone else. God loves them all. If those sorts of voices were more prominent in our culture wars, I suspect incidents like these would strike less of a nerve for me.

Leaving the religious angle to one side, this is an example of a culture teaching its children to hate. I think such teaching is pretty much inevitable when a culture strengthens the “in-group” by defining itself against an “out-group” that is regarded as inferior in some fashion. I don’t know what it looks like from the inside, but to me, as an outsider, it looks like child abuse; breaking a perfectly good kid and teaching him to hate. Laughing and clapping and cheering by way of rewarding the kid for abandoning his good nature.

Update One friend noted that Greensburg was the town where 15 year old Billy Lucas lived before committing suicide after being the victim of anti-gay bullying in 2010.

Another friend noted that it’s inevitable that members of that congregation are or know and love someone who is gay and yet they rise and cheer in solidarity with these cretins.

Galupo on Mitt Romney

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Scott Galupo has a column in the American Conservative whose brevity is matched by its brutality. I’m probably quoting too much, but:

[Romney] combines Bill Clinton’s mendacity with Al Gore’s charm. . . . A candidate who promises to close the deficit but whose budget plan will only make it worse? A candidate who’s pushing for yet more tax cuts for the wealthy when there’s no evidence that such cuts will spark more or faster growth than they did the last time they were tried? A candidate who compensates for ignorance on foreign policy with pointless bellicosity? A candidate whose general-election victory would at least marginally increase the chances of war with Iran?

…

The choice between Obama and Romney is no choice at all. It can be summed up in that famous two-word review of Spinal Tap’s Shark Sandwich album.

The Spinal Tap reference is perhaps more apt than he intended. A related joke is that “life is like a shit sandwich, the more bread you have, the better it tastes.” Near as I can tell, that’s Romney’s economic plan in a nutshell.

The Indiana Dept. of Education Gets Letters

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There is an interesting discussion brewing between State Rep. Randy Truitt and the Indiana Dept. of Education, reported upon by Mikel Livingston. Based on concerns expressed to him by educators in Warren and Tippecanoe County, Rep. Truitt has questions about whether the Indiana Dept. of Education’s implementation of education legislation actually reflects the language and intent of that legislation. The Indiana Dept. of Education is working on a formal response, but its response to the newspaper was that (and I paraphrase) those silly teachers are telling tall tales.

Rep. Truitt’s letter is here (pdf). By way of disclosure, I know Randy, I like him, and through working with him a bit, I’ve grown to respect him a lot. I think if he ran the state based on his own preferences, I’m not sure I’d find a lot to disagree with him about. My primary quarrel with him is that he’s one member in a large body, and it’s politically necessary for him to go along with initiatives of his colleagues that I don’t care for. By contrast, I don’t know Tony Bennett, head of the Department of Education; and I do know that I’ve disagreed fairly sharply with some of his policy initiatives — intentional or not, I feel like his initiatives undermine local control and seek to undermine the public school model in favor of a private one. (And, for that matter, I’ve not had warm feelings about Truitt’s challenger, Rick Cornstuble, who has mixed feelings about Truitt’s efforts in this matter.)

Rep. Truitt’s concerns include reports that, rather than retaining local control, teachers would be evaluated from Indianapolis without the evaluator even necessarily observing the teacher directly; that it would be possible for the Indiana Dept. of Education to override local evaluations of a teacher’s performance. He is concerned that the State Department of Education does not recognize itself as being subordinate to the General Assembly; that it’s a tool to implement the will of the General Assembly, not the other way around.

Another concern is that the for the IREAD-3 test, schools are evaluated on which students happen to be in their school at the moment of the test, with no consideration as to how much or little that school had to do with that particular student’s education. If the kid moved from a bad school yesterday but fails the test in your school, that’s on your school.

Here is a passage I liked:

If our educators are required to be evaluated by data and are required to be given a school grade, quite possibly our IDOE leaders should be equally accountable for the state data. They should be graded on the number of turnaround schools they have. This would be a motivator to encourage IDOE to work to prevent these rather than give the perception that educators currently have, which is the IDOE wants to take over more schools faster. One great idea is to give our local schools (our community) the flexibility to improve instead of waiting to some arbitrary length of time and then give that same flexibility to an outside source with no community “skin” in the game.

