Podcast Alert

by Stacy Chin
May 9, 2008, 12:18pm

Listen to the IWF podcast with Allison Kasic and Carrie Lukas here.

Is it too easy to get a a student loan?

by Allison Kasic
May 8, 2008, 9:31am

Jenna Robinson of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has an interesting piece in Clarion Call recounting her personal experience with government-backed student loans.  Jenna and her friends spent a good deal of their loan money on non-school related activities, such as vacations, concert tickets, and off-campus apartments.  She concludes:

My friends and I didn't really cause the student loan crisis. In the grand scheme, our dalliances were a drop in the bucket. But we did make bad decisions. We misused taxpayer money, accrued years' worth of debt and postponed adulthood's important financial lessons to have a good time. Now that the college-loan business is in trouble, perhaps Congress will mend its ways and no longer permit these excesses to continue. Students who receive today's scaled-back loans should be better off as a result.

Read more here.

Obamamania

by Stacy Chin
May 7, 2008, 11:51am

In an op-ed today on Townhall.com, Allison Kasic writes:

Obamamania has been largely driven by the Senator's appealing personae and inspiring rhetoric. But for this upswing in interest in politics to have real meaning it can't just be a cult of personality.

It's crucial that young voters focus on the many pressing issues of concern to them and future generations.

Take Social Security, for example. In 2017 Social Security will start to pay our more money in benefits than it collects in taxes, and by the time, today's college students retire, the program will be able to pay only 74% of promised benefits. Unless reform happens soon, young voters will face massive tax hikes, massive benefit cuts, or some combination of the two.

Read the article here.

Children of the Corn

by Allison Kasic
May 7, 2008, 10:04am

Over at NRO, Dave Freddoso has a great primer on the ethanol debate, including this history of the subsidy:

Corn ethanol would not exist at all without Uncle Sam. The handouts began with ethanol tax credits in the Energy Tax Act of 1978. It was an attempt to solve two problems at once: our vulnerability to oil shortages and corn prices that had been depressed by our agricultural subsidies. In 1980, a punitive tariff of 50 cents per gallon was laid against ethanol imports (the rate today is 2.5 percent plus 54 cents). This and government sugar-price supports and tariffs guaranteed that American corn would be the only cost-effective feedstock for ethanol. Ethanol producers also became eligible in 1980 for government-guaranteed loans for up to 90 percent of their construction costs. (By 1988, the government had lost $352 million in defaults.) The government provided other assistance as well - R&D funding, for example.

Government help was a windfall for ethanol: Production shot upward from 20 million gallons in 1979 to 750 million gallons by 1986. In 1990, a tax credit of ten cents per gallon was created for small-capacity ethanol producers. In the same year, Congress mandated the use of oxygenated gasoline. The subsequent downfall of MTBE boosted demand for ethanol, a rival but less cost-effective oxygenate, so that production surged to 3.6 billion gallons by 2004.

Our ethanol policy always made food slightly more expensive by increasing demand and reducing supply. But 2005 was the year that Congress went all-in. Just before the oxygenate mandate disappeared in 2006, Congress guaranteed that ethanol use would expand dramatically no matter what. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandated the use of 4 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, increasing each year toward an annual consumption of 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol by 2012. This immediately brought about increased ethanol investment and production - and much higher demand for corn, leading to higher prices. By 2007, when ethanol production had already reached 6.5 billion gallons, the new energy bill upped the mandate to 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol by 2015.

More here.

Think we don't need entitlement reform?

by Allison Kasic
May 7, 2008, 10:02am

Think again.  Social Security and Medicare take up an increasing amount of the federal budget each year, and that trend will only increase as Baby Boomers retire.  The National Center for Policy Analysis crunched the numbers and this is what they found:

In the absence of a tax increase, if the federal government keeps its promises to seniors and balances its budget:

• By 2012, the federal government will stop doing 1 in 10 other things it has been doing.
• By 2020, the federal government will stop doing 1 in 4 things.
• By 2030, about the midpoint of the baby boomer retirement years, the federal government will stop doing about 1 in 2 things.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if Medicare spending continues to grow at the historical growth rate of total health care spending:

• Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (the health care program for the poor) will consume nearly the entire federal budget by 2050.
• By 2082 Medicare spending alone will consume nearly the entire federal budget.

