Cause Of Death: Misprocessing of Medicaid Benefits

Nine year Zumante Lucero, pictured above, had asthma that he could treat with a drug called Advair that he has a prescription for and was entitled to as part of the Medicaid benefits for which he was eligible.

The Denver County Department of Human Services was in charge of handling his application and despite strenuous efforts by his mother to get the county to tell Walgreens that he was eligible to have the medicine, they instead incorrectly told Walgreens that he wasn't even though they had told Zumate's mother (correctly) that Zumante was eligible to have Medicaid pay for his medicines. Zumante couldn't afford the drugs over the several months that Denver's computer system told Walgreens that Zumante didn't have coverage when he actually did, despite Zumante's mother's efforts, and as a result, Zumante's asthma killed him in July of 2009.

"The city fixed Zumante's eligibility status to pay for his funeral." Swell job guys.

The State of Colorado has faced litigation for years over this computer system which it requires counties to use (if I recall correctly, this problem dates back to Governor Owens and neither Governor Ritter nor Governor Hickenlooper have yet been able to solve it), but the Medicaid benefits processing system that was purchased for millions of dollars by the State from a big name private contractor didn't work and never has worked. Judges have ordered the State to take action, but it didn't fix the problem, either by fixing the computer or by finding a work around that worked. This was something that was entirely foreseeable and had been predicted for years before it happened.

Zumante died as much because certain named bureaucrats (and no doubt other unnamed bureaucrats and government computer contractors) screwed up and denied him a few hundred bucks worth of medicine that the law said he was entitled to have and that the Denver County Department of Human Services knew he was entitled to have but didn't extent themselves to clear up despite the life threatening nature of this boy's conditions in the absence of his medicine.

I'm not even going to begin to think about the legal issues involved. Suffice it to say that the when some judge writes an opinion resolving this case a long time from now, if the case is not settled, that the statement of facts will less than a page long and the analysis of the procedural history and the law will be lengthy. Governmental liability in tort is an arcane subject at the best of times in the simplest of cases.

But there is no good reason that kids should be dying in Denver, Colorado when we have the drugs to treat it, the means to pay for the treatment, the legislative will to provide coverage, and an involved parent trying to obtain care by contacting the government officials and pharmacists in charge of making it happen. Moreover, any department whose bureaucratic screw ups can be a matter of life and death that serves people who are, by definition, poor and in practice, almost always not the most sophisticated in cutting through red tape, rarely politically connected and rarely able to afford lawyers, needs to have someone out there with the power and ability to fix problems promptly who is looking out for the program's beneficiaries.

This is not a program where it is reasonable to assume that the beneficiaries or those acting on their behalf will be able to navigate the system and correct governmental screw ups on their own.

READ MORE - Cause Of Death: Misprocessing of Medicaid Benefits

A Silly Argument And A Smart One

Mark Thoma at The Fiscal Times argues that "balanced budget rules can cause rushed decisions if the statutory deadlines for achieving balance leave little time for careful deliberation" in the course of arguing that Congress is disfunctional. This is silly.

How many times in my lifetime have state or federal legislatures gotten fiscal matters done in advance in a carefully deliberated manner, rather than right at a deadline? I can't remember a year that Congress didn't have a continuing resolution or passed all of the dozen different appropriations bills separately before the deadline came and an omnibus bill had to be pushed through, even in years when we haven't had divided government.

Colorado's joint budget committee is better, but still highly deadline driven. And, one of the key's to Colorado's deadlines - a joint set of legislative rules made necessary by a short session, amateur legislature and strong legislative services division are almost impossibly to constitutionally impose on Congress.

But, Thoma also has a worthwhile point to make:

[A]nother explanation that is often put forth to explain the change in congressional behavior is that legislators today are less patriotic than they once were. That is, nation used to come before party, but those days are long gone.

But patriotism is not the problem. What has changed is that we have become, in many respects, two separate nations living within a common border. Patriotism is as strong as ever within each nation, but there is very little recognition that the needs of the other group are legitimate or have any standing at all in policy decisions.

Thus, we are no longer indivisible. Justice for my group rather than justice for all dominates the political landscape and pollutes the policy environment. Until that is fixed–if it can be fixed–no amount of rules, triggers, ticking bombs, or other devices will set it right again.

The two nations thing isn't entirely Mark Thoma's invented rhetoric. For example, Texas Governor Perry, who has campaigned for the GOP Presidential nomination in Colorado recently, has publicly said positive things about the possibility of Texas leaving the United States of American again. The partisan divide between U.S. regions is as strong as it has been in recent memory and social class divides are also more intense in the U.S. than they have been in a very long time.

