supreme court, in two split decisions, upheld and trashed affirmative action at UM. ... wel, which is it? upheld or trashed.113 responses total.
My understanding is that they voted against the "bonus points for minorities" system that the U of M uses for undergrads, but upheld the less-blatant preference system that the Law School uses.
The Supreme Court ruled today on racial balancing though college admissions policies. The policy of U of M's undergraduate admissions allowed for 20 additional points (out of 150 total) to be awarded based on the applicant being of an under-represented race. The U of M's law school policy didn't award points but allowed prejudice in selecting for race among qualified applicants. Or at least that's how I understand the issue. The court ruled against the undergraduate policy but left the law school policy stand. I interpret this to mean it's fine for a school to select for a racially balanced student body among equally qualified applicants. But it goes too far to use race as a mechanism for joining the qualified pool of applicants. If I got that right then I'm pleased with the ruling. It's time. The vote was 6-to-3 on the undergraduate ruling and 5-to-4 on the law school verdict.
Maybe UofM can give the same number of points for living in the city of Detroit as they do for living in certain rural counties.
For those who aren't on the UM's email system, excerpts from a campus-wide email written by President Coleman: ---- A majority of the Court has strongly reaffirmed the principle of diversity articulated by justice Powell in the Bakke decision. The Court said that it "endorses Justice Powell's view that student body diversity is a compelling state interest." Universities can continue to use race as one of many factors in an individualized admissions process. [...] These decisions are a wonderful victory for the University of Michigan, for all of higher education, and for the hundreds of groups and thousands of individuals who supported us. The Court has provided two important signals. The first is a green light to pursue racial and ethnic diversity in the college classroom. The second is a pathway to get us there. The Law School policy clearly met the Court's criteria for a holistic admissions process. We will modify our undergraduate admissions process to follow today's guidance from the Court. . . . We expect to have a revised undergraduate admissions process in place this Autumn. [...] I am proud of the role of the University of Michigan in this important debate. We argued for fair and equal access. Now, we will do whatever it takes to recruit the finest, most diverse student body possible, within the provisions of today's decisions. [...] [O]ur commitment to a diverse campus will continue. . . . [And,] every student admitted to our University will continue to be eminently well qualified. [...] I expect that members of our community will engage in a full and robust debate of many related issues. I anticipate this discussion will be civil and respectful of all points of view. Your right to freedom of expression is paramount at the University of Michigan. This is a hallmark of our educational system, and one of which I am most proud. In the coming days and weeks, we will continue to provide updated information on our main University WWW site [www.umich.edu]. This is an historic day for our University. You may look to me for leadership as we adapt to the new provisions of the law, and I will look to all of you for inspiration. With my best wishes, Mary Sue Coleman President
The bandaid can remain. Who is going to regrow the severed arm?
Severed arm?? What severed arm?
It would have been nice if, having said that affirmative action was acceptable, if the courts had given a suggestion as to how it should be implemented as opposed to how it shouldn't be. Sounds like they were told they could use race as a means of diversifying the campus population, but weren't given any means as to how they could accomplish this.
It is far nicer that the courts only specify what cannot be done, and leave open what remains, rather than specifying what can be done. Mainly, this is because the courts cannot possibly imagine all possible scenarios which their rulings may affect.
Why do they need to consider race for making admission decisions? Aren't academic and other merits sufficient?
I haven't read that much about the rulings. What's struck me most is Mary Sue Coleman, president of U-M, citing the new decisions as unqualified victory. It seems she was willing to cite just about anything as a victory. I whimsically imagine a decision like this: Supreme Court: We rule the U-M has used racial quotas, which is discriminatory. The U-M should be disbanded and it's grounds sewn with salt. Coleman: We hail this ruling as an unqualified victory. The Supreme Court has clearly supported U-M in it's pursuit of diversity by not mandating what brand of salt. In fact, the Supreme Court has *ended* U-M's policy of giving 20 bonus points to racial minorities for undergraduate admissions, which is the means the university has used to achieve the racial balance they wanted. The door has been left open to giving racial preference, but only on a case by case basis. Individually! It seems to me this will either cut way back on racial preference, or make it very, very expensive for the university. In practice, I don't think even the U-M can do *all* of it's admissions on an individual case by case basis. That's what they'd need to do to even approach the racial percentages they've tried to maintain. President Coleman has managed, very quickly and efficiently, to put a positive spin on it for the university and to get that spin quoted nation-wide in headlines. Good for her. But I don't see how the Supreme Court could have ruled much more against U-M's policies. I think this was a nearly complete loss for the university's racial preference system, and for colleges across the country which try to achieve or maintain racial quotas, percentages or "balances". I mostly don't know what I think about the rulings yet. We'll see what the effects are in 10 years or so. I expect I'll have formed opinions about these two decisions before then. (-: I did see something to be optimistic about in what little I've read. The Supreme Court appears to believe racial preferences are a temporary measure which ought to be dispensed with at some point. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." Also from O'Conner: "We take the law school at its word that it would 'like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula' and will terminate its race-conscious admissions program as soon as practicable."
I think the main effect will be more litigation. It's a victory in the sense that the Supreme Court didn't outlaw affirmative action altogether, but what exactly universities are allowed to do with it now is pretty murkey and will probably have to be hashed out in court over time.
The plantiffs were absolutely hypocritical in pressing race as the main thrust of their suit. Preferential treatment will still be given to children of alumni and athletes, and applicants from certain geographical areas. This suit wasn't really about equality of education. In order for there to be an equal playing field for admissions, students should have equal opportunitirees to meet standards. They do not.
I accidentally hid that response. Read at will, and my apologies!
re resp:9: You see, there have been a couple of centuries of racial discrimination in America, deciding privileges and rights for people based on their skin color. These have greatly harmed those who aren't descended from Europeans. No ethnic group has overcome this discrimination, except all of them who aren't African-Americans, so the obstacles are clearly proven to be insurmountable. Obviously the only thing that can be done to combat the effects of two centuries of racial discrimination is privileges and rights for people based on their skin color. This is of course *not* racial discrimination. We know that, because racial discrimination is bad, and this isn't bad. It's affirmative action, you see. It's completely different. Make no mistake about *that*. Statistics have been warped and stretched (and even made up) to show it works. In some cases, it hasn't worked at all, but the answer to that is more rights and privileges based on skin color. Questioning that in any way means you're a racist because affirmative action is good, so opposing it is bad. In case you think you can oppose it without being branded as a maniac, saying you're opposing it because it causes more harm than good is "code words" for a desire to return to the days of slavery. Anyone like that has to be shut up and ridiculed because we believe in free speech. Free speech is good, of course. We have a Constitutional right to free speech. Since being a racist anti- affirmative action nut would be bad, it's hate speech, which is something different.