The CBO also found that if federal income tax rates are adjusted to allow the government to continue its current level of activity and balance the budget:

• The lowest marginal tax bracket of 10 percent would have to rise to 26 percent.
• The 25 percent marginal tax bracket would increase to 66 percent.
• The current highest marginal tax bracket (35 percent) would have to rise to 92 percent!
• Additionally, the top corporate income tax rate of 35 percent would have to increase to 92 percent.

More here.

Changing Times for Ethanol

by Carrie L. Lukas
May 7, 2008, 9:38am

It really is amazing to see how many prominent politicians and opinionmakers are abandoning the idea of forcing Americans to use ethanol fuels. The Wall Street Journal, a long-time opponent of distortionary ethanol subsidies and mandates, writes today about how this remarkable turnaround:

Even the environmental left, which pushed ethanol for decades as an alternative to gasoline, is coming clean. Lester Brown, one of the original eco-Apostles, wrote in the Washington Post that "it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that food-to-fuel mandates have failed." We knew for sure the tide had turned when Time magazine's recent cover story, "The Clean Energy Myth," described how turning crops into fuel increases both food prices and atmospheric CO2. No one captures elite green wisdom better than Time's Manhattan editors. Can Vanity Fair be far behind?

All we can say is, welcome aboard. Corn ethanol can now join the scare over silicone breast implants and the pesticide Alar as among the greatest scams of the age. But before we move on to the next green miracle cure, it's worth recounting how much damage this ethanol political machine is doing.

To create just one gallon of fuel, ethanol slurps up 1,700 gallons of water, according to Cornell's David Pimentel, and 51 cents of tax credits. And it still can't compete against oil without a protective 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on imports and a federal mandate that forces it into our gas tanks. The record 30 million acres the U.S. will devote to ethanol production this year will consume almost a third of America's corn crop while yielding fuel amounting to less than 3% of petroleum consumption.

In December the Congressional Research Service warned that even devoting every last ear of American-grown corn to ethanol would not create enough "renewable fuel" to meet federal mandates. According to a 2007 OECD report, fossil-fuel production is up to 10,000 times as efficient as biofuel, measured by energy produced per unit of land.

Now scientists are showing that ethanol will exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions. A February report in the journal Science found that "corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years . . . Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%." Princeton's Timothy Searchinger and colleagues at Iowa State, of all places, found that markets for biofuel encourage farmers to level forests and convert wilderness into cropland. This is to replace the land diverted from food to fuel.

As the article goes on to detail, a growing number of politians, lead by Senator John McCain who has long been an outspoken opponent of ethanol subsidies, are asking the EPA to provide relief from government mandate. Let's hope the momentum keeps going so that policymakers (who are responsible for these mandates in the first place) can repeal these distructive laws.

Dying Together

by Halima Karzai
May 6, 2008, 11:36am

The article "If we die, we will die together," in quqnoos.com highlights one of several thousand stories occurring in Afghanistan today.  The sky rocketing prices of wheat and rice and the food shortage crisis is forcing families to sell their children so that they can make their ends meet.

Mother's plea to husband who sold daughters for food and water  

"If we die, we will die together."

These were the words a Kabul mother used to beg her husband to buy back her two children who he sold to buy food for his starving family.

The mother of six told Quqnoos.com that her husband sold her two daughters, aged four and two, because he could not afford to buy drinking water for his family.

"My husband said, ‘I'm going to sell these children to provide food for our other children'. But I said, ‘if we die we will die together' I can't stand to see my children with another family."

The husband agreed to buy back her two young daughters after she screamed at him for days.

One of the girls' brothers said: "When my father took my sisters off to sell them I was crying but I know my father did this because he had to."

One of the sisters said: "We don't have money to buy food: that is why my father sold my two sisters."

The husband said Kabul council had bulldozed their previous home and failed to provide his family with a new home, depsite numerous promises.

The family now lives in the capital's Kai Khana area, where they rent a house close to the Presidential Palace.

Over the last month, the cost of bread has doubled in some parts of the country. America warned last week that the rising cost of wheat, the lack of rain and export bans on flour to Afghanistan will likely increase the risk of serious food shortages in the country.

The US government's development agency, USAID, also predicts a below-average wheat harvest next month because crops have had about 50-90% less water than last year.

Provinces such as Ghor, Badghis, Daykundi, Badakhshan, Faryab, Urzgan, Zabul, Wardak, and Logar are most at risk from food shortages, the agency said.

