'Green' jobs success story of the day: $20 million for 14 jobs in Seattle

Via the Washington Policy Center:



Not to be outdone, Nevada recently spent $12 million to create 5 "green" jobs.

A much better plan would be for government to stop picking the winners and losers in the economy and provide a low and uniform tax and regulatory burden. In that type of economy (also known as a free market), businesses would succeed or fail on their merits, not their ability to get taxpayer handouts.

Video: Energy Sec. Chu claims government played ‘intimate role’ in all U.S. tech development

No joke.

Here's what Secretary Steven Chu, a top official in the Obama administration who's in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy, claimed today at Sen. Harry Reid's National Clean Energy Summit:

So the government played an incredibly intimate role in all the technologies that led to prosperity in the United States, and we must not lose sight of that fact.

And if you don't believe he said that — and given how ludicrous that statement is, I wouldn't blame you — here's video of his comment (30:50 mark):



Browse through these lists of 10 popular inventions and the top 50 inventions of the last 50 years. Notice anything missing? Oh yeah, government's "intimacy" in creating the telephone, the television, the automobile or even the TV remote.

If you have some extra time and want some laughs, go back to the 28:25 mark of Chu's speech and watch him try to explain how the government was really responsible for airplanes.

Of course, the Wright brothers invented it, Chu says, but if it weren't for military spending or allowing private companies to deliver the U.S. mail (amazing how he considers deregulation to be “intimate” government involvement, but I digress), no doubt airplanes would have faded away.

Sure, mankind has been trying to fly for thousands of years, but absent some military spending, I'm sure this technology would have been lost to history, and we'd all be traveling on a rail system that would make Dagny Taggart envious.

What garbage.

Of course, given that Chu was at a conference designed to promote government subsidies to private businesses, false claims are par for the course.

For more coverage of Reid's Clean Energy Summit (and to find out what other ridiculous things government officials are saying), check out NevadaJournal.com.

What you need to know about Reid's Clean Energy Summit

Tomorrow, Sen. Harry Reid will sponsor his fourth annual Clean Energy Summit. The event is called "The Future of Energy."

So does the program feature green energy's top scientists and inventors? Nope. Instead it features speakers and panelists drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of elected or government officials.

Why? Because "green" energy isn't profitable or popular. The only future it has is dependent on government handouts.

I wish I could say I was the first to notice this, but the RJ's Glenn Cook made this point perfectly in his Sunday column.

The National Clean Energy Summit 4.0 will be held Tuesday at CityCenter's Aria resort, so one might expect the list of speakers to be a who's who of science and entrepreneurship.

Wrong. Because the clean energy industry is propped up by massive federal subsidies and political pressure, the event might as well be a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. ...

As with everything else associated with green power, research and economics are out the door in favor of partisan politics and crony capitalism. All to find ways to make you pay more for energy -- and everything else as a result.

Also in Sunday's RJ, reporter Jennifer Robison asks the key question: Is Nevada green energy worth all the green?

Answer: No.

Robison wrote an excellent article that details just some of the money government has wasted pursuing green energy policies and includes some great stuff from NPRI's Geoffrey Lawrence.

"We've been talking about how renewable energy would be the job creator of the future since the 1970s, and the sector has consistently failed to deliver despite massive subsidies," said Geoffrey Lawrence, deputy director of policy at the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a libertarian think tank in Las Vegas. "It's time to re-evaluate those promises."

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Tomorrow's conference isn't about clean or green energy. It's about government picking the winners and losers in the energy sector. Reid and his ilk want to give taxpayer money to green energy companies and mandate the use of green energy, which will lead to higher electricity prices for consumers.

Green energy isn't just more expensive. It's also costing states thousands of jobs.

Clean energy is really about cleaning out your wallets and giving your green to government-chosen winners.

Stop giving private businesses government handouts

Whether politicians call it “business development,” “economic diversification” or a “venture capital fund,” handing out government — excuse me — taxpayer money to favored companies is corporate welfare and the very worst of crony capitalism.

Then why are politicians, from Gov. Brian Sandoval, Speaker John Oceguera, Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, Henderson Mayor Andy Hafen to even Texas Gov. Rick Perry, so eager to do it?