*blinks*
re resp:13: resp:12 is not hidden. re resp:12: I don't think any of the plaintiffs would have taken a case to the Supreme Court by themselves. Someone (CIL, Center for Individual Liberties I believe) dug them up, convinced them they'd been wronged, and used them to bear their standard. I don't think the case was about equality. I think it was about giving special privileges based on race. I think there's plenty of room for another ground-breaking suit which would be about preferences for alumni, athletes, and geographical areas. I don't think there'd be as much attention given to any of those suits as there was for this one; it wouldn't be about race and therefore wouldn't be as hot a topic.
I just found it amusing that one of the dissentors (Thomas) is a major product of affirmative action. I saw a sign in the paper today that basically said, "Affirmative action exists because racism exists". White people rarely think of the color of their skin as being beneficial or detrimental - it just is. Do you think black/asian/hispanic people could answer that question the same way? I think the law school's standards being upheld was a good thing - and I think the undergrad's standards being stricken was also good. It's a lot easier to funnel through law school apps than UG apps.
("does not always work" != "does not work")
We pay physicians so extraordinarily well in this country that there is intense competition for entrance into medical schools. Only a small percentage of those who apply can be admitted and trained as doctors. As a practical matter, however, most applicants to medical schools, were they admitted, would do perfectly well as physicians. The fact that tippity-top credentials are required to get in to med school is an artifact of the competition for seats, not a requirement of the curriculum or of medical practice. African-American graduates of US medical schools are, statistically, much more likely to choose to practice in settings, such as urban hospitals and clinics in the rural South, where the patient population is predominantly African-American. Probably similar correlations apply to Hispanic graduates and practice in Hispanic areas and so on. The typical black medical school applicant grew up in a predominantly black or all-black neighborhood, with parents who were not college graduates (probably about a third in single parent families), and attended schools where academics were not the first priority, and which never attracted very many good teachers. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of medical school applicants who have absolutely stellar academic backgrounds come from privileged white upper-middle-class backgrounds, with parents who were also highly educated, and attended excellent schools with lots of highly motivated (and motivating) teachers. If the assignment of seats to medical schools is made strictly on the basis of academic credentials, there will be very few African-American medical graduates -- just given the historical realities recited above. As a result, medical facilities in minority areas will have much more trouble finding physicians. We could solve this problem by increasing the number of medical school slots (i.e., spending billions on a dramatic expansion of medical schools). That would increase the supply and reduce the price of physicians. Or, at comparatively trivial cost, medical schools could simply admit reasonable numbers of racial minority students. Or, we could write off health care in predominantly minority areas. If lower-income communities get outbid in the competition for trained physicians, isn't that just the free market at work?
Or you could lower the standards to what was considered necessary for success in the medical field. Of those who meet the new standards you select based race and gender to see a diverse and representative class. If you still aren't attracting enough black applicants I'd suggest you do two things - take a look at your institution and find out why blacks aren't interested. Two, recruit. Don't know how to recruit? As the football coach. But the new rule, as I read it, is you can use race as a tie-breaker but not as a means to qualification.
From what I've heard of the decision, I think the main implication is that UM will have to hire a bunch more people to do admissions, and it will have to be much more of a hands on "person by person" activity, rather than a relatively objective system relying heavily on computers to do relative ranking of persons. I doubt it will actualy change by any great degree the sorts of people UM admits, it will just make the process harder to understand.
That's right - making it subjective will make it more legal than having it objective. This seems to be a trend in New Law from the Supreme Court.
Having done no research on this, I am curious to hear exactly how Clarence Thomas is a major product of affirmative action. I would be very interested to hear if there are grounds for that--it is certainly not a sure bet that his success is affirmative-action driven if that conclusion is reached merely because he is black. The first I heard of the result, it was a pro-affirmative action individual declaring victory. Then I heard the anti-affirmative action spin on it, and they declared victory too. In this case, the rulings on affirmative action have affirmed pretty much everybody. Perhaps it will turn the economy around. Larry did a nice job of describing a potential scenario that defends affirmative action in medical schools, a situation roughly analogous to the law school problem that was actually tackled. However, it presumes the persistence of much larger problems--society's natural self-segregation, which causes people to settle amongst other people they feel they belong to (ie, those of the same color, though it actually has as much to do with economic status as anything else), and the lack of qualified applicants for medical schools from minority persuasions. All this energy spent on affirmative action is conveniently relieving people of the necessity to solve these larger problems.
I didn't say there was a lack of qualified minority applicants for medical schools. Indeed, there are plenty. What I said was that, if you rank the applicants on academic qualifications alone, only the utterly topmost would be admitted, and that specific stratum tends to be drawn almost exclusively from the white upper-middle-class. And they are far from the only applicants who are "qualified" by any reasonable standard.
I agree with senna. I think the embarrassing problem here is the lack of educational schools in the inner cities / black sector. Until that is fixed, and the problems that promote that, African-Americans will continue to be under-represented in colleges and professional schools. As Larry points out, I think society has a compelling interest in making sure there are qualified doctors to work in all sectors of our society. What never ceases to amaze me is how quickly some people complain when, for the first time, their skin color (or the skin color of someone else) has an impact in their lives. Suddenly they scream for a color-blind society. One can only wonder what they would think or say if they had to face such challenges on a regular basis.
when you suggest that you need to have black targetted schools to educate people in the inner city to support pople in the inner city, is that not a racist statement?
Ok. So this means that if there is a tie between a white applicant and a coloured applicant at a medical school then the white one's told that black one gets the seat coz he's black? And that is bcoz the black neighbourhoods need more doctors. So far good. But the assumption that a black graduate will serve in a black neighbourhood is a supported by facts or is it just an assumption? Why wouldn't he work at a place where he can make maximum money? Does the school also stipulate that since he was given this seat over an equally deserving white candidate so he must spend X number of years serving a particular area? The statement that "if you rank the applicants on academic qualifications alone, only the utterly topmost would be admitted, and that specific stratum tends to be drawn almost exclusively from the white upper-middle-class." Facts? Is there a survey done on this?