The entire letter is worth a read — particularly by those who are more knowledgeable about Indiana’s education system than I am. I can get the sense of the concerns, but I’m not in a position to evaluate the details.

Of Girls & Boys & Soraya Chemaly

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Soraya Chemaly has a powerful message to girls. It tells them, in essence, when girls are told by men (usually under the guise of religion) that they are shameful or sacred, but, in any event, must use or not use their bodies in a particular way; it’s because these men fear them.

Maybe it’s fear. Certainly I get a fearful, self-loathing vibe from St. Augustine underlying his hang ups about sex. But, if I had to give my gut reaction to why patriarchal cultures oppress women, I’d go for greed, not fear, as the primary emotion. Greed for domestic control, sexual control, getting more and doing less – imposing more burdens on women so there are less burdens on themselves. Hunting is more fun and more rewarding than hauling water. Taking what she wants out of the domestic equation makes life easier.

But, that’s just my gut reaction. I’m a privileged white male and so don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about such things. Aside from the “God told me so” explanation, what’s the reasoning -if not fear- behind imposing cultural distinctions between men and women beyond what they (particularly the women) might freely choose for themselves?

People Are Worthless

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Are people worthless? It occurred to me that this is the underlying assumption in many ways when we regard public expenditures as sunk costs for which we don’t recognize getting anything of value in return. That’s the primary way in which cuts to those expenditures can be viewed as, essentially, a purely good thing. After all, if we killed everyone off, taxes and government would go away entirely. Nirvana!

I’m not sure how closely related the cause of the firing neuron is to the idea that came to mind, but here is the article that triggered my thought. It was a column about the economics of health care. Particularly this passage:

If we actually prevent diseases or conditions, would our bills go up in the end? People would live longer and develop lots of other chronic diseases that can be expensive to control or treat. And they would draw Social Security.

In the fiscal sense, health improvement can cost us money. But that totally ignores the value to society.

For example, H.I.V. prior to antiretroviral therapy was like a death sentence. With the introduction of those drugs, we took a killer and made it more like a chronic illness. There was a lot of hand-wringing about how do we pay for the drugs. But that completely ignores the value to society.

We think of health care as an expense, but we really should be thinking of health care as an investment. We want to invest where we have the greatest return. I would put prevention in that bucket.

In some fashion, which I have not entirely pinned down yet, I think this also ties into the world view where the biologically human life is of critical importance before birth and after brain death but where the biographical human life in between those points is a matter of relative indifference.

Urbanophile on New York Parking Meter Privatization

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The Urbanophile has a post about New York City potentially privatizing its parking meter operation. He notes that Chicago’s meter privatization was a fail but that such projects are not necessarily doomed to failure; and offers some notions that are probably applicable generally.

First is, you have to appreciate how dynamic the system is. Contracts have to be able to evolve – practically, that probably means shorter term contracts, easier escape clauses, or an ability to amend duties.

Another is appropriate allocation of risk. Renn notes that one of the main benefits to a municipality of privatization is shifting risk but that all too often, privatization contracts do not leave the contractor with much in the way of appreciable risk. They need to make a profit, of course, but assumption of risk is one of the primary justifications for allowing someone profit (labor and innovation being the two other ones that come to mind.)

He suggests that it’s too bad former Indianapolis mayor and New York deputy mayor Steve Goldsmith is not working on the issue given his experience with privatization efforts in Indianapolis. I’d be interested to know how successful Goldsmith was in protecting Indianapolis from risk by shifting it on to private contractors.

All too often what you get with privatization is all of the monopoly of a municipality with none of the transparency and with more of the compensation getting shifted away from ground level workers and up the management chain.

Toll Road: With 90% of Lease Term Left, Money Almost Gone

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Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, reported last week that the toll road money is almost gone. You might recall that, back in 2006, instead of proposing to raise the tolls ourselves, pay off the bonds, and owning the Indiana Toll Road outright, Gov. Daniels proposed a long term lease to a private consortium. (Mixing incompetence with pandering, the Democrats attacked the fact that the consortium was a foreign operation, sort of missing the point about what made this a questionable idea.)