First, it looks good — for them! Not for taxpayers, not for the vast majority of the unemployed, not for the businesses (and their employees) who have their taxes used to subsidize their competitors. Corporate welfare looks good for politicians.

Why? Because they can put out press releases saying "they," your elected representatives, have created jobs, and "they" are fixing the biggest problem facing you and your community. Now, don't you want to vote for them again?

Second, when the jobs never materialize, politicians often aren't held responsible. And businesses receiving government largesse go belly up or produce significantly fewer jobs than advertised with astonishing regularity.

How about the $1.5 million lost when a company subsidized by Texas — authorized by Perry — went belly up? Gone.

ThromboVision, Inc., a medical imaging company, was also the recipient of an award from the Emerging Technology Fund: It received $1.5 million in 2007. Charles Tate, a major Perry contributor, served as the chairman of a state committee that reviewed ThromboVision's application for state funding, and Mr. Tate voted to give ThromboVision the public money. ...

According to a Texas state auditor's report, ThromboVision failed to submit required annual reports to the fund from 2008 through 2010, when the company went bankrupt. The report noted the tech fund's managers were "unaware of ThromboVision, Inc.'s bankruptcy until after the bankruptcy had been reported in a newspaper."

How about the $58 million Massachusetts gave Evergreen Solar, which recently declared bankruptcy? Gone.

How about when Nevada spent $12 million to "create" five green jobs? Wasted.

Third, there's a significant misunderstanding in this country (among politicians and the public) about what or, more appropriately, who creates jobs.

Sure, politicians can create short-term jobs and bubble expansions by taking wealth away from citizens and manipulating interest rates, but neither those jobs nor the economic bubbles are sustainable. Exhibit A is the epic failure of the stimulus. Exhibit B is the high number of failed government interventions during the Great Depression.

Long-term economic growth, the kind that made America the richest country in the history of the world, where even 97.7 percent of "poor" Americas have televisions, comes from entrepreneurs — individuals acting in their self interest.

How does a system, rooted in individuals acting in their own best interests, benefit society in general and not just those individuals? Simple. In a free-market system, you earn money by making others better off.

Want to be rich? No problem. Just invent something to make other people's lives better off. Want to run a successful company? Meet your customers' needs at a competitive price. Want to put Wal-Mart out of business? Build a better store — "better" being determined by individuals making decisions about what's best for them.

The beauty of the free market is that individuals are incentivized to meet the needs of others. These free exchanges of money for goods or services leave both sides better off and are the basis for wealth creation.

A simple example: Imagine going into a McDonald's and ordering a Big Mac. You value the Big Mac more than the money it cost and McDonald's values your money more than the Big Mac. That type of win-win transaction — freely agreed to by both parties — is how wealth (not money, but wealth) is created.

Contrast that with government-directed "growth." Instead of spending money on satisfying customers' needs, businesses that want government handouts spend money lobbying and contributing to elected officials. This shifts the power from the consumer to the government. (There's a host of other reasons this negatively impacts the economy, the biggest being that government officials suffer from both an incentive and information problem, but that's a whole other issue.)

Indeed, the great success Texas had creating jobs while Perry was governor isn't about what Perry did. As noted above, the times Perry "did" things to grow the economy, he often failed.

Perry's great success in Texas is what he didn't do. In general, he didn't raise taxes, he didn't grow government, he didn't increase job-killing regulations, he didn't pass ObamaCare. Perry's success is that he got out of the way of entrepreneurs, and they built businesses while pursuing their own individual self interests.

Entrepreneurs are ultimately responsible for job growth in Texas or in any other state. The great achievement of a politician, then, is simply to create a low and uniform tax and regulatory burden and get out of the way.

And giving money to favored companies is the very definition of getting in the way. Those who care about long-term job growth, as opposed to short-term photo-ops, should oppose government giving tax-dollar subsidies to private businesses every chance they get.

Somehow, news about Nevada's poor graduation rate gets worse

At 44.3 percent, Nevada's graduation rate is a disaster.

Next year's graduating class in the Clark County School District is headed for similar numbers, with nearly 10,000 of the 20,600 incoming seniors not projected to graduate, because they either don't have enough credits or haven't passed the High School Proficiency Exam, which is required.