In India we've had affirmative action for almost five decades now. In Government education institutions and jobs, a certain percentage is reserved for the Scheduled castes/Scheduled Tribes and Oppressed backward classes (SC/ST/OBC). In our case, the entry levels for these candidates are far lower than those for general candidates. Big flaw. Anyways, so what happens to these candidates to whom the state does a favour. Do they end up in rural areas and communities of SC/ST/OBC? No, the ones who end up in rural areas are people who are not so smart irrespective of their caste. The smarter ones get into private practise and make lots of money. And the smart ones serving in rural areas and SC/ST/OBC communities are people who are attached to some kind of social service organisation or NGO. But not necessarily of any particular caste.
Re #16: I think it's extremely unlikely we'll see anything done about alumni preferences. A majority of people in power in this country have probably benefited from legacy status in one way or another. It wouldn't be in their interest to end it. Re #23: I'm not sure self-segregation is a solvable problem. Re #26: They don't have to be black-targeted. Inner city white residents (both of them) would benefit too.
My black next door neighbor is now a pediatrician (who volunteers in a a Hispanic clinic). While in medical school, she said everyone assumed she had been admitted only because of her skin color and that she was not really capable of doing the work. She graduated near the top of her class. I think she would have preferred it if there were no affirmative action while she was in school.
I can understand the frustration in that, but it's a small price to pay. Larry mentioned statistics to support that minority doctors are more likely to serve needier communities. What may also be true, but is sheer speculation on my part, is that some of these minority doctors are more likely to require and receive financial aid which may stipulate that they must spend some years in such communities.
It's apparently both possible and quite popular to skip out on those "requirements". Or so I've heard.
Re 27. Yes, there are reams of studies and statistics supporting all of those conclusions. This debate has been going on for many years, and there's a ton of data.
It occurs to me to wonder, if UM's admissions process is so automated and impersonal, why I had to write that obnoxious application essay. I'll be pissed of nobody read that.
re resp:31: Leeron, how would you know if it's a small price to pay? Maybe it isn't. re resp:29: I doubt if they'll terminate any legacy preferences retroactively. Though it'd be amusing to consider how they'd go about doing so. I don't imagine they'll end legacy admissions preferences as long as they're of benefit to the school. I'm not sure self-segregation is a *problem*.
John, you are of course correct that I can't know what "price" it is for someone else to be thought of as being the beneficiary of assistance that in reality they didn't need. But that seems selfish to me given the benefit it provides others. Also, even if at first one is slighted so, just think of all the fun and retribution they can have when they do graduate above those other losers....
Self-segregation isn't so much of a problem as long as it's really self-segregation, and that involves being mutual. The history of segregation in Michigan started out with members of the advantaged group violently attacking members of the disadvantaged group when they tried to move in to the advantaged group's neighborhoods, and later when that became unacceptable, the advantaged group moving out of neighborhoods en masse whenever members of the disadvantaged group started to move in, taking the financial resources of the neighborhood with them.
I thought all med students needed to borrow money, like she did, because medical school is so expensive. If university educations were free and there were more positions open in medical school, more minority students might be interested in becoming doctors, and there would also be more doctors which might drive the cost down a bit.
Wait, so separate is equal? Self-segregation now is, for the most part, quite voluntary. That is, people with money go ahead and segregate themselves from the inner city, where the people without money are stuck. Coincidently, most of those people are minorities. (I say coincidently to indicate that those who leave the cities don't actually dislike the minorities, just the unpleasant living situation created by living amongst a lot of people without money). Solving this problem is not a legislative issue, but it is an economic one. The problem in the meantime is that the groups are evolving separately, and the old negative attitudes are starting to creep in.
Have you spent much time talking to people fleeing Southfield, for example, to move to "if you lived here you'd be home by now" land? Nobody now will say they're doing that to get away from the black people, but they'll tell you Southfield "isn't safe" anymore. They'll you too many people are coming over from Detroit. And they will openly wonder why somebody they know who was mugged didn't know to turn and run when they saw they were being approached by black people. It should also be noted that the early black movers into expensive white neighborhoods are rarely "people without money." The typical white flight pattern is that some small number of affluent black people move into an affluent white neighborhood, followed by the affluent whites fleeing in droves, thus causing a nosedive in the property values which brings in far less affluent black residents.
Ok. To collect reliable information on employment statistics of students favoured by affirmative action, you would need to: 1. Make public the information of students favoured by it. 2. All employment forms which a person fills have to have a field asking the candidate whether they were favoured by affirmative action. 3. A method of verifying that such information provided by the candidate is true. Right?
Haven't talked to those people, Steve, so you probably have a point. I have heard quite a bit of rhetoric from Ann Arbor, though, which says otherwise--ironically, I think that further backs up your point.
Y'know, it's funny. Society at large is becoming more and more anti-intellectual. Jerry Springer and The Osbournes have attracted huge audiences. Innumeracy and scientific illiteracy are high and going higher. On the other hand, books and newspapers are downright cheap. A great many good textbooks in ageless subjects like reading are out of copyright, and could be reprinted for next to nothing. More recent texts which have fallen from favor could be obtained and fixed up for the price of some bindery work. The opportunity for some hitherto-disadvantaged group to leap to the top of the educational achievement ladder has never been better! If some poor, downtrodden community (such as Benton Harbor, or even Detroit) had the will and the cohesion to insist on education and hold it up as one of their primary values, they could vault right over the majority culture and put themselves just below the elite. It probably wouldn't take more than half a generation. Heck, it could have been done at any time in the last 30-40 years. This has not happened, and the word I hear is that bookish students in many minority communities have to conceal their capabilities to avoid being harassed. Even more so than in the majority culture, these people devalue education. Entitlements won't fix this. Change must come from within.
