from the
Baltimore Sun
Federal officials view Americans as largely uninformed on key public policy issues, according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University.
A survey of 850 federal bureaucrats conducted by Hopkins finds that most non-elected officials think Americans know "very little" about key issues. Researchers found 73 percent of government officials think the public knows little or nothing about programs aimed at helping the poor, for instance.
The yearlong study was conducted by political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg. It will appear in a book -- "What Washington Gets Wrong: The Unelected Officials Who Actually Run the Government and Their Misconceptions about the American People" -- to be published next week.
"This disdain for the public results from the wide gulf between the life experiences of ordinary Americans and the denizens of official Washington," the authors write.
"Official Washington is wealthier, whiter and better educated than ordinary citizens. It lives in its own inside-the-Beltway bubble, where Washingtonians converse with one another and rarely interact on an intellectual plane with Americans at large."
The results and the book come during a presidential election that has amplified a sense among many voters that Washington is out of touch with the citizens they serve. Republican nominee Donald Trump has largely built a campaign around that theme.
The findings are based on a study of officials working at federal agencies, on Capitol Hill and in other Washington policy jobs.
Researchers found that 71 percent of federal officials think the public knows little or nothing about science and technology policy. Just over six in 10 think the public knows almost nothing about childcare.
Earlier findings from the study released in 2014 indicated that the federal workforce is whiter, richer, more educated and more liberal than the rest of the country.
At the time, a spokeswoman with the American Federation of Government Employees, said the study had "horrendously misrepresented the federal workplace."
from
American Thinker
On the debate stage Monday night, Hillary Clinton smugly repeated the big lie that Democrats have been telling with something close to impunity since 2008.
“We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s,” said Hillary. “That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.”
In fact, tax policies had almost nothing to do with the recession of 2008. What caused the market crash was the collapse of the subprime market. If that collapse had an architect-in-chief, his name was Bill Clinton. This is not a speculation. It is an easily documented fact.
When Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993, the homeownership rate was lower than it had been when Richard Nixon was inaugurated in 1969. Despite increasing prosperity, despite the growth in the condominium market, the numbers were declining.
The Clintons wanted to push those numbers up. If they had been inclined to look, the explanation for the decline was simple enough: the collapse of the two-parent family. From 1970 to 2000, single-parent households, disproportionately black, increased 60 percent. In that same period, married couples with their own children fell from 40 percent of all households to just 24 percent.
The Clintons and their media allies refused to acknowledge family breakdown as a problem -- remember “Murphy Brown” -- let alone as an explanation for the disparity in home-ownership rates. Their preferred explanation for just about everything unpleasant, then as now, was the inevitable racism. This they could and would freely impute to less enlightened Americans, “the deplorables” as they would come to be known.
The Clintons found the confirmation they were looking for in a 1991 study by the Federal Reserve. According to the study, 61 percent of blacks had been approved in their quest for government-backed home loans as compared to 77 percent for whites. Bingo!
To make the racism story line work, the Clintons had to ignore another significant set of data, namely, default rates. A comprehensive HUD study of FHA loans for the years 1992-1999 found that blacks were defaulting more than twice as frequently as whites, and Hispanics were defaulting three times more frequently. If minorities had been held to a higher standard, their default rates should have been lower than whites, not higher. This was obvious.
No matter. As early as 1993, HUD began to bring legal action against those mortgage bankers who declined a higher percentage of minorities than whites. In 1995, the Clinton administration put teeth in Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which had merely “encouraged” financial institutions to “help meet the credit needs of local communities.” Under Clinton, regulators moved from encouraging to strong-arming.
The regulators were backed by the street-level bullyboy tactics of the late and unlamented ACORN, shorthand for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Historically, banks had been reluctant to offer home loans to people who might not pay them back, and so ACORN set out to embarrass bankers into overcoming that reluctance.
A sympathetic media romanticized ACORN and turned what might have been a nuisance for the banks into a public-relations nightmare. As the New York Times reported approvingly, “The nation’s largest banks have come to the negotiating table just to silence objections that could derail or create costly delays to a merger.”