While potentially having 10,000 high school seniors fail to graduate is horrible, there's another fact that should scare Nevadans even more.

Of the 20,600 incoming seniors, the School District has identified nearly 10,000 students who don’t have enough class credits and haven’t passed the standardized High School Proficiency Exam needed to graduate. The exam is first administered in 10th grade and tests students on mostly 9th grade material. [Emphasis added]

Umm ... what? The High School Proficiency Exam is a test on ninth-grade material? And we have up to 10,000 seniors who can't pass a test on freshman-level material? So our high school dropouts have only reached the learning level of a junior-high student? Is anyone else outraged?

Why are those seniors — who can't pass a ninth-grade test — entering the 12th grade? Why weren't they held back — several times if necessary — and allowed to develop the basic skills necessary to perform at grade level?

This out an outrage and is exactly why substantive school reforms, as opposed to the minor changes passed in the last legislative session, are so necessary. These children are graduating or dropping out of high school with a junior high education!

Liberals and their union allies have run Nevada's school system for decades, and the results of their policies, focused more on spending money and protecting bad teachers than student achievement, have long been apparent. And for at least 10,000 students next year in CCSD, that means either not graduating, or even if they graduate, only having a ninth-grade education.

That is shameful.

It's way past time for substantial and proven education reforms.

And no, spending money is not a proven reform. We've tried that in Nevada and nationally — it doesn't work.

Private school for $1/week

Private schools flourish nowhere like they do in sub-Saharan Africa, home to the poorest people on Earth. There, thousands of parents take their children out of free public schools to enroll them in low-cost private schools so they can enjoy a greater chance at success in life. John Stossel reports:

Government to keep "big role" in setting mortgage rates?

The Washington Post reports today that President Obama is asking for proposals on how the federal government can try to re-create the housing bubble. Or...at least that's what I got out of it.

Reportedly, President Obama wants to ensure the continuance of Washington's favorite taxpayer-subsidized arms of political patronage - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He also wants to make sure the federal government stays in the mortgage insurance business, guaranteeing loans for risky borrowers - you know, like those of the subprime variety.

Members of Congress are almost assured to go along with any scheme to keep Fannie and Freddie alive, which really says a lot about the political class.

Einstein defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Truly, by Einstein's definition, Washington policymakers are completely insane.

I really can't put my frustration into words more eloquent than those of Cato's Mark Calabria:

Perhaps most offensive is that the Post reports that Obama “officials don’t want to punish the thousands of Fannie and Freddie employees who have specialized knowledge about the mortgage market.” Seriously? What about the many blameless employees of AIG, Lehman Brothers, or Bear Stearns? Or New Century for that matter. Did the janitors and receptionists at those firms really cause the crisis? The truth is that the employees of Fannie and Freddie have been lining their pockets at the expense of the taxpayer for years. What the Administration is really saying is that they wouldn’t want all the political operatives at these favored firms to lose their perks. After all, Obama officials will need somewhere to land after 2012 and Goldman Sachs has only so many slots.

What’s most depressing is that you can’t say Obama hasn’t been given the facts. As the Post makes clear, his economic advisers spelled out the case against massive subsidies for the mortgage market. Austan Goolsbee, chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, points out: by subsidizing mortgage investments, the government drives capital away from other types of investments. If Obama truly wants to help the middle and working class, then he’d want capital to flow into investments that increase labor productivity, which is the ultimate source of wage growth. Running up asset prices, like houses, does not make us wealthier in the long run.

Indeed, sir.

Are entitlements and transfer payments responsible for US fiscal crisis?

While perusing the Economic Research division of the St. Louis Fed, I just came across an interesting article that asks, "What's the source of the increase in [federal] spending?" While policymakers in Washington - loathe to enact meaningful fiscal reform - have blown a lot of hot air over earmarks and other "non-defense discretionary spending," entitlement spending has long been the true driver of federal deficits.

The article points out that transfer payments and entitlement spending combined to account for 70 percent of federal expenditures in 2010 and that these categories are the fastest-growing budget items. Whereas defense spending dwarfed all other categories of federal spending until 1975, it has fallen, as a percentage of GDP, from 15 percent in 1953 to about five percent today. By contrast, spending on Social Security and Medicare has risen, over the same time period, from less than one percent of GDP to about 8 percent today. Combined with transfer payments, these programs cost 16 percent of GDP in 2010. Defense plus non-defense discretionary spending accounted for only 7 percent of GDP in 2010.