"Change must come from within." Er, so we should just fence them in and hope for the best? A lot of anti-intellectual messages are coming in, from TV and other sources - what's needed is not pretending that it's their own fault, but instead figuring out some way to push an "education is cool" message in via the same channels.
resp:43 there is much more to this, I'm sure, than meets the eye. Is there any sort of class distinction or snobbery to intellectualism? I'm assuming the myth that is being perpetrated here is 'intellectualism is establishment, old money, traditionalist, stuffy'... etc. The rudeness and cheap thrill that seems to be pushed today in society seemed to be packaged in the whole 'be a rebel' albeit 'be a rebel and get with the program' deal. I don't think it helps too much that disappointing voices about education come from the press, at least, the mainstream press. You'd think it would come from the youth, Hollywood, or someone anointed 'cool.' Ergo, Scott, although there are anti-intellectual messages from the media, at times, part of it wonders at times about it, at least as far as schooling is concerned. I think 'entertainment' should maybe be a little bit more interested. But strangely enough, it should be noted that the media *does* have more intellectual offerings in some areas. We have A&E, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, et al for a start. Documentaries are effective at presenting certain types of information, for example. You'd find intellectualism in the weirdest sorts of places, albeit, again, in small niches. I'm a gamer by one hobby, and one group of games I play draws on a wealth of folklore, pop culture, history, and many real references for material in its game material. Some of the game books are almost mini-novels in their complexity.
I had the impression that part of the split on the decision was also based on the fact that law schools play a bit of a different role than, say, engineering schools. Law school is one of the key routes into politics. As such it is important for the survival of democracy in America that people of all ethnicities feel that the routes to power are open to them. Something like 25% of all senators are graduates of elite law schools. The percentage in the judicial branch is even higher. All of the current supreme court justices are graduates of elite law schools. Admissions to those law schools are highly competitive. Many more qualified applicants apply than can be admitted. So the argument works much the same way as the one Larry gave for medical school. (1) There is a compelling social interest in diversity. (2) There is a glut of applicants. I think that under such circumstances, affirmative action works very well and serves an important need.
However, to get into an elite law school, you need to have gone to a very good undergraduate school...
I can think of one or two people who have gone to elite graduate schools (even UofM law school) after completing their undergrad at a second tier state university (such as EMU).
Since public education is a State function, there should be a much greater effort to ensure that all public schools have the facilities they need and the well trained (and paid) teachers. Education (and diversity) would be well served by eliminating the disparity of quality among public schools. That said...I recognize that it will still be more difficult to maintain the level of operation of such schools in areas of poverty than in areas of plenty, which would call for some more resources and effort (and inducements) in the more difficult to manage school districts. But I think this would go further to attain the desired equality of education, and hence access to to later higher education, than just treating higher-education access alone.
Does Mr. rcurl have in mind the model where the public schools in the D. of C. ought to consume the highest level of resources in the nation as compared to the level of resources expended in some of the obscure western states - the result being the elimination of the disparity in educational performance among the two areas - or is he once again displaying his droll sense of humor?
Re #44: Nice straw-man, but no. We have to insist that any demand for help to compensate for past discrimination has to come in return for effort. It's the difference between having a chance to get to the top of the mountain, and the chance to be a mountain climber; the person who demands a ride up in a Jeep because they were once forbidden to climb still won't be a climber. Re #46: If you were looking for a way that disaster could strike the USA, groupthink caused by the narrow experience pool of those few elite schools is a scary possibility. It's also one way that a self-perpetuating aristocracy could be set up - the basis for it exists right now.
Re #48: There are exceptions to every rule, but you have to admit that
going to a really good undergrad school helps a lot.
sure, I'll admit that.
Jan in #46 talked right around society's biggest problem: politicians are lawyers, not engineers. (:
Re 54. We have had a significant number of engineer politicians, and I'm not sure they're really any better as a group than lawyer politicians. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were engineers, no? The upcoming new version of PoliticalGraveyard.com will have pages listing politicians in various occupational categories. Lawyers, physicians, bankers, dentists, farmers, automobile dealers, florists, veterinarians, architects, funeral directors, engineers, hardware and implement dealers, hoteliers, and many others.
Re #51: Isn't that the idea between things like legacy status, and eliminating the inheritance tax? Ensuring that rich families stay rich, and the poor stay poor? Re #54: I think complaining that politicians are mainly lawyers is a bit like complaining that the people who write building codes are mainly engineers. The basic implement politicians work with is law, so it makes sense that they'd come from a lawyer background. A basic understanding of law is essential to being an effective politician.
re 54,55 That's why Archie Bunker crooned "Mister, we need a man like Hebert Hoover again".
re: "#56 (gull): The basic implement politicians work with is law, so it makes sense that they'd come from a lawyer background. A basic understanding of law is essential to being an effective politician." Which explains why the President is a businessman, the Speaker of the House is a teacher, and the Majority Leader of the Senate is a physician.
In a lawyer's training, the final arbitrator of what is good is a jury. If you can convince a jury that you are right, then you are right. This is to a large extent true even for lawyers who never argue cases in front of juries. A contract is well-written if it would hold up in court. And so on. For a lawyer, an idea has merit if you can convince other people that it has merit. For an engineer, the final arbitator of what is good is the real world. If have a theory or a design, then you build it, and see if it works. An idea has merit if and only if you can make it work in the real world. So we set them each to writing laws and setting social policy. The engineer thinks up an idea for policy, and then she gets stuck. She can't just send it off to manufacturing to build a prototype. She's got to get out and convince a lot of people that her idea is a good one before she can get it implemented in a democratic society. To do this she needs to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a lawyer. The lawyer hasn't got this problem. He selects a policy that he likes and that he thinks he can convince to the public to support. He sells, it and with luck gets his law passed. He is obviously a much more effective politician than the engineer was. Only problem is that once the lawyer has got his law passed, he thinks he's won his case. He throws a victory party and moves on to the next law. If the engineer had ever managed to get her law passed, she probably would have remembered to stop and look to see if it actually worked once implemented. Maybe spent some time fine tuning it. However, her efforts would have been largely foiled by the fact that it is almost impossible to meaninfully measure the effectiveness of nearly any service that the government supplies. Telling if a tax cut is working is a lot harder than telling if a garage door opener is working. So I think lawyers make much more effective politicians than engineers. What they get done may or may not be good for anything, but that's certainly more likely to get you re-elected than total deadlock. There is such a thing as a one-man engineering shop, and a one-man law firm. If there is such a thing as a one-man government, then it is thankfully a rare item. In real life we don't have to pick between lawyer mind-sets and engineer mind-sets. There is room in government for an awful lot of people with an awful lot of minds. Thank Gosh.
