Dollars Are Not The Issue

Senator Harkin wants to bail out the public schools:

The Senate's leading Democrat on education issues proposed a $23 billion bailout Wednesday to help public schools across the country avert widespread layoffs, a sequel to the economic stimulus law that has propped up teetering state budgets for the past year.

The Obama administration immediately expressed support for an education jobs bill to help states through fiscal crisis, hoping to build momentum for the proposal from Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

....

Education Secretary Arne Duncan seconded Harkin's assessment of the gravity of the situation facing schools. He estimated that schools face layoffs in the range of 100,000 to 300,000.

"It is brutal out there, really scary," Duncan told reporters after addressing the lawmakers. "This is a real emergency. What we're trying to avert is an education catastrophe."

One, the feds really can't afford another bailout.

Two, this precedent would only encourage California, New Jersey, et al to look for still more bailouts rather than address their various structural problems.

Three, a bailout aborts a reassessment of school funding and performance. Fiscally stressed electorates are questioning the link between funding increases and system quality. They _can_ raise taxes or cut other items. That they _choose_ not to suggests either they care less about kids than tax levels, or they question whether they are getting their money's worth out of the schools. The latter seems more likely to me.

School funding problems aren't about public willingness to pay, they're about public confidence in the school systems. And that speaks to much more serious problems than a painful but momentary funding crisis.

Next Question

On Wednesday Ben Bernanke called for plans to address the deficit, providing an institutional punctuation to what is obviously the next great question for our government.

One preparation for that debate is a growing interest in the value added tax. Volcker noted Tuesday that interest in the VAT was rising. And Congressional talk of VAT is reaching CBO:

Today, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf confirmed he's been getting "a lot of questions" about the VAT tax from Congress.

"Many people in Congress are interested in it," he said of the VAT, a national sales tax that adds between 10 and 20 percent to purchases in European countries where it's been implemented. "We've had conversations with a number of members and their staffs."

(CBO link via the Daniel Foster at The Corner.)

Clearly our governing class knows we have an impending problem. The current schedule calls for a report from the President's deficit commission, due sometime after the November election. But there is no reason to wait. The commission's stated purpose is to provide expert and nonpartisan advice. But this isn't some tedious and obscure question, and nothing new about will be learned in the next eight months, so we hardly need some "expert" report. And there is no technocratic, "nonpartisan" answer to questions of fundamental policy.

So never mind the commission. Congress and the President know there is a problem, and they get to work fixing it. If they accomplish nothing more than outlining the broad strokes of the alternative fixes, well, that's what elections are for.