These figures leave Fed researchers to conclude thusly:

This analysis suggests that the increase in the debt over the period 1975-2007 was not only a consequence of increased government spending without increased revenues, but also that the government increased payments to individuals through Social Security, Medicare, and other payments without sufficiently reducing spending elsewhere in the budget. In short, these trends, as the CBO’s recent Long-Term Budget Outlook makes clear, will continue to strain federal, state, and local budgets as they consume an ever larger percentage of federal spending dollars.

The article sparked my curiousity and so I visited the authors' source data - housed within the Office of Management and Budget - and constructed my own chart. This pretty much tells the story:

How will the U.S. credit downgrade impact you?

The Cato Institute has the answer.



And note what's causing rating agencies to lower our credit score. It wasn't the fight over the debt limit. It's the unsustainable spending.

Exposing the baseline-budgeting myth

At the federal level, the greatest challenge facing believers in limited government is a practice called baseline budgeting. (For a short and humorous example of baseline budgeting, watch this video.)

In zero-based budgeting (aka real-life budgeting), you compare how much you spent last year to how much you plan to spend in the next year. For example, if you spent $50,000 last year and planned on spending $55,000 in the next year, you'd have a $5,000, or 10 percent, spending increase.

Not so with baseline budgeting. In baseline budgeting, you compare how much you spent last year plus your desired amount of spending increases to how much you plan to spend in the next year. For example, if you spent $50,000 last year and wanted to increase spending to $60,000, but decided to "reduce" spending and only spend $55,000 next year, that would be a $5,000, or 8.3 percent, spending decrease.

Do you see the trick there? In the two examples, you spent the same amount last year and are spending the same amount next year, but because of the baseline-budgeting assumptions, you can claim a $5,000 cut in spending.

This, of course, is garbage and gives advocates of big government an incredible PR advantage. Since most people would rather have a colonoscopy than try to understand federal budget numbers, this system allows tax consumers and leftists to publicly bemoan "cuts" — even if what's being proposed are actually spending increases that are merely below the numbers that the "baseline" approach would entail.

Exhibit A is the recent debate over raising the debt ceiling and the $2 trillion in spending "cuts." These aren't cuts in the real sense — they are simply reductions in future spending. Even if Congress reduces future spending increases by $2 trillion, the deficit will rise to over $20 trillion in less than 10 years.

This is exactly the same trick that leftists used to claim that Nevada faced a $3 billion budget deficit before the 2011 legislative session. Fortunately, many elected officials and members of the media in Nevada understood that the common narrative was inaccurate and began noting that Nevada's deficit was only about $1 billion.

Fixing the problem in the national press isn't going to be so easy, but the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board has an excellent suggestion.

As Mr. [Peter] Ferrara suggests, the top tea party priority right now should be to replace baseline budgeting with "zero-based or family-style budgeting," under which the word "cut" could be used only if the government really spent less than it did last year.

If the debate isn't defined accurately, it's no use having a debate on the merits of an issue. If your opponent can make you accept inaccurate assumptions, you've already lost.

The same is true in the debate over the national debt. First, believers in limited government need to expose and correct the baseline-budgeting myth. Once the terms of the deficit debate are defined accurately, it will be easy for conservatives and libertarians to show the country that America's broke and that the growth in government spending needs to be slowed or, better yet, actually reduced.

If you'd like to read more on this issue, NPRI's Geoffrey Lawrence has written a great commentary on the problems with baseline budgeting.

Video: How to save money by spending more

Only in the government can you claim to "save" money by increasing total spending. But, as Mary Katherine Ham demonstrates in this funny and short video, that's exactly what the government does.



The culprit here is something called baseline budgeting, which I will explore in my next post.

If the U.S. government was a family, how much in debt would they be?

If you knew this family, they'd either be bankrupt or mighty close.

“If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & [they] are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.” – Dave Ramsey

There are only two positions on the national debt: denial and reality. Reality: We're broke.

The numbers — and their implications — are staggering. Without a change in course, a Greece-like scenario isn't just a possibility — it's an inevitability.

