Dash of Calabash

There is a major discrepancy in the MSM concerning the advancement of ethanol production in the state of Hawaii. On April 2nd 85 percent of the gasoline in the state must be 10 percent ethanol - which goes by the euphemism “gasohol.” The problem is that Hawaii has been unable to develop local refineries to make ethanol. Although that was the original intent of the law, aside from questionable environmental considerations, Hawaii will have to import all the ethanol required to meet the law.

The discrepancy is that there is no reporting that actual ethanol refineries are under construction. The media resort to such terms as “planned” and “in development” to get around the fact that the problems involved in ethanol production from Hawaii sugar cane are currently insurmountable.

Oahu Ethanol planned to begin ethanol production in the second quarter of this year. That has been delayed until the first quarter of 2007 because of difficulty securing land, among other things, KenKnight said.

The “among other things” is that the technology doesn’t exist yet, isn’t efficient enough to be economically feasible.

And then from another source:

Six ethanol refineries are in development in the state, although Tome said she was not aware of any that plan to use bioengineered enzymes to make the fuel.

Both of these comments are in the month of January 2006.

Hawaii will be importing ethanol for the foreseeable future. The consumers will pay a premium to enrich Archer Daniels Midlands because of short-sighted government fiat.

The ethanol program needs to be put on hold until a Hawaii source of ethanol production can be developed, if we need to do it at all.

Otherwise the public will only pay inflated prices for gasohol imported from the Mainland, to the detriment of Hawaii consumers.

First quote here, second quote here.

The state of New York wants to use eminent domain to so that the Seneca Indian Nation to condemn 26 acres in Niagara Falls so that the Seneca Indian Nation can expand it casino facilities. This would be an expansion of the loss of property rights that were the result of the Kelo v New London Supreme Court decision.

The Empire State Development Corp. determined the Senecas’ expansion plans would be good for Niagara Falls, with the potential to create thousands of jobs and attract more visitors.

“It is determined that ESDC should exercise its power of eminent domain in order to implement the acquisition,” the corporation wrote in findings published as newspaper legal notices late last month.

The Senecas were promised about 50 acres of downtown land as part of their 2002 compact with the state, which let them build the casino — and two others in western New York — in exchange for a share of slot machine profits.

To use eminent domain to condemn land in order to make it available to a separate sovereign nation is a extremely bad precedent. Should the Akaka bill pass and this case make it through the courts and be upheld the precedent would mean that the reorganized native Hawaiian government would be able to go to the state of Hawaii and request the same thing. As long as those in the state government thought there was something to gain in the way of an increase in tax revenues there would be nothing prevent the same thing from happening here.

The articles are here, here and here.

Our friend Mike Antonucci of Elk Grove, California, sends out a regular analysis “The Education Intelligence Agency,” http://www.eiaonline.com/.

On January 3, 2006, he published his “Public Education Quotes of the Year” for 2005.

We find it noteworthy that Mike gave Hawaii’s own Hawaii State Teachers Association (HSTA) Vice President Joan Lewis second place for this gem which appeared in the 11/1/05 Honolulu Advertiser.

“While building efficiencies of scale might fit a sound business model, it is the antithesis of sound educational practice.”

What say you?

Predictably, John Stossel received a great deal of hate mail for his TV special on education referred to in the previous blog item. He wrote a column for RealClearPolitics.com answering some of his critics, with the focus on those who insist the only way to impove schools is to throw more money at them. Stossel answers:

America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.

He then goes on to document that specific instances such as the experience of Kansas City, Mo. that was ordered by a judge to spend billions more on education. The upshot:

What did spending billions more accomplish? The schools got worse. In 2000, five years and $2 billion later, the Kansas City school district failed 11 performance standards and lost its academic accreditation for the first time in the district’s history.

The problem is that the union dominated government schools cannot be held accountable because the unions will not permit it. Stossel includes a couple of out-of-the-system success stories. The battle goes on. Full article here.

This Reason Online article highlights John Stossel’s special report “Stupid in America: How we cheat our kids” on ABC which documents the poor performance US students compared to their European counterparts. One of the most significant aspects of the report is that US students didn’t realize how poorly they compared, in this case, to Belgian students. As the American boy who got the highest score remarked:

“I’m shocked, ’cause it just shows how advanced they are compared to us.”

Stossel puts the blame squarely on government schools and the teacher’s unions shoulders as well.

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

And he gives the reason why European schools do so much better, competition.

In Belgium, for example, the government funds education-at any school-but if the school can’t attract students, it goes out of business. Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents. “If we don’t offer them what they want for their child, they won’t come to our school.” She constantly improves the teaching, “You can’t afford ten teachers out of 160 that don’t do their work, because the clients will know, and won’t come to you again.”

“That’s normal in Western Europe,” Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. “If schools don’t perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S.”

The American Legislative Exchange Council’s “2004 Report Card on American Education“(pdf) confirms Stossel’s assetment of US schools.

The results of the 2004 Report Card on American Education once again mirror those of past editions. Despite substantial increases in resources being spent on primary and secondary education over the past two decades - per pupil expenditures have ncreased by 53.5 percent (after adjusting for inflation), student performance has improved only slightly - 73 percent of American eighth graders are still performing below proficiency in math, according to the 2003 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test.