The main problem with lawyers for politicians is well, they think like lawyers. I'm not entirely sure a lot of lawyers is any improvement over just one. To some extent, I think politicians work like movie producers: they all want to steal someone else's idea, preferably one that worked somewhere recently. So tax cuts work something like cowboy movies or SF movies; somebody once made a killing selling tax cuts to the public, and now everybody wants to get in on the act.
Re #56 para 1: Amen, brother. Re #56 para 2: Except that the politicians are writing laws about engineering, and medicine, and all kinds of things where the study of law confers no understanding of the various gotchas which apply. Given a choice between an expert in the subtleties of law who approaches, say, pollution control without subtleties, and an expert in pollution control who approaches law in a direct fashion, I think I'd rather have the clean air & water acts drafted by the latter. The points of law can be cleaned up in the courts based on legislative intent, but if the author misses a way that someone can shift pollution without cleaning it up (or is overly prescriptive about how something is to be done rather than what is to be done), the result can easily be worse than no law at all. The dearth of broader experience (than law and/or "public service") among our political class is a big problem for the nation.
Re #58: that is very telling: the businessmen, the teacher, and the physician, were promoted to positions in which they don't usually write legislation. They left the lawyers to write legislation.
Re #61: That's why politicians need advisors who understand things like engineering, and medicine. That's also why people who have backgrounds in things like engineering tend to be appointed to regulatory positions.
I grew up among physicians and observed even as a kid that doctors make *terrible* engineers. Doctors generally work on human bodies. The human body, is so complex that you can't really understand many of it's processes. You have to do things by trial and error and see what works. But you are working in what is usually an essentially benign environment. A good surgeon doesn't try to carefully stitch everything back together exactly right. He gets things close enough and gets the incision closed quickly (reducing chance of infection) trusting that the natural healing processes of the body will fix all the details. A lot of medical processes are like that - attack the patient with knives and poisons, trusting the body to fix all the collateral damage you do. Doctors don't heal people - they just try to facilitate the body's natural healing. For engineering, proceeding without a thorough understanding of the underlying principles is undesirable (though very often necessary), but getting things approximately right and trusting that things will work out the rest of the way hardly ever works. I've seen brick walls built by physicians. It's not a pretty sight. The mind set is similarly bad for flying aircraft - I've heard small private aircraft refered to as "Doctor Killers". If you are riding in a plane, pick one piloted by an engineer over one piloted by a doctor any day. Doctors just don't have a sufficiently firm grasp of Murphy's Law. I think doctors might make better politicians than engineers. Like engineers, they are in the habit of judging the value of their procedures by the real world outcome. They are a bit better a dealing with poorly understood systems and outcomes that are not always subjectively measurable (though doctors are much better at treating broken limbs than they are at treating general feelings of malease). Social systems do have certain abilities to naturally heal. People implementing a law often modify it to make it make more sense (eg, there are lots of laws the police quietly agree not to enforce). Having faith in this process might be better for a lawmaker than trying to get all the details exactly perfect in the legislation. However, like engineers, physicians aren't really used to marketing their ideas to the general public. They are used to having people come to them as penitents, pleading for help, and they are used to their opinions being accepted at face value with little question by most of their customers. This is not a very good starting point for getting legislation passed.
For a businessman, the value of an idea is ultimately determined by whether it makes a profit when implemented. Success is measured in dollars. (Yes, I know real businessmen think about other things too, just as real lawyers and physicians and engineers are more complex that the profiles I mention. I'm trying to describe the distinctive thought processes needed for success in different fields. Considerations of ethics and social responsibility have a place in *any* profession, and all professions have people all over the ethical spectrum.) Hmm...I'm having a hard time with this one. Part of the problem is that *everyone* is a businessman. We all need to bring in as much or more money than we spend. It's a major consideration in all our lives. We all market our services. Businessman tend to operate in very hierarchical structures. The larger supply of businessmen in the Republican party is probably why it is more hierarchically structured. People used to a hierarchical command structure might get by OK in the white house (up to a point) but the legislature is rather a different deal. On the other hand, many businessmen are salesmen - used to going out and talking to masses of people and trying to convince them to buy a product. Being able to convince people to buy a product isn't that different from being able to convince them to support an idea or a candidate. I'm just not sure how you actually apply the idea of profit to a government. It's a dubious fit.
There's also what seems to be a great deal more commonality of interest
in the Republican party.
Re #64: I always figured that the reason physicians tended to have aircraft accidents is that they had a lot of money. Just because you can afford a high-performance aircraft doesn't mean you can fly one well. I've heard the term "Doctor Killer" used specifically to refer to the Beech Baroness, which is a fast, roomy single-engine plane that apparently has some unfortunate stall characteristics that can make it tricky to fly. Re #66: I don't know if there's more commonality of interest, or if they just do a better job keeping everyone in line. The Republican party does not tolerate moderates well.
The Beech Bonanza is known as the Forked Tail Doctor Killer, because of it's V tail and the reputation it has as a plane that is harder to handle than most recreational pilots are used to.
It's certainly true that no plane is likely to get called a "Janitor Killer". Doctors are more likely to own airplanes than many other professions. But few of the doctors I've ever met had the necessarily paranoia to be safe pilots. They just don't *expect* things to go wrong the way engineers do. I've known several doctors killed in plane crashes - mostly taking off and flying in bad conditions, sure that everything will work out. I was surprised that I wasn't very good at characterizing the mindset encouraged by being a businessman. I don't find educators easy either. Educators measure their success by their ability to communicate key ideas and methods of thought to their students. They aren't necessarily trying to convince their students to take any particular action, instead, they are trying to endow people with new capabilities. I would expect an educator-turned-politician to tend toward trying to solve social problems by empowering people. Give people the capability to act, and trust them to identify and solve the problem themselves. This kind of thinking might fit in better in local government than in federal government.
Re #67: I really do think there's more commonality, though. Most
conservatives can agree on certain common economic and social interests, and
are more willing to compromise towards the party line. On the left, however,
you have everything from the greens and (arguably) the libertarians to Earth
First and racial consciousness groups.
Re various: The Beechcraft Bonanza came in two models: the V-tail
and the straight-tail (originally known as the Debonair, because the
straight tail didn't have the same cachet).