We're broke. And to think, the boom in entitlement spending is just beginning. It's time to make real cuts in spending, not "cuts" to an imaginary baseline.

Who’s saving our schools?

Written by Alexander Cooper, NPRI policy intern.

On July 30, Reason.TV correspondent Michelle Fields attended the Save Our Schools Rally in Washington, DC, to interview some of the protesters about school reform, including Matt Damon.



For the most part, the jargon was familiar to those accustomed to the education debate. Attendees asserted that it’s always been possible to fire teachers, that teachers are paid poorly, that teacher tenure doesn’t bring down education, that charter schools aren’t any better than private schools, and even the totally out-of-the-ballpark claim that we shouldn’t cut education funding because the worth of an education can’t be quantified.

Anyone making the first claim apparently hasn’t heard that, between 2000 and 2010, the Los Angeles Unified School District spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven teachers — and only succeeded in firing four. They also probably haven’t heard about New York’s rubber rooms (which were ended just last year), in which teachers being considered for termination just wasted time, sometimes for months, while still receiving their full salaries. In Nevada, until the recent legislative session, it was about as difficult to fire post-probationary (or, tenured) teachers.

Then, according to Matt Damon, teachers are so poorly paid that they must already be performing their best. Teachers, however, are not poorly paid once you consider the number of hours they report working and when you count their generous benefits on top of that. The best teachers, however, often put in many more hours outside of school, and they might rightly think they are underpaid. Performance pay would align pay more closely with performance, but even that idea has met union resistance. In the Clark County School District union-negotiated contracts instead require that teachers be paid on the basis of their degree and their length of time with the school district.

The real problem with teacher salaries is that they are usually unrelated to teaching ability.

The third claim made in this video is particularly disconcerting. When asked how much money should be spent per pupil in our education system, one woman quickly responded, “Billions!”

This is absurd. How absurd? We would need to raise taxes to $51 quadrillion (rounded to the nearest quadrillionth) to fund this. (Nationwide there are 50,829,079 students as of 2009-2010.)

Regardless, more money is not the answer. Both here in Nevada and nationwide, massive funding increases have been followed by stagnant results or minute gains in educational achievement. (In Nevada alone, inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending has tripled during the last fifty years, and we’ve seen where that’s gotten us.)

Finally, it is worth addressing the claim that charter schools aren’t any better than private schools. Studies show that although charter schools might not make a huge impact in areas with already high-performing public schools, students assigned to low-performing zoned schools are more likely to succeed when they attend a charter school, according to a study of voucher winners in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

Parents deserve the right to select the best schools available to them – schools that pay their teachers on merit, that swiftly remove ineffective teachers, and that spend their money efficiently. It’s time to recognize the importance of school choice.

Update: Changed the sentence on the time teachers work to more accurately what the Bureau of Labor Statistics studied: time teachers reported working, not the minimum number of hours they are required to work.

Also, added that this blog was written by Alexander Cooper.

CCSD fails to meet AYP; Growth model offers hope

Written by Alexander Cooper, NPRI policy intern.

The Clark County School District failed to meet AYP for the 2010-2011 school year.

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), all schools and school districts are required to meet certain minimum standards (to make “adequate yearly progress”) set by the federal government.

One of the primary factors that goes into determining whether a school has made AYP is the performance of certain groups of students (e.g., students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, black students, Hispanic students, students with disabilities, students learning English as a second language, etc.), especially as measured by state-administered proficiency tests. If any of these subgroups fail to meet AYP, the entire school that they come from also fails.

This year, the number of subgroups increased from 37 to 45 mainly due to a new definition of “ethnicity.”

The results were released for individual high schools today at a meeting of the CCSD Board of School Trustees.

For 2010-2011, only 139 of CCSD’s 363 schools made AYP — down from 151 schools last year. Moreover, only 116 schools are currently labeled “adequate.” All other schools are either “watch” schools (meaning that they only failed to meet AYP in the last year) or are “in need of improvement” (meaning that they failed to meet AYP for at least two years in a row or they have failed to meet AYP for at least two years but which may have met AYP during the last year).

