Prager U: Myths, Lies and Capitalism

Prager University (which isn't really a university) continues to produce some of the best short video "lessons" on the important issues of our time — videos that have garnered over 29 million views to date.

Below is their latest video lesson in economics, Myths, Lies and Capitalism. If you like what you see — as have almost 100,000 subscribers — check out their other videos in economics, political science, history, life studies, and religion/philosophy.

Common Core and the Wisdom Deficit

In a thought-provoking essay, veteran English teacher Michael Godsey writes that he doesn't teach much "wisdom" in his high school classes anymore, and he wonders who does now that the Common Core has taken hold in public schools.

Secular wisdom in the public schools seems like it should inherently spring from the literature that's shaped American culture. And while the students focus on how Whitman's "purpose shapes the content and style of his text" [in the Common Core]," they're obviously exposed to the words that describe his leaves of grass.  And that's good. But there is a noticeable deprioritization of literature, and a crumbling consensus regarding the nation's idea of classic literature. The Common Core requires only Shakespeare, which is puzzling if only for its singularity.

The Common Core's 10 so-called College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards focus heavily on technical skills and impersonal text analysis and leave little if any room for classical literature. Yet classical literature plays an important role in encouraging students to personally engage in, and examine, literary characters' life experiences and decision-making processes. Through literature, students had the opportunity to garner a certain wisdom from those life lessons and to evaluate truth and appropriately apply it to their own lives.

Admittedly, nothing abut the Common Core or any modern shifts in teaching philosophies is forbidding me from sharing deeper lessons found in Plato's cave or Orwell's Airstrip One. The fine print of the Common Core guidelines even mentions a few possible titles.

But this comes with constant pervasive language that favors objective analysis over personal engagement. Achieve the Core, for example, an organization founded by the lead writers of the standards, explicitly encourages schools to teach students to "extract" information so they can "note and assess patterns of writing" without relying on "any particular background information" or "students having other experiences or knowledge." This emphasis on what they call "text-dependent reading" contributes to a culture in which it's not normal to promote cultural wisdom or personal growth; in fact, it's almost awkward.

Godsey doesn't worry about his own children, or children of families who value classic literature and the life lessons they teach enough to pursue it at home. But he is concerned for the millions of young people who are not so fortunate and who will lose out on the shared wisdom that families once relied on their public schools to transmit.

Source: The Wisdom Deficit in Schools, Michael Godsey, The Atlantic, January 2015

Abortion Legislation, Pro-Life March in DC

On the 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, tens of thousands gathered in Washington DC to March for Life from the National Mall to the steps of the Supreme Court—the largest of many marches in support of life in cities across the nation over the past weekend.

To coincide with the march, House GOP leaders had scheduled a vote on legislation, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that would have banned elective abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy — the point at which unborn children can feel pain and survive premature birth.  A Quinnipiac poll on the issue in November reported 60% approval among Americans. That legislation was abruptly pulled, however, when female GOP members raised concerns about a provision in the bill that required rape victims to report the crime to law enforcement in order to qualify for an exemption.

In its place a lesser bill, "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," was passed the House in a 242-179 vote, reports the Washington Examiner.

The legislation would make it illegal for individuals to use the Affordable Care Act's insurance subsidies to buy plans that cover abortion services through the new health exchanges. Many states have already passed legislation limiting abortion coverage in exchange plans, but the measure the House approved would apply nationwide and possibly discourage insurers on the exchanges from offering abortion coverage at all.

The switch upset some who supported the stricter measure. Mollie Hemingway chastised Congress for not believing "it's competent enough to make a case against infanticide" when there is clear polling data showing broad support.

A Washington Post/ABC survey showed that 64 percent of Americans favor limiting abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy or earlier. When just women were asked, the figure jumped to 71 percent. Such measures are popular among independents and Americans of various income levels.

Quinnipiac even asked detailed questions about the bill last go-around ... Sixty percent of voters said they would support it, while 33 percent said they were opposed. Even Democrats were evenly divided (46 percent to 47 percent) on the question. We're one of just a small handful of countries, including notorious human rights violators North Korea and china, that allow late-term abortion.

Others were less critical. "While we are disappointed that the House will not be voting on the [20-week abortion ban] today, we are pleased that the House is moving forward to stop taxpayer funding of abortion," said a joint statement by the Susan B. Anthony List, the March for Life Education and Defense Fund and the Concerned women for America Legislative Action Committees.

Growing Business-Builders Essential to Growing Economy

While the president painted a deceptively rosy picture of our economy in his State of the Union address, a more reality-based assessment was delivered recently by Gallup CEO Jim Clifton in Business Journal. He argues that American leaders, having misdiagnosed the cause and effect of economic growth and job creation, are making our economic problems worse.

"This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses," asserts Clifton. "When small and medium-sized businesses are dying faster than they're being born, so is free enterprise. And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it."

• Approximately 6 million businesses with one or more employees in the U.S.—the real engines of economic growth—provide jobs for more than 100 million Americans and much of the tax base for everything, from military to social safety net spending.

• Since 2008, U.S. business "deaths" (shut-downs) have outnumbered new business "births" (start-ups), and we have fallen to 12th among developed nations in terms of business start ups behind countries such as Hungary, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel and Italy.