To make ACORN’s task easier, the Clinton administration demanded that banks quantify the progress they were making in giving loans to LMIs -- people of “low and moderate income.” The administration encouraged banks to use “innovative or flexible” lending practices to reach their LMI numbers.
Meanwhile HUD, which Congress had made the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992, began to pressure these agencies to set numerical goals for affordable housing, even if that meant buying subprime mortgages. The media cheered the agencies on. A September 1999 Times article commended Fannie Mae for prodding banks to provide mortgages to those whose credit was “not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.”
With a gun to their head, the lenders turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relieve them of the imprudent loans they were now being forced to make. Before the 1990s, Fannie and Freddie had sufficiently tough lending standards that default was not much of an issue. That would change.
In 1999, the Clintons’ newly appointed CEO, Franklin Delano Raines, was boasting of the changes Fannie Mae had already made and the changes to come. As he told the Times, Fannie Mae had lowered the down payment requirements for a home and now planned to extend credit to borrowers a “notch below its traditional standards.” That notch was spelled subprime.
Given the greater risk, subprime prospects typically have had to pay more interest to secure a loan. For investors, high interest translated into high yield. In October 1997, the investment banks Bear Stearns and First Union Capital Markets underwrote the first securitization of subprime loans for a total of $385 million.
The back-patting press release announcing the launch hit all the bubble-era hot buttons: these “affordable” and “flexible” mortgages offered the possibility of credit for “low and moderate income families” in “traditionally underserved markets.”
These securities proved enormously popular. They promised a 7.5 percent yield in a low-interest environment and, if that were not enough, a chance to cleanse one’s venal Wall Street soul by doing what appeared to be a social good.
To rally the base a week before the 2000 election, the Clinton administration announced historic new regulations that would put a further squeeze on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “These new regulations will greatly enhance access to affordable housing for minorities, urban residents, new immigrants and others left behind, giving millions of families the opportunity to buy homes,” said HUD Secretary, now New York State governor, Andrew Cuomo.
The regs upped Fannie and Freddie’s “affordable housing” quota from 42 to 50 percent. “We have not been a major presence in the subprime market,” boasted CEO Raines, “but you can bet that under these goals, we will be.”
Raines deflected criticism by focusing on Fannie Mae’s success at social engineering. “We have met or exceeded our affordable housing goals, even as they have increased,” he told the Congressional Finance Committee in late 2003. He also shared the company’s “voluntary goal,” namely, to “lead the market in serving minority families.”
When President Bush expressed concern about the precarious state of Fannie and Freddie in June 2004, he triggered seventy-six Democrats in Congress to sign a letter warning that “an exclusive focus on safety and soundness is likely to come, in practice, at the expense of affordable housing.”
Despite early signs of impending disaster, Congress kept the pressure on. On June 27, 2005, Barney Frank, the ranking Democrat on House Financial Services Committee, took to the House floor to chide those who worried about a housing bubble.
“You are not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble,” he lectured his colleagues. “So those on our committee in particular are going to continue to push for homeownership.”
And push they did. Subprime credit had become, what one wag called, “the mad cow disease of structured finance.” With a clean bill of health from the media and the Democrats, and a shockingly ignorant assist from Wall Street, the infected product was allowed to poison the entire economy.
No sweat for Hillary. The final convulsion -- Phew! -- occurred on George Bush’s watch.
from the
Washington Free Beacon
Probably since time immemorial, each generation has thought the next one lacked industriousness. But for the last half-century, this belief has been true of American men. Even as the economy has grown, a rising share of prime-age males have opted out of work.
Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, a brief book by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, drives this point home forcefully, drawing on an impressive array of data to explain what’s happening and why.
The ups and downs of the economy obviously matter; more men stop working during recessions. But for half a century, there’s been a trend of increasing joblessness, as is especially obvious from the bars depicting decade-long averages. This trend does not go away when Eberstadt adjusts the data to account for things like rising college enrollment and an aging population.