It should be noted that NCLB demands more of schools every year; in fact, it ultimately requires that 100 percent of schools meet AYP by the 2013-2014 school year — an unrealistic expectation, as several school board trustees noted today. Additionally, scores may have decreased due to the increased difficulty of the reading proficiency exam.

For elementary- and middle-school students, AYP was set at a 65.9 percent pass rate on English/Language Arts (ELA) proficiency exams and 63.8 percent for mathematics proficiency exams. For high-school students, AYP was set at an 86.7 percent pass rate on ELA tests and at a 71.3 percent pass rate on mathematics exams. In order for a school to make AYP, the student body as a whole as well as all 45 subgroups had to either pass their proficiency exams at the above rates or increase their scores by 10 percent from last year.

This year’s results are dismal, and with the legislature only enacting minor reforms, substantive improvements will now hinge on the success of Superintendent Dwight Jones’ improvement plan.

The good news is that CCSD is publicly acknowledging and talking about a better type of tests — tests that measure the growth in student learning. You can learn more about value-added assessments, called the growth model in CCSD, here.

A final note: under NCLB, students are permitted to transfer from schools that have landed in the “in need of improvement” category. However, that is only if those schools are also Title 1 schools. There are fewer Title 1 schools this year, however, due to the end of stimulus funding. At this time, no high school is listed as a Title 1 school. So, unless students miraculously get a seat in a better school through CCSD’s Open Enrollment program, students will be unable to leave any high schools that have failed to meet AYP for years. Elementary- and middle-school students will also be more limited in their ability to transfer under the guidelines set by NCLB.

For a list of CCSD schools and their AYP status, click here.

Problems with the US health care system

Gilbert Berdine, M.D. and medical professor at Texas Tech University, delivered an excellent diagnosis today. His diagnosis is not of a patient's particular ailment, however. It is of the ailments afflicting the US health care system in general.

Berdine details how federal and state interventions in the health care industry are directly responsible for runaway costs, less cost-effectiveness and, in some cases, poorer health outcomes.

Berdine traces how the Medicare Part A entitlement has led to a popular misperception of the role of health insurance. As I have written in the past, the major cause of skyrocketing prices for health insurance is that insurance is expected and, in many cases, mandated to cover conditions that are not "insurable." That is, health insurance is no longer used to insure against unforeseen calamity; it is used to finance the cost of routine care. As Berdine points out, this function does not constitute "insurance," it is just a socialization of costs. The only way that beneficiaries of a cost-sharing pool can benefit is to force lower-risk and lower-cost individuals into the pool - hence the impetus for a government mandate to participate in the cost-socialization scheme.

Berdine shows that the forced socialization of health expenditures is unaffordable for most households. Using data from the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he calculates that the "the minimal cost of a fully homogenized national health-insurance policy where everything is covered, everyone is covered, and there are no preexisting conditions" for the average American household of 2.63 individuals is $20,632. The problem is that after that household has covered their taxes and food, clothing and housing costs, only $16,529 remains.

The high costs of health care socialization - a phenomenon that began long before the passage of Obamacare - can only be financed through government borrowing or money-printing. Berdine points out that payroll taxes intended to finance Medicare Part A are completely incapable of meeting the skyrocketing demand for medical services associated with the moral hazard problem of comprehensive health insurance. Forty percent of the financing for Medicare Part A today comes from general revenues while general revenues finance the entirety of Parts B and D. With the most realistic accounting assumptions, Medicare is facing an unfunded future liability of more than $100 trillion. These deficits are financed through government borrowing or money-printing, leading Berdine to conclude that the US health care system is in a credit-induced bubble.

Berdine ultimately recommends four steps to fixing the broken US health care system. The linchpin, however, is in the first recommendation:

1.Limit insurance to insurable conditions and eliminate all regulatory barriers to the provision of health insurance;

2.Eliminate the barriers to the production and delivery of healthcare, including licensing restrictions;

3.Eliminate the barriers to the production and delivery of medicines and medical technology, including patents; and

4.Eliminate the socialization of healthcare costs and the subsidies for being sick.

Great advice from someone who actually understands both medicine and economics.

Those in Washington and Carson City should be paying attention, because they have repeatedly demonstrated a failure to understand both disciplines.