The original "straight 35" Bonanzas had a serious structural defect
in the left wing, where the end of the wing spar's shear web, the
landing light opening and a joint in the wing skin all fell at the same
place. This amounted to a sign saying "BREAK HERE", and from what
I understand a very large fraction of those aircraft did exactly that.
(In-flight airframe failure is essentially 100% fatal.)
Even after that was fixed, the V-tail Bonanza had a problem. Its
tail caused yaw/roll coupling ("Dutch roll"), and when the original
designer increased the tailplane area to cure another problem he
did it by making the ruddervator panels wider... but he did not
relocate the structural spar, nor add ribs to stiffen the greater
depth of the front D-tube. The ruddervator ahead of the spar was
an empty metal tube, and sufficient force could cause it to buckle.
Once buckled, the deflection of the leading edge amounted to a huge
(and unintended) control input which caused the aircraft to go out
of control or even break up in midair due to excessive aerodynamic
forces. Sharp wind shears, wake turbulence from other aircraft and
other factors were apparently sufficient to buckle a ruddervator.
The powers that be finally issued an Airworthiness Directive (AD)
which set forth standards for stiffening the attachment between
the ruddervator leading edges and the aircraft tailcone, and the
problem went away (though not without grumbling from people whose
fixes didn't meet the letter of the AD and had to do it over).
Re #69: Doctors also have a tendency to neglect their recurrent
training and just hop in the machine when it suits them; when
something comes up, they often don't have the proper reactions
drilled into them. The Bonanza is a high-performance aircraft,
and things can happen mighty fast; the pilot has to be ahead of it.
IIRC, the Mitsubishi MU-2 became essentially worthless because of a
slightly more extreme case of the same; it became nearly impossible
to get insurance for one because the required training was so
specialized and could not be neglected. If you didn't mind flying
without insurance on your life and hull, you could pick up a really
fast twin-turbine airplane for less than some used Cherokees.
Re #65: Actually, some business principles do appear to be at
work in the Republican platform (though not the execution). The
idea of the Laffer curve is classic economics, finding the "sweet
spot" even if it means giving up some of your margin because the
greater volume will yield you more money. Ditto the "flat tax",
because the simpler something is the less overhead you have and
the fewer discouraging hassles (another form of tax) there are.
What we could really use for a good tax policy is a bunch of smart
folks who don't have ideological axes to grind, nor horses of their
own in the race (and aren't in the pay of folks who do); they could
do a good job of making one. And it'll never happen.
I disagree with the last paragraph. Non-ideological people could not design a good tax code. The basic idea behind taxation is to raise money. But any form of taxation is going to cause people to change their behaviour to accomodate the tax. Given this, it is necessary to try to think of ways to design the tax system so that it encourages productive behaviors rather than destructive ones. Your choices are to design the tax code blindly, without thought to the impact it will have on society, or you can design it guided by some ideological theory of what kind of society would be good.
Jan, I think what you were getting at is the "god complex" of [some] doctors. There's a dental software package that advertises that it's the only such software designed and written by a dentist.... which of course made it an instant hit with dentists.
I suppose if you were really keen on "blind" taxation, you could design the whole system around this. We already have something like this for parking tickets and speeding tickets. Saddam had a somewhat larger scale version of this running in Iraq. There's no reason we couldn't do something like this here. Here's how it would work: the feds would randomly pick on people, property, or money, and upon finding it, would randomly confiscate some large arbitrary amount. Private insurers could then cover the risk of this happening, and people could elect either to take the big but unlikely risk from the gov't, or a smaller more predictable nibble from private insurers. So, for instance, driving down the road, you might be pulled over by the police, and handed a "random" tax bill of, say, $320,000. Or maybe they just seize your car and sell it at public auction. Not to fear -- you would be prepared for this, because it's merely another risk (like being struck by a drunk driver, or having your car stolen), and your insurance policy would actually pay the bill. Some people would elect not to have the insurance, and would lose more. That happens today, and nobody sweats that. Same thing with bank accounts. Every so often, the feds would walk into a bank, essentially say "stick 'em up", and walk out with the contents of everybody's savings account. The bank would have previously subscribed to some form of private insurance consortium, funded it out of small charges taken from everyone's account, and would merely replace the money with the insurance payoff. The result in this case would be an inversion of what we do today: today the feds insure private loss: with this new tax scheme, private insurance would insure against loss due to the feds. Another way to look at this is that it would privatize the tax collector and taxation rates. Instead of having one governmental entity that collects tax moneys, according to some instutitional formula nobody likes, there would be many private parties collecting the money that ultimately funds the government, according to numerous different schemes each designed to favour one element of society at the expense of others. Presumably market pressure would distribute the risk to be equally fair to everyone, on average. Just as our current privately run medical field is presumably more efficient at providing affordable quality medical care at a fair price to all, so would this new scheme be more efficient at funding the government.
Immediately following the dot-com crash, I knew a few people that had sort of happened to. They excercised somewhere around a million dollars worth of stock options, didn't sell any of the stock, watched the stock's value decline to near zero, and then ended up with tax bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was the lack of insurance scenario -- the widely repeated rule was that seling stock quickly was bad because it would be taxed at a higher rate, but it turned out that not selling left them not only vulnerable to losing the entire value, but to owing taxes on money they no longer had anyway.
Mmmm, aren't losses deductible?
Yeah, stock market losses are deductible. That I one reason I like to gamble on the market because at least when I lose money, I get to write it off. ;)
You can only deduct $3000/year in losses, though. Further losses can be carried over to future years, but that doesn't help in the case described in #75.
Oh, I didnt realize that there was a limit. I never lost more than $3000 so it never came up.
Re #72: Our current tax code/abortion is a result of trying to use tax policy for social engineering. Regardless of the intent, the ill effects are well documented: people spend billions each year merely trying to file their taxes, and billions more trying to avoid taxes on the money they make. The cost to the economy of the malinvestments made because they were better for tax purposes than simply doing the most productive thing is probably much bigger than the gross income of the tax preparation industry.
Re: #80 If you haven't noticed, the biggest problem with our current tax codes (at least at the Federal level) is the result of using tax policy - quite successfully - to milk fat campaign contributions out of innumerable groups and individuals who desire more favorable treatment for themselves. Employing many more people in the IRS, tax prep. industry, tax consulting & shelter industry, etc. are not a material (to the politicians) issue.