• Fewer businesses mean declining revenues and smaller salaries to tax, followed by declining aid for the elderly and poor and declining funding for the military, for education, for infrastructure — in short, for everything.  

Citing Gallup polling data showing Americans believe the economy (59%) and federal spending and budget deficit (58%) are cause for a "great deal" of worry, Clifton argues that ordinary people seem to intuitively understand what America's leaders do not:  that businesses and entrepreneurs are the critical drivers of a strong economy.

Our leadership keeps thinking that the answer to economic growth and ultimately job creation is more innovation, and we continue to invest billions in it. But an innovation is worthless until an entrepreneur creates a business model for it and turns that innovative idea in something customers will buy. Yet current thinking tells us we're on the right track and don't need different strategies, so we continue marching down the path of national decline, believing innovation will save us.

Because we have misdiagnosed the cause and effect of economic growth, we have misdiagnosed the cause and effect of job creation. To get back on track, we need to quit pinning everything on innovation, and we need to start focusing on the almighty entrepreneurs and business builders.

Source: American Entrepreneurship: Dead or Alive?, Jim Clifton, Business Journal, January 13, 2015

Vermont Abandones Single-Payer Health System

Vermont was the only state to undertake the liberal dream of a state-wide single-payer health care system in lieu of Obamacare (as the Affordable Care Act permitted). After discovering how much it would cost, Vermont has abandoned the idea.

Designed by Jonathan Gruber, the Green Mountain Care plan enacted in 2011 (to take effect in 2017):

• abolished all private health insurance except those provided by multi-state employers;
• offered substantially higher benefits: i.e., the state would pay 94% of health costs, compared to 90% under ObamaCare's most expensive plan; and
• was to be funded entirely by tax collections, with no individual premium payments. 

But "Vermonters were stunned to discover how much their new free health care was going to cost," writes Michael Tanner in the New York Post.

•  Paying for Green Mountain Care would have required a 160% increase in state taxes by 2019, as much as $2.9 billion annually.
• The state's top income tax rate would have been raised from 8.95% to an astounding 18%. For high earners that would mean a combined federal-state income tax burden of 56%. Even lower-income Vermonters would have seen a substantial tax hike.
• Businesses would have been hit with an 11.5% state payroll tax (on top of a federal payroll tax of 15.3% to 16.2%).
• Payments to doctors and hospitals would have been cut by an estimated 16%, forcing some to leave the state and threatening the viability of local hospitals.
• And even with all of that, according to numbers released by the governor's office, the plan would be running in the red within four years.

Although "Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, announced that the state was giving up and abandoning its plans for Green Mountain Care, reports Tanner, other states are currently considering legislation similar to Vermont's, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington.

Source: Liberal Dream of Single-Payer Health Care Dies in Vermont, New York Post, January 18, 2015

WH Tax Punishes Moms Outside Labor Force

The $320 billion tax increase the president will propose tonight in his State of the Union address reveals his "tax policy as power and punishment, tax policy as vengeance" mindset, argues Ira Stoll.

...how this administration approaches tax policy not from the point of view of raising the revenues necessary to run the government, and not from the view of creating the maximum incentives for growth and innovations, but rather as a kind of zero-sum, redistributionist means of political warfare.

A few items Mr. Stoll considers particularly punishing:

• "one earner" families would pay higher taxes so that "two-earner" families could get a $500 "second earner" tax credit along with a tripled "child care" tax credit;
• high earners who have saved money in Individual Retirement Accounts all their lives would see their retirement accounts taxed retroactively; and
• families who have saved 529 college savings accounts for their children would be taxed when they withdraw the funds to pay for their children's college bills.

Calling it "Destructive Social Engineering," the editors at National Review Online write that the tax code is already heavily biased against saving and investment, and Mr. Obama's proposal would make it even worse. Moreover, his plan takes a gratuitous slap at mothers outside the paid labor force:

Most mothers, especially of small children, prefer to work part-time or drop out of the labor force for a time. Commercial child care is the least favored option for most parents. The president's plan encourages families to do what they do not wish to do and penalizes them for refusing.

 UPDATE: See also Obama Tax Hike on College Savings Plans Breaks Middle Class Tax Pledge

The "1-in-3 College Men Would Rape" Study

"No polling organization would ever be taken seriously if its sample size was 73, and neither should this 'study' on college rape," begins Mark J. Perry.

A "study" conducted by "researchers' at the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University ("Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders") and published in the journal Violence and Gender claims to find that almost one in 3 college men would commit rape "if nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences." Oy vey, where to begin on this one? 

The study's conclusions were drawn from responses of only 73 male students, who were compensated with "extra credit for their participation" (suggesting they were all taking the same course), at a single unidentified North Dakota university.  The "margin of sampling error" for a tiny sample size of 73 is so huge as to make the results meaningless to the entire 9 million male college student population in the U.S.

Yet the conclusions fit so nicely with the Left's current campus sexual assault narrative that left-wing media shouted it out:

• Study: 1 in 3 Men Would Rape if They Wouldn't Get Caught or Face Consequences (Cosmopolitan)
• Study Finds That a Third of College Men Would Rape if They Could Get Away With It (Feministing)
•  1 in 3 College Men Admit they would Rape If We Don't Call it Rape (Jezebel)

And another liberal lie is born.