NPRI responds to Ralston's inaccurate attacks

In last Friday's Las Vegas Sun, liberal pundit Jon Ralston attacked NPRI in his column and accused us of bias and partisanship. To respond to his numerous false claims, NPRI submitted the following letter to the editor to the Sun.

In his recent column (“Has think tank removed non-partisan pretense?” July 29, 2011), liberal pundit Jon Ralston attempted to disparage the Nevada Policy Research Institute (NPRI) using innuendo, a false narrative of bias dependent on cherry-picking articles and ignoring others, and a patronizing attitude that he alone knows what our organization should focus on. His attempts to twist our organization's mission, purpose and actions are not accurate or supported by readily available facts.

For the last 20 years, NPRI has promoted limited, accountable government, individual liberty and free enterprise. To accomplish these goals NPRI produces high-quality research and conducts investigative journalism focused mainly on government corruption.

As a non-partisan organization, we investigate stories and leads regardless of how powerful are the individuals we're investigating or which political party those individuals belong to. To kill a story, as Ralston suggests, just because one political side isn't going to like its implications would actually make us guilty of the very partisanship Ralston later accuses us of.

Ralston's criticism is no more than a shoot-the-messenger attack. If Assembly Speaker John Oceguera didn't want to be criticized for double-dipping and trying to cover it up — don't double-dip and try to cover it up. If Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford didn't want to be criticized for leading a potentially illegal taking of $4.2 million for the College Savings Plan — either don't take an action that could leave Nevada liable for millions in damages from a lawsuit, or return NPRI's repeated phone calls to get an explanation.

Is it partisan that these stories involved the highest ranking Democrats in the Legislature? Only if it's also partisan that NPRI has praised both Oceguera and Horsford for their stances, respectively, on transparency and opposition to a corporate income tax. Only if it's partisan that NPRI has both praised and criticized Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval for his stances on various issues. Only if it's partisan that even the highest ranking lawmaker in NPRI's Legislative Report Card scored lower than 90 percent.

Looking at NPRI's work through a partisan lens is inevitably going to lead to this kind of confusion. That's because NPRI is concerned with ideas, not individuals or political parties. If an elected official supports good tax, budget or education policy, we'll applaud him — regardless of party. If he doesn't, we'll point that out as well — regardless of political aspirations.

The same is true in our news stories. If there's a newsworthy story of corruption, a cover-up or serious legislative negligence and we come across it, we're going to write about it.

In the last year, NPRI has produced more than 500 commentaries, policy studies, news stories, press releases and blog posts and has appeared in state and national media outlets hundreds of times. If, as Ralston did, you consider only a handful of articles, you could support a variety of false narratives about us — many in direct contradiction to the one he crafted. If you consider the entirety of our work, however, our focus on our mission is clear.

Further, Ralston's suggestion that NPRI drop its investigative reporting efforts and focus only on policy research would be like someone suggesting that he drop his column and focus only on his “Face to Face” television show, because the liberal views he promotes in his column interfere with the generally neutral moderator role he has on “Face to Face.”

Our organization is able to focus on more than one issue at once and, if he weren't so insistent on cherry-picking reports, Ralston might have noticed that NPRI has written repeatedly on two areas he criticized us for not addressing — the constitutional problems of the IFC and public employees serving in the Legislature, including a five-part series on the latter subject earlier this year.

He might also have noticed that in between writing news stories involving Oceguera and Horsford, NPRI has produced numerous commentaries and blog posts and even released 2010 public employee salary data on TransparentNevada.com. But those facts don't fit his false narrative.

Regardless of the distortions we face, or who they come from, NPRI will continue to stand up for sound policy ideas and expose government corruption — even if some would prefer Nevada’s citizens remain in the dark.

Victor Joecks
Communications Director, Nevada Policy Research Institute

Many thanks also to Chuck Muth for penning a stellar piece defending NPRI and pointing out that It’s Not “Partisan” to Expose Abuses of Power. Chuck's piece was so good, I'm going to steal his last two paragraphs.

I’m sure our friends over at the conservative think tank aren’t happy with being targeted by a hit piece authored by the state’s leading and highly-respected political commentator this morning, but they should consider these thoughtful words widely attributed to a truly non-partisan man of peace, Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Sounds like victory may be right around the corner! [Emphasis added]