Men who aren’t even looking for jobs are driving a lot of the trend. To judge from various surveys, these men fill their days with mindless leisure, sometimes including drugs. They are actually less socially engaged than men with jobs, with lower rates of church attendance and volunteering. In fairness, non-working men do spend about 30 minutes more each day on housework than working men, which puts them roughly on par with employed women.
Why is this happening? Eberstadt offers a number of explanations, some more controversial than others.
One obvious factor is that the economy has changed in ways that make life harder for low-skilled men, the group that has experienced the most pronounced drop-off in employment. We can argue about how much to blame immigration, trade, or technology for the shift, but the bottom line is that the days of easily available, decent-paying factory jobs for men with little education are over. This isn’t a full explanation—for instance, low-skilled immigrants don’t seem to have trouble finding jobs—but it’s a big one.
Another factor may be the rise of mass incarceration, though as Eberstadt notes, any policy change in this area must be made with an eye toward preserving public safety. Only about one-half of one percent of the American population is imprisoned at any given time, but that’s still five times the rate of the 1960s. Additionally, most prison sentences are short, meaning that while the “stock” of prisoners is low relative to the size of the total population, the “flow” of prisoners is substantial. During the course of their lives, many men enter the system and then return to society with criminal records.
Eberstadt marshals a lot of data about this problem, which is a welcome surprise given that few surveys ask about Americans’ incarceration history. But the number I found most helpful was one the book inspired me to dig up myself. In 2012, the General Social Survey asked Americans a question often seen on job applications: “Not counting minor traffic offenses, have you ever been convicted of a crime?” Among men 25-54, one-fifth said they had. Drawing on other data, Eberstadt estimates that 13 percent of adult men have been convicted not just of any crime but of a felony. Criminal records are concentrated among African-Americans and those with less education.
How does this affect the labor market? Eberstadt provides unsurprising data showing that greater involvement with the justice system correlates with less work, both among individuals and at the state level. I wish he had also cited “matched pair” studies in which actors pose as job applicants with and without criminal records. Such studies show convincingly that employers discriminate severely against men with criminal records. As a group, men who break the law are probably destined to have below-average work histories whether they get caught and convicted or not, but a criminal record makes employment even less likely for these men, and there are a lot of them.
A third argument Eberstadt makes is sure to enrage the left—indeed, the book contains a response from liberal economist Jared Bernstein taking issue with it. Eberstadt argues that the social safety net is financing men’s decisions to stop working. While the 1996 welfare reform law did a lot to promote work among single mothers, there has also been a steady rise in men collecting disability, even as jobs have become less dangerous.
Just a few months ago, the president’s Council of Economic Advisers seemingly destroyed this talking point, noting that “from 1967 until 2014, the percentage of prime-age men receiving [Social Security Disability Insurance] rose from 1 percent to 3 percent, not nearly enough to explain the 7.5 percentage-point decline in the labor force participation rate over that period.”
Eberstadt counters that other programs are available to the disabled as well—and that in the Survey of Income and Program Participation, 57 percent of men who were out of the labor force lived in homes reporting disability benefits. That number has increased 20 percentage points since 1985, and it is twice as high as the council’s figure. It may also be an underestimate, because people don’t always admit to using safety net programs in surveys.
Eberstadt doesn’t spend much time talking about solutions, keeping the book unnecessarily short at 206 pages, including two dissents, Eberstadt’s response to his critics, and endnotes. The solutions he does offer are great in theory but difficult in practice: more jobs and economic growth, safety net reform, and efforts to draw ex-prisoners into the workforce. It’s “only one person’s initial thoughts and suggestions,” he writes. Indeed.
But that doesn’t undermine the value of Men Without Work. Eberstadt is right that this is “America’s invisible crisis”: an enormous problem that is rarely discussed and will not go away on its own. Eberstadt has done more than anyone else to raise awareness of the issue and to sketch its contours.
