Will Governor Markell Serve 4 Years?

The following is from the political news website, Politico. Should President Obama win a 2nd term, could Governor Markell leave Delaware to take a cushy role in DC? His frequent TV appearances, push to get a national role with the DGA, and his active travel schedule certainly imply that Delaware is too small of a pool for his many talents.

Maybe he should be asked if he’ll “sign the pledge” to serve for 4 years.

Some other possible picks:

• Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor, is rumored as possible education secretary but is such a lightning rod that she likely will not get it. Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, chairman of the National Governors Association, is a possibility.

via Obama second term: Team of insiders – Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei – POLITICO.com.

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Three Simple Rules To Success — Not Much Government Needed

As readers of this blog know, opinions are fine, but back it up with data. The following was on the editorial page of today’s Wall Street Journal. The facts are what they are.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Ron Haskins testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, June 5:

I want to emphasize the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success. Young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success—complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby. Based on an analysis of Census data, people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2% chance of being in poverty and a 72% chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010). These numbers were almost precisely reversed for people who violated all three rules, elevating their chance of being poor to 77% and reducing their chance of making the middle class to 4%.

Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America. The nation’s struggle to expand opportunity will continue to be an uphill battle if young people do not learn to make better decisions about their future.

via Notable & Quotable – WSJ.com.

Now, some on the Left (actually, most on the Left) will argue that Government needs to provide those full-time jobs. But, of course, the Left’s understanding of how to create a full-time job seems quite limited. Full-time jobs are created because the value of the work performed is greater than the cost of the work performed.

Government jobs do not create value. Government jobs are, generally, regulatory/oversight/bureaucratic by design. This doesn’t mean that all government jobs are “bad”, but we long ago passed the point of diminishing returns as it relates to health & safety.

The only entity that creates full-time jobs in which the value created by the job is greater than the cost of performing the job is the private sector.

So, let’s summarize what Delaware’s Government can do…

• Provide educational options so that kids stay in school through high school (which means that Delaware needs more high-performing, niche schools like Kuumba Academy, Newark Charter or DAPSS);
• Reduce the regulatory burden of the State on Small Businesses and quit wasting tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on crony capitalism and leave that money in the pockets of the job creators;
• Promote abstinence and marriage.

Simple enough.

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PIMCO – School Daze, School Daze Good Old Golden Rule Days

The following was written by Bill Gross, founder & managing director of PIMCO in 1971. His firm now oversees $1.7 Trillion ($300 billion more than the U.S. Government’s current annual spending)…

College was great as long as the jobs were there.

Now, however, a growing number of skeptics wonder whether it’s worth the time or the cost. Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and head of Clarium Capital, a long-standing hedge fund, has actually established a foundation to give 20 $100,000 grants to teenagers who would drop out of school and become not just tech entrepreneurs but world-changing visionaries. College, in his and the minds of many others, is stultifying and outdated – overpriced and mismanaged – with very little value created despite the bump in earnings power that universities use as their raison d’être in our modern world of money.

Fact: College tuition has increased at a rate 6% higher than the general rate of inflation for the past 25 years, making it four times as expensive relative to other goods and services as it was in 1985. Subjective explanation: University administrators have a talent for increasing top line revenues via tuition, but lack the spine necessary to upgrade academic productivity. Professorial tenure and outdated curricula focusing on liberal arts instead of a more practical global agenda focusing on math and science are primary culprits.

Fact: The average college graduate now leaves school with $24,000 of debt and total student loans now exceed this nation’s credit card debt at $1.0 trillion and counting 7% of our national debt. Subjective explanation: Universities are run for the benefit of the adult establishment, both politically and financially, not students. To radically change the system and to question the sanctity of a college education would be to jeopardize trillions of misdirected investment dollars and financial obligations.

Conclusion to ponder: American citizens and its universities have experienced an ivy-laden ivory tower for the past half century. Students, however, can no longer assume that a four year degree will be the golden ticket to a good job in a global economy that cares little for their social networking skills and more about what their labor is worth on the global marketplace.Fareed Zakaria, as usual, has a well-thought-out solution. “We need,” he writes, “a program as ambitious as the GI Bill,” but one that focuses on retraining existing unemployed workers and redirecting our future students. Instead of liberal arts, he suggests focusing on technical education, technical institutes and polytechnics as well as apprenticeship programs. Our penchant for focusing on high tech value-added jobs should be modified and redirected, he claims, to mimic the German path, which allows people with good technical skills but limited college education to earn a decent living.

via PIMCO | Investment Outlook – School Daze, School Daze Good Old Golden Rule Days.

Mr. Gross has one recommendation — an alternative vo-tech path rather than college. Another path would be, of course, that colleges & universities actually improve productivity from their, largely liberal elite, faculty. Perhaps they could actually teach valuable courses that raised living standards. Is that really too much to ask?

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