The hike in the cost of wheat is most pronounced in Faizabad, Badakhshan, where prices are 157% higher than the five year average, Mazar-e-Sharif (151% above average), and Herat (13% above average). Since January, the cost of bread in Kabul has risen from Afg6 to Afg20 in some parts of the city.

Interesting News Out of Dartmouth

by Allison Kasic
May 6, 2008, 10:16am

There's certainly been a lot of it recently.  Here's the latest out of Hanover: 

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."

More here.

Polar Bear Politics

by Allison Kasic
May 6, 2008, 10:13am

To add the polar bear to the endangered species list or not to add the polar bear to the endangered species list?   That is the question.  

Rob Bluey has a great article over at Townhall.com looking at the consequences of listing the polar bear on U.S. energy policy.  The results aren't pretty:

Listing the polar bear as a threatened species would be a devastating blow for U.S. energy exploration and a boon to global-warming alarmists.

The classification would open the door for environmentalists to challenge any new forms of energy production -- including oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) or new power plants and factories that emit fossil fuels. It also would jeopardize a highly promising arrangement in Alaska's Chukchi Sea, which contains an estimated 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Now is not the time to cut back on domestic oil production. With gas prices soaring to nearly $4 per gallon in some parts of the country, there's hardly been a better time to embark on energy exploration in the United States to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

"Alaska is America's last best frontier for domestic oil and natural gas," Ben Lieberman of The Heritage Foundation said in arguing against the polar bear's listing. "Closing off these potential resources would add to energy prices for decades to come and increase reliance on imports."

But what about those cute polar bears, you ask.  Turns out, they are doing quite well:

...environmentalists conveniently ignore the facts about the bears' growing populations in Alaska, Canada, Russia and other countries. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, between 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears live around the world today, up significantly from the 8,000 to 10,000 in the 1960s. The alarmist views about global warming clearly don't jive with the facts.

More here.

What role should "women's issues" play in the 2008 elections?

by Stacy Chin
May 5, 2008, 12:15pm

The Independent Women's Forum is pleased to announce the winners of the 2007-2008 IWF College Essay Contest.  IWF received hundreds of essays for this year's contest.  Full-time, female undergraduate students were asked to submit an essay no longer than 750 words, answering the question: What role should "women's issues" play in the 2008 elections and how do you define women's issues?  

The awards include: First Place Award - $5,000, Second Place Award - $2,000, Third Place Award - $1,000, and Ten Honorable Mentions - $250

The winners are:

1^st Place Cassidy Bugos, Christendom College

2^nd Place Lauren Migliore, Kalamazoo College

3^rd Place Sara Elizabeth Walter, Lafayette College

Congratulations to all of the winners!

View the Honorable Mentions here.

Score one for transparency proponents!

by Allison Kasic
May 5, 2008, 10:44am

A U.S. District Court judge has ruled federal financial transparency laws apply to certain public-sector unions, traditionally exempt from such regulations.

If it stands, the decision will allow workers across the country to have increased access to records of their unions' financial dealings.

The case, Alabama Education Association v. Chao, has worked its way up and down the court system for several years. The most recent decision, issued in late March, requires state-level public-sector unions to disclose their finances to the federal government if those unions are affiliated with a national union that must comply with the federal reporting laws.

While the case deals directly with affiliates of the National Education Association, the same principle applies to other public-sector unions, including the American Federation of County, State, and Municipal Employees and Service Employees International Union.

More here.  (Hat tip: The Union Label)

Nancy Brinker Makes Time 100

by Allison Kasic
May 5, 2008, 9:47am

Last year's IWF Woman of Valor award winner Nancy Brinker recently made Time magazine's Time 100 list.  Check out the tribute to Brinker here.

Quote of the Day

by Allison Kasic
May 2, 2008, 2:41pm

From William Tucker in the Weekly Standard (via the Wall Street Journal):

Wind, hydro, and all the "alternate" sources of energy have been dubbed "green" because they are supposedly clean, renewable, and sustainable. In fact, what being "green" really means is that they all require vast amounts of land.

Interesting Strategy

by Allison Kasic
May 2, 2008, 11:38am

New York is paying teachers not to work.

Details here.

Big Government Band-Aids

by Stacy Chin
May 2, 2008, 10:53am

Allison Kasic and Carrie Lukas encourage policymakers to consider policies that will spur economic growth and job creation, rather than focusing on big government band-aids.

Listen to the podcast.