Re: #80 Taxation *IS* social engineering. You cannot apply a tax without changing the way the economy works. There is no option of doing taxation without doing social engineering. The only options are which kind of social engineering you are going to do. You can disagree with the goals the lawmakers have pursued with the tax code, but you cannot demand a "neutral" tax code. There is no such thing.
Economists tout the value-added tax (VAT) as one which has relatively little impact on economic decisionmaking. Essentially, the flow of money through your business is taxed, regardless whether it ends up as profits, employee salary, executive furniture, or whatever. Michigan is the only US jurisdiction to have a VAT -- we call it the Single Business Tax (SBT). Hundreds of business taxes were abolished and replaced with the single low rate on gross receipts. The immediate impact of enacting the SBT was to dramatically reduce the state tax bills of the Big Three auto companies, because practically every one of the individual business taxes that were abolished had built-in bias to tax larger companies more heavily. So the SBT was amended to completely EXEMPT firms with gross receipts below a certain number, something like $300,000. Of course, this meant that a growing company which exceeded $300,000 for the first time would be hit with a large tax bill, but only the same rate that all their larger competitors were already paying. Nonetheless, the SBT remained extraordinarily unpopular, since it meant that a money-losing business still had a substantial tax liability. Quite necessary for the concept, you see, because taxing profits creates an incentive to redirect what otherwise might be profits into other things. So the Engler Administration and the Republican legislature decided to abolish the SBT and replace it with, um, well, good question. Certainly not the hundreds of business taxes that the SBT replaced. Maybe a corporate profits tax with a very low rate like the SBT. Of course, that would generate much less revenue, hence shifting the state tax burden to individual taxpayers.
The VAT is, in effect, a national sales tax. It is passed along through the manufacturing/retail chain from seller to buyer and is eventually paid in total by the consumer. As a tax on consumption, it would be expected to reduce consumer spending and increase consumer savings.
And since when is anyone ineresed in that?
I found it interesting. The individual tax in Michigan has already been cut severely, which explains why state programs also got cut severely. I read that houses in Louisiana were at one time taxed according to number of rooms, and closets counted as rooms, so they stopped building closets. In England they taxed by number of windows, so people bricked up their windows. In the Netherlands they made one large window (whole wall). Here they tax according to what they think your house would sell for if you had to move because the taxes are so high, not what it actually cost you to build.
(Charleston, SC, I think it was, taxed based on the width of the house. So the houses were all one room wide and very long.)
Re #82: You got your first fallacy in your first sentence. Taxation per se is NOT social engineering; any tax may have social effects, but to be "social engineering" the effect has to have been a goal of the tax policy rather than an unintended outcome (design is required to have engineering). A tax policy which treats things more equally has fewer distorting effects, and is "engineered" to raise money rather than achieve some other end. While searching for something else, I found an example of social engineering via taxation gone horribly wrong. Turns out that Denmark imposed a tax on fuel used for heating, but not on fuel used for other purposes. This caused industry, which often had low-pressure steam or hot water as a byproduct of some other process, to dump the heat to the environment rather than selling it for heating buildings; if they dumped the heat, they didn't owe tax on their fuel. The tax policy effectively demanded waste. The result of a carbon tax would have been the opposite, as well as being a simpler and more direct way to accomplish the end. (Carbon taxes are social engineering, but much more direct and harder to game [and with fewer unintended consequences] than complex schemes.) Re #81: <russ has nothing to say, but agrees 99.9% with Walter> Re #83: Taxing firms which have yet to make a profit is a good way to keep firms from getting started. This may be why the USA does a much better job of it than the European economies.
Re #86: I think the Dutch -- at least in Amsterdam -- taxed based on
frontage at one point, which is why all the houses are narrow
and tall.
Re: #88 Taxing firms based on profits is equivalent to social engineering taxes which favor hiding profits via shell games, cooked accounting, etc. A firm which hasn't yet made a profit still has to pay rent, electric bills, costs of supplies, etc. Why is social overhead (expressed by taxes) any different? BTW, have you ever heard of payroll taxes? Re: #83 Speaking as a small business beancounter who deals with Michigan's SBT, the intent may have been good, but the execution is crap. There are three or four different ways to figure the tax - sometimes it's "follow these rules to see which applies", more often it's "calculate your tax in every way, then take the answer you like best". Immediate capital write-off (vs. taxing payroll) is a clear tax incentive to fire your workers & replace 'em with robots. The huge complexity of it (vs. 941, SUW, etc.) is a subsidy of the tax guru profession.
Re #90 para 1: The fallacy in your first sentence is that profit has to appear *somewhere*. Money that goes for electric shows up as revenue at the utility company, and profit gets taxed there; the electric company's fuel expenses are the coal company's revenue, and profit gets taxed *there*. Wages are taxed as, well, personal income. And, should you be starting an enterprise and have some sales but no profits or paid employees, a business net-income tax doesn't suck away seed capital the way a VAT does. The VAT model assumes that enterprise exists to pay money to the state. This neglects the fact that the enterprise has to survive and make a profit in order to continue to exist; as government can't exist without profitable enterprises, the VAT gets it exactly backwards. You could probably find a correlation between the VAT's impact on startups and Europe's chronic malaise; small business is the big employer in the USA. The power to tax really is the power to destroy. No argument about accounting burdens. IMHO the cost of tax compliance should be a refundable credit, to keep government from running up the indirect costs without limit; the effort wasted in tax preparation as opposed to productive pursuits should be considered an outrage.
Re #90:
I'm in favor of replacing man-hours with robots - especially in those jobs
that people don't seem to really want, such as fast food. It is the *only*
way we can ever get anything like a successful socialist economy.
The hard fact is that at present, *somebody* has to do the grunt work.
In fact *most* people have to. While "anyone" might be able to be an engineer
or a programmer or a lawyer, *everyone* can't. Automation is the only way to
change this.
The worries about skyrocketing "unemployment" due to worker replacement
by machines could be addressed: shorter hours legislation with teeth in it.
But that might not even be necessary.
That should be market-driven, though. Trying to push it through ahead
of the market will result in a lot of fat subsidies for a select few robotics
firms that have senators in their pockets, and substantial unemployment.
Re: #90 Russ, are you talking about taxing profits in the real world, or in some fantasy world of yours, where you write the laws of every country and no one on the planet can get a inappropriate valuation of a partially- defaulted derivative security past your all-seeing eye? Here in the real world, no business with enough savvy to understand the tax laws needs to show a profit, an a great many do not...*ever*.