I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone

The $3.8 billion payout for the lease was, according to Aaron Renn, a good trade; he knows more than I do about such things, so I’ll trust him on the price. But, the fact remains that the tolls remain much higher than they were, and we’ve lost control of the asset for another seven decades. And, according to Nikki Kelly, the money is mostly gone.

As of Jan. 1, the state had $1.7 billion still in the Major Moves Construction Fund.

But Will Wingfield, spokesman for INDOT, said several major projects are being awarded this year and next – obligating most of the money to be paid when construction is done in the next two years.

That means all the money should be spoken for at the end of June 2013.

That leaves two main questions: 1) Will the return on those projects be great enough to justify the higher tolls on the motorists of Northern Indiana for the next seventy years; and 2) What adjustments (higher taxes or more road deterioration) will be made now that the asset has been sold and the money’s all gone?

John Gregg is apparently favoring the deterioration option; advocating for elimination of the gas tax. Gregg says he’d pay for the shortfall by reducing government inefficiency elsewhere. But, I think by this time most people recognize “reduce government waste” as a candidate’s dodge; meaning they don’t want to alienate potential voters by saying they’d have to raise taxes elsewhere or by specifying cuts to a particular program which someone inevitably regards as valuable.

You can see a an overview of the distribution from gas tax revenues here (pdf – p.26), but a lot of it goes to maintain roads and highways. It’s easy for me to criticize John Gregg, because I expect him to be at least somewhat responsible about governing. I find myself being less disappointed in Mike Pence because I don’t even expect real solutions for governing from him – just vague conservative slogans and an indifference to whether application of those slogans actually improves the lives of Hoosiers.

At any rate, it looks like the roads are likely to get bumpier in Indiana in the near future.

That’s *Chief* Justice Dickson to You!

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I was pleased to learn that Justice Dickson will take the position of Chief Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court. Mostly it’s just good old-fashioned home-town bias. He practice for many years (17 I think I heard) as a general practice lawyer in Lafayette. He had been a Supreme Court Justice for many years before I even became a lawyer. But, I’m told, when he first came to town, he shared office space with Fred Hoffman who founded my law firm. So there is an extremely tenuous connection there. Later, he practiced with some other excellent local lawyers I’ve had the privilege of working with since I’ve been in town. (Bob Reiling, Dan Teder, and Jerry Withered are the ones I know).

One thing that I have appreciated is Justice Dickson’s efforts to maintain his connections to the Tippecanoe County bar. Seems like he’s at events every year, if not more frequently. And, just because he comes from a legal background with which I identify, I think I have confidence that we’ll have similar frames of reference when looking at a legal problem. While I’ve certainly disagreed with decisions from time to time, I’ve never gotten the sense of anything other than a genuine effort to apply existing law to the facts at hand. (And, really, that’s the sense I have gotten about all of our Justices — I can’t tell from their decisions the party affiliation of the governor who appointed them.)

I expect the transition from Chief Justice Shepard to Chief Justice Dickson will be fairly smooth.

Rightward Drift

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Sheila Kennedy has a good post entitled “Looking Backward.” She reminisces about how, in 1980, she won the Republican primary in what had been the Eleventh District and how her loss in the general to Andy Jacobs was typically attributed to her being a bit too much of a Goldwater Republican. She says her governing philosophy hasn’t changed in the last 32 years, but now she’s routinely accused of being a leftist or a socialist.

Fred Clark at the Slacktivist also had a good post a few days back about the tribal markers of evangelicals that got me thinking. It occurs to me that conservative policy, whatever that means exactly, is perhaps incidental to the conservative movement except as it serves as a tribal marker for the movement.

There are explanations for the embrace of the policies, but those aren’t the reasons. The reason is that Leaders I Trust told me these policies are Good and these policies are what distinguish Us from Them.

As Democrats drift to embrace more conservative policies (compare, for example, Birch Bayh v. Evan Bayh) in an effort to co-opt that vote, knowing there is no pressure on the Left; the conservative tribe keeps looking for more distinctive markers which are available only to the right. Rinse. Advocate transvaginal ultrasounds, girl scout antipathy, defaulting on the national debt, climate change denial, evolutionary denial. When Democratic policy drifts too close, move to greener pastures on the right. (The girl scout thing was probably unfair — Doug)

Just a thought.