Who Knew Hot Dogs Were So Controversial?

by Allison Kasic
May 2, 2008, 10:01am

In his latest video for Reason.tv Drew Carey follows vendors in Los Angeles selling illegal goods--bacon-wrapped hot dogs:

"Do Union Leaders Make Too Much?"

by Allison Kasic
April 30, 2008, 8:46am

That isn't a question you're likely to hear.  Much more common is the claim that corporate executives make too much money. But it turns out that union leaders aren't doing so bad themselves (and their salaries come from the dues of union members, not company profits):

• The Plumbers paid former General President Martin Maddaloni $1.3 million in total compensation, and Secretary-Treasurer Thomas Patchell almost $900,000 - after they were ousted for disastrous pension investments in a Florida hotel. According to the Association for Union Democracy, the buyout agreement included "salaries and benefits plus free use of cars and other perks through the end of 2006."
• AFSCME President Gerald McEntee recorded total compensation just shy of $585,000.
• General President of the Laborers Terence O'Sullivan made more than $528,000.
• National Education Association President Reg Weaver made almost $439,000.
• The presidents of unions for players in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association made more than $1 million each. The NFL union head, Eugene Upshaw, made $2.4 million. Moreover, Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb received $900,000 from his AFL-CIO affiliated union as a player representative.

More here.

Title IX in the Courts

by Allison Kasic
April 30, 2008, 8:42am

Here's the latest Title IX litigation news out of California:

A federal judge has ruled in favor of the University of California, Davis, in a Title IX case filed by four women who wanted to be on the intercollegiate wrestling team.

In an order issued Wednesday in Sacramento, the court held that the plaintiffs in Mansourian v. Regents of the University of California failed to give the campus notice that they were making an allegation against the entire women's intercollegiate athletic program. The plaintiffs had changed the focus of their lawsuit to allege Title IX violations in the overall program after the court dismissed their claims pertaining to the wrestling team last October, finding them to be untimely.

In his 22-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr. held that a complaint filed by the former students with the Office for Civil Rights in 2001 was not sufficient to give the campus notice of the broad-scale discrimination allegations they made in the lawsuit.

In noting that Title IX requires a complainant to provide notice to a school of an alleged violation so that it can resolve the issue, Damrell held "the court does not find that Congress intended to create an implied enforcement scheme that may impose greater liability, in the form of monetary damages potentially exceeding the level of federal funding, absent comparable conditions." In addressing the UC Davis case, he ruled "the evidence simply fails to establish that plaintiffs gave defendants notice of a Title IX claim for failing to provide enough athletic opportunities to female athletes."

Emphasis mine. More info here.

Bad Government = High Prices

by Kate Pomeroy
April 29, 2008, 1:06pm

Every day the American people wake up to receive another ominous report on our economic future.  High gas prices, rising food costs, and home foreclosures are causing anxiety for millions of people, but as Carrie Lukas, vice president of policy and economics for the Independent Women's Forum writes in the following op-ed in today's townhall.com, "one real cause for concern should be the policies opportunistic politicians will pass in a rush to "solve" current economic challenges."  Read the following article to learn more about how policies being pushed in the name of rising gas prices will make our problems worse. View Article

Sex and the Soul

by Allison Kasic
April 29, 2008, 12:02pm

In today's Wall Street Journal, Harvey Mansfield reviews Donna Freitas' Sex and the Soul, a new book documenting the college hook up culture.  There have been a host of books on the topic recently (which I think is a great thing--it's brought the hook up culture into popular dialogue) and while I haven't read Freitas' book yet, Mansfield's review makes me want to pick up a copy:

In "Sex and the Soul," Donna Freitas, an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, acutely describes this "liberated" campus culture and wisely analyzes its effects. She is especially concerned to measure conduct and expectation against the inner life of students, including their religious feeling or "spiritual" selves. Over and over again she finds a conflict that does not resolve itself happily.

According to one feminist professor of health - the head of a recent Harvard committee on student sexual relations - sex on campus should be "mature, respectful and life-affirming." But, as Ms. Freitas shows, it usually is not. Instead it degrades both women and men. Women lose their sense of having a choice, to say nothing of "autonomy," the supposed goal of sexual liberation. They feel compelled to offer a hook-up when they really want a date without the expectation of sex. And yet they fear "getting a reputation" for doing just what they are expected to do. "I felt a lot of regret . . . ," one female student tells Ms. Freitas, speaking about a hook-up experience. "I felt that I kind of just gave myself."

More here.