Indeed the dutch taxed the width of houses. The british did windows instead, as well as soap, tea, etc. You can see how well the tea tax went over here in the colonies. Soap taxes had a more subtle effect, medically in terms of facilitating the spread of disease, and socially in terms of acting as a class marker. The IRS actually does frown on businesses that *never* show a profit. But all that means is it's important to leave a *bit* of tax liability now and again. For a public corporation, a much more important reason to make profits is to attract investors. For private corporations, on the other hand, it's open season on taxes. Both public and private corporations employ a vast network of lawyers and accounts to find and exploit tax loopholes, and most also fund lobbyists to rearrange loopholes.
Re: #95 Remember that companies are de facto legally required to keep seperate sets of books for reporting results to shareholders/banks/management and to each different tax authority (seperate Federal/state/local even if they're nothing more than a gas station). How much "profit" there is can vary widely depending on which set of books you're reading.
Re #94: That begs the question of why anyone is *allowed* to arbitrarily complicate such financial dealings. (Or keep one set of books for the taxman and another for the public.) The IRS can disallow any deductions for things done purely to evade taxes. You appear to be saying they're not doing their job. Guess what, I agree! I'll bet the over-complication of the tax code is one reason we are dragging our recovery from this recession; small business is the engine of employment growth, but it can't take advantage of the loopholes used by the big guys so it can't get financial leverage.
Financial "deals" are as complicated or simple as the principals choose. Some people *like* to receive their income spread over a 25 year amortized basis, with a cap on earnings in any one year, and an option to renew. Accounting of any significant sized organization is guaranteed to be complicated. Here's a simple example of why it's hard: how much does it cost to run your car per-mile? Think carefully. Besides the gasoline, there is the cost of oil changes, replacement tires, and brake pads. Then there is the insurance - which is generally by time rather than miles, so the marginal cost of driving an extra mile insurance-wise is nearly "0". Then there is the initial cost of the automobile, cost of any repairs done, and the current market value of the vehicle, which itself isn't absolutely fixed since it really depends on the best value you could get for the vehicle, which you can't know without actually selling it, and depends on whether you sell to your neighbors, privately via the newspaper, or to a car dealer. If the car was bought on time, or leased, then that too needs to be factored in, somehow. And then there are the imponderables -- if you bought your car more than several years ago, the dollars you spent for it are worth more than the dollars you earn today. If the 2nd set of tires you bought wore out twice as rapidly as the first, does that mean those tire miles were twice as expensive? How about snow tires? Spare tires? How do you count mileage from them? What period of time should the cost of repairs be spread out over? &Etc. The answer to a lot of these questions is more or less arbitrary. Your car isn't going to cost any different in total if you count the cost of tires against the mileage you got from them, or all up front as a lump sum. Fortunately for the average person, most of these account decisions are not only arbitrary, but unnecessary. But, now, for a taxi cab company...
Re #86: And in Michigan, cars newer than 1982 are taxed (in the form of a registration fee) based on their original purchase price. So an '83 Mercedes with a current value of $2000 would cost more to register than a brand new Ford Focus that costs $14,000. Re #94: Enron being a classic example. They never paid any taxes. Re #97: I don't think that will ever be fixed. It's the big guys who have the clout. The campaign contributions from small businesses aren't big enough to buy any legislation that would favor them instead.
Re #98: If you check the IRS publications, there are detailed instructions for expenses and depreciation related to vehicles. You have (had) 3 choices for depreciation (now four, with the option to immediately expense it), and precious little else. Not at all complex as these things go.
So am I reading correctly that Russ considers it far better to pick a tax scheme without consideration for the consiquences, rather than to think about the results a tax scheme might have?
Re #101: As I am on record as favoring carbon taxes, you are quite wrong; I think that far MORE thought should be given to the consequences of tax schemes, especially loopholes and exemptions. AAMOF I was on record in 1990 or so opposing CAFE standards without fuel-tax increases (perverse incentives, since borne out by data) and the CARB electric vehicle mandate (no incentive for consumers to adopt EVs while fuel was cheap and the subsidy of EVs via conventional vehicle sales amounted to a hidden tax on new vehicles rather than on use of petroleum, which was the behavior the policy was allegedly aimed at reducing). Right now the US has a policy (not sure exactly what form it takes) of encouraging natural gas-fired electric generation capacity but we have drilling restrictions and import restrictions on natural gas. The result is that NG prices are heading up, up, up and it's going to be very expensive to heat homes this coming winter (and cool many of them this summer). Again, this needed better consideration of tax policy (I presume it is an investment tax credit or production credit or both, thus it falls under tax policy) esp. as related to other policy. Tax policy is a rather blunt instrument, and trying to "narrowly tailor" parts of it to promote particular ends has proven to be a bad idea. It works much better for promoting or discouraging things on a large scale.
Re #102: You don't think a carbon tax would be using the tax code for social engineering?
Re #103: Oh, of course I do. That's one situation where the size of the problem is a decent match to a big, blunt instrument. Anytime you're trying to discourage something, a tax works amazingly well; tobacco consumption, for example. But you've got to be careful that the tax isn't too easy and profitable to evade so you don't create opportunities for organized crime, e.g. smuggling. As long as we've got to have taxes, taxing things that people should probably be doing less of seems better than the alternative.
Great. I await the introduction of a tax on having children. ;>
There is currently a negative tax on having children.
As well as a negative tax on one's own existence??
quality conytributions - gotta love it - until the affirmative action discussin got derailed into , what, irs? start a new item. this is affirmative action. i am glad to hear that some non-recipients have chaffed at the suggestion/presumption that they were recipients = and happier still that they graduated inthe tip of their class. such preformance does more for eliminating racism than any other action.
and .. i am glad that *my* soulution - individualized scrutiny - has been affirmed by the supreme court. no other solution was rational.
Hopefully that will mean the end of undergraduate racism at UofM, since they can't apply individual scrutiny to the tens of thousands of applicants they get every year.
*snorts* As if that totally takes care of the problem. "Undergraduate racism" my ass.
heard an amusing commercial for Comedy Central's new show this morning: "There *is* a lot of racial tension on the force. It's all because of Andy Garcia. He can't help it, poor guy--he's a Mexican." :)
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