The 2004 Report Card, with its more than 50 tables and figures that display in various ways more than 100 measures of educational resources and achievement, strengthens the growing consensus that simply spending more taxpayer dollars on education is not enough to improve student performance. These measures and the analysis based on them confirms that there is no evident correlation between pupil-to-teacher ratios, spending per pupil, and teacher salaries on the one hand, and educational achievement as measured by various standardized test scores. In other words, lawmakers seeking ways to improve our nation’s struggling educational system must look beyond these conventional measures of investments in schools to discover the path to educational excellence.

These facts are especially pertinent for Hawaii which under-performs compared to the national level. A Heritage Foundation report on school choice ranked Hawaii’s charter school law as “weak” with no public school choice or school voucher law. ALEC’s ranking of Academic Achievement put Hawaii’s schools at 44th (8th graders 2001 - 2003.) The national average for NAEP scores was 276 with Hawaii coming in at 266.

Just throwing more money, such as spending a significant portion of the state budget surplus as some are calling for, is not going to solve the situation.

The tremendous growth of school choice programs over the past five years indicate that policy makers and parents have become increasingly aware that improving student achievement is not based on dollars spent, schools constructed, or even teachers hired. Instead, improvements are realized when accountability, choice and competition are injected into our current educational system.

School choice, like they have in Europe, will have a far more positive impact.

The Morgan Report is now online. See AkakaTalka for link to the report.

Listening at a forum of legislators talking about what they do and the difficulty of their jobs, one of them, a veteran, mentioned that one of the major problems she had was the balancing of special interests as she made her voting decisions. That was just another way of admitting that she accepts as her job or duty the task of finally deciding to help some people or companies at the expense of some other persons or companies. In other words, her job as she sees it is to help some and thereby hurt others.

I’m sorry that is such a raw unvarnished statement but it seems to me it is time to get to the truth. The founding fathers of this nation, believing that people should be free to succeed or fail, and that government should pretty much only protect our lives and our property (core functions), would be appalled that this help - hurt matrix has been adopted. How, pray tell, can we now undo it? Would love to see or hear your remarks in comments.

Randal O’Toole has an article at the Cato Institute noting that the real reason for rail public transit is not need but federal subsidies.

Prior to 1964, when Congress began subsidizing transit, the industry was mostly private. Since then, the industry has been almost entirely taken over by state and local governments. Today more than three of every four dollars spent on transit come from taxpayers, not transit riders.

The effectiveness of local transit systems is undermined by federal subsidies, which encourage the construction of highly visible and expensive services such as light-rail trains to suburban areas despite the chronically low number of riders on those routes. Federal subsidies to transit advocacy groups and misguided environmental and labor regulations also encourage a large investment of taxpayer money in wasteful transit systems.

Yep, you read that right “Today more than three of every four dollars spent on transit come from taxpayers, not transit riders.” Nothing like getting other people to pay for your commute.

This links to the Cato Institute summary and the whole article is this link. (pdf)

A new report from the Cato Institute finally brings a little good news to Hawaii. This state doesn’t lead the pack of having the largest percentage of state and local government workers. Alaska has that honor with 16.6 percent of its workforce in the government sector. Hawaii is in the middle at 12.0 percent. The bad news is that government workers as a percentage of the workforce is growing. The report makes a number of interesting observations:

The nation’s 16 million state and local government workers form a large, growing, and well-compensated class in society. State and local workers earned $36 per
hour in wages and benefits in 2005, on average, compared to $24 per hour for U.S. private-sector workers. Another distinction is that 42 percent of state and local workers are represented by unions, compared to just 9 percent in the private sector.

The number of school teachers and administrators increased 22 percent between 1994 and 2004. By contrast, the number of children in the public schools increased just 9 percent during the period.

Yet other areas are suffering for lack of growth:

Some areas of the state and local bureaucracy, such as hospitals, have not grown.

In this state the hospital sector is heading towards a crisis.

Finally this observation:

One conclusion is that there seems to be substantial room for increased government efficiency in many states. Although this bulletin provides only a brief look at differences in state bureaucracy, the data indicate that some states deliver government services with many fewer workers than do other jurisdictions.

The whole Cato report here. (pdf)

An article by Ben Lieberman written for Tech Central Station explains the issue:

Ethanol costs more than gasoline (if it didn’t, its producers would not need federal help) — and its use reduces fuel economy. The new mandate is great news for some well-connected special interests, namely Midwestern corn farmers and big ethanol producers like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). But those who are stuck paying the tab — you — will be far less thrilled.

Hawaii will require ethanol be added to gasoline but there are no ethanol refineries currently operating in the state, despite tax breaks to encourage their construction. Therefore oil companies will have to pay to import ethanol from the mainland to add to their product with the attendant additional cost.

Since ethanol reduces fuel economy Hawaii residents will pay more to drive the same distance. With the state’s General Excise Tax (GET) the consumer will get punished twice: Paying for more gasoline to go the same distance and then paying more in GET because of the increased purchase.

Later on the article notes:

In addition, Washington has done little about the regulations that make it difficult for oil refiners to expand capacity. No new refinery has been built in decades, and expansions of existing refineries must run a gauntlet of time-consuming requirements. The red tape is a part of the reason that refinery capacity has barely kept pace with growing gasoline demand.

This is the real reason for the high cost of gasoline, both on the mainland and in Hawaii. The constraint on supply is government created.

The article concludes:

And until Washington gets serious about reining in its ever-expanding list of fuel rules, America is likely to experience even more pain at the pump in the years ahead.

The Attorney General of this state and others can call for an investigation into price gouging but until those in government realize they are big part of the problem all the investigations in the world aren’t going to change anything.

Whole article here.