Environmentalists and Biofuels

by Allison Kasic
April 29, 2008, 9:43am

Over at National Review Online, Phil Kerpen and James Valvo report that a few environmentalists are starting to catch on that biofuels aren't all they're cracked up to be:

Even environmentalists are calling for a halt to government subsidies and mandates on biofuels. Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, and Jonathan Lewis, a climate specialist with the Clean Air Task Force, spoke out on Earth Day with an article titled "Ethanol's Failed Promise." They outlined the desperate need for Congress to abandon a policy that should never have been enacted. In a daze over rising fuel costs, increased dependence on foreign oil, and a fear of carbon emissions, Congress has been backing the politically favored food-to-fuel ethanol program. But "the mandates are not reducing our dependence on foreign oil," wrote Brown and Lewis. "Last year, the United States burned about a quarter of its national corn supply as fuel - and this led to only a 1 percent reduction in the country's oil consumption."

The failure to reduce oil dependence is not the only flaw in the ethanol program. It also has driven food prices disturbingly high. The World Food Program is warning that the upward pressure on food prices is likely to lead to a "silent tsunami" of hunger. Josette Sheeran, the program's executive director, warned that "The price of rice has more than doubled in the last five weeks." The World Bank estimates that food prices have increased by 83 percent in three years. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged what many have been saying for years: "The production of biofuels needs to be urgently re-examined."

More here.

The Real Cost of Tackling Climate Change

by Allison Kasic
April 29, 2008, 9:40am

Steve Hayward had a great article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal reflecting on what an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 (as many politicians are pushing for) would actually look like:

Begin with the current inventory of carbon dioxide emissions - CO2 being the principal greenhouse gas generated almost entirely by energy use. According to the Department of Energy's most recent data on greenhouse gas emissions, in 2006 the U.S. emitted 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or just under 20 tons per capita. An 80% reduction in these emissions from 1990 levels means that the U.S. cannot emit more than about one billion metric tons of CO2 in 2050.

Were man-made carbon dioxide emissions in this country ever that low? The answer is probably yes - from historical energy data it is possible to estimate that the U.S. last emitted one billion metric tons around 1910. But in 1910, the U.S. had 92 million people, and per capita income, in current dollars, was about $6,000.

By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.

It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low - even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia.

More here.

Government at It's Worst

by Carrie L. Lukas
April 28, 2008, 1:44pm

It's hard to be surprise by bad policy that comes out of government, yet somehow I am still amazed that Congress would be preparing to pass another farm bill complete with giveaways for millionares in the agriculture businesses (it isn't really appropriate to call many of these folks "farmers"). As an editorial in the Sacramento Bee describes:

Given that big growers and commodity corporations are enjoying the windfall - and experts say these price spikes are not just a temporary "blip" - you might think that Congress would want to pass a farm bill that reflects current realities.

Nope.

Congress is close to approving another five-year farm bill that would cost the treasury about $300 billion. A good chunk of this funding - about $5.2 billion a year - will be in the form of "direct payment" subsidies to growers of corn and other crops, including some growers who are millionaires....

Will Congress ever reform the farm bill? Possibly, but not while powerful commodity interests have a lock on leaders of both parties, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Until that changes, Amercians will continue to pay twice for their food - once at the grocery store and once in their federal tax returns.

Politicians always say they are concerned about the middleclass and rising prices, but apparently that doesn't extent to issues like this one.

Fore!

by Allison Kasic
April 28, 2008, 10:54am

Here's how ESPN news covered Lorena Ochoa's recent LPGA feat:

It's been 45 years since we've seen someone on the LPGA Tour win four straight tournaments in as many weeks. Back when Mickey Wright pulled off the winning quartet in 1963, both Title IX and the Equal Rights Amendment were still ideas, not laws. And to world's #1 Lorena Ochoa, admittedly feeling fatigued after winning in her native Mexico last week, but poised to rewrite the record books in Tigeresque fashion Sunday.

Hmmm.  Is it really fair to bring Title IX and the ERA into the equation?  Newsbusters doesn't think so:

Huh? How much did Title IX, which has led to the creation of more women's college athletic programs, have to do with Ochoa's success? Long before she enrolled at the University of Arizona, Ochoa was already the world's most celebrated girl golfer, with 44 national titles in her native Mexico, and five World Golf Junior Championships. Ochoa left Arizona after her sophomore year to turn pro, in fashion similar to Wright, who dropped out of Stanford to join the LPGA Tour.

More here.