It isn't just the politicans. I frequently finding myself asking what the heck Republicans are thinking, because when I ask myself what someone who hates American would do and then compare it to what they are trying to accomplish, it very frequently seems to be the same thing. My civility instincts tell me that this is a horribly bad attitude that I should try to fight, but it is what comes to the surface emotionally whenever their latest idea comes up. Whatever agenda they are advancing, it is so profoundly distant from my reality that it makes no sense at all to me, much of the time, or violates deeply held values about the political process and policy substance of what makes our country special and uniquely American. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off if Governor Perry got his wish and rid us of the influence that he and his have on our politics.

Then again, Thoma makes one more argument that is neither here nor there. He says that the press doesn't do a good enough job of holding politicians accountable. There is merit to that. Politicans are held accountable for very little of their destructive bad behavior and mischief.

But, I'm not convinced that the press is the most guilty party. It is hard to educate the large share of the voting public that isn't interested in paying attention, and the fact that the nation feels that it can get away with indifference is mostly a testament to a fairly healthy political culture in the formative period of the average voter, rather than being a purely negative indicator. Many of us managed to earn the privilege of not paying much attention because politics has tended to be incrementalist for the last few decades in the United States. Only when elected leaders really screw up in a way that forces a radical change that is contrary to the agreed rules of the political game, as we saw this year in Wisconsin and Minnesota, does the sleeping giant that is the American public wake up and start paying attention. We can be outraged about the process because we have been taught to expect better.

If the U.S. had defaulted on its debt and there had been dire consequences, the American public probably would have woken up and been determined to do something about it in 2012. But, a deal to complex and arcane and unlikely to be adhered to in the long term to make it interesting to the general public was reached, constitutional crisis was avoided, and the public will return to its slumber for a while.

I don't like the way that we are making our sausage and would like to reform it. The Republican balanced budget amendment proposal is a DOA way of addressing the problem. But, there is room for process reform and better ways of holding politicians accountable as well.

READ MORE - A Silly Argument And A Smart One

Minnesota Running Out Of Liquor And Tobacco

The government shutdown in Minnesota means not just that state parks are closed, but also that licenses to purchase wholesale liquor and tobacco are expiring and impossible to renew. The result is that stores across the state are rapidly exhausting their inventories of booze and cigarettes. Licenses for hundreds of establishments have expired.

READ MORE - Minnesota Running Out Of Liquor And Tobacco

Deinstitutionalization Legacy Persists

According to Pete Earley, former Washington Post intelligence journalist and author of "Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness" (2006) the United States has made a little dramatic but little noticed change in the way it handles mental health issues from a medical model to a criminal justice orientation:

In 1955, about 560,000 Americans were being treated in state mental hospitals. Based on population growth since then, you would expect more than 930,000 people in such hospitals today. There are only 55,000. Nearly 300,000 are imprisoned. Another half-million are on probation.

The largest public mental-health facility in the U.S.? The Los Angeles County Jail, home to 3,000 mentally ill inmates.

A dramatic shift towards the deinstitutionalization of those with mental health conditions in the 1980s from being the developed nation with the highest institutionalization rate for mental health conditions in the world, to the lowest, afforded some more freedom, but rather than producing a reinvestment of funds previously used for a public sector mental health care into community based programs led to a massive disinvestment in public sector funded mental health care that ended up funnelling many people who had trouble functioning in the absence of that care or family support, into the criminal justice system. Now, it can be hard to find services for anyone but the most affluent, even for bureaucratically savvy middle class families.

The trend is ongoing, with Colorado having seen many of its psychiatric hospital beds taken out of service over the last few years in the face of their high cost, and declining funding support since these programs receive less federal support or budget process protections than programs that have been preserved and often lack of visible constituency.

Earley cites conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, rather than psychopathy, as driving the trend. Some criminologists, such as Bernard Harcourt, have identified the size of the total institutionalized population as an important driver of crime rates, despite the mystery that the demographics of mental health institutions are very different from those of prisons (particularly in the number of women institutionalized). Early's identification of the large number of people with mental health conditions who are on probation or in jails, rather than prisons also helps to shed light on this demographic mystery; many people who would formerly have been institutionalized in mental health institutions are now in the criminal justice system, but only through probation or jail rather than prison, while many other individuals convicted of crimes are now more likely to be incarcerated in prison than in the past as criminal sentences have grown stiffer.

The brief excerpt in the linked story doesn't shed light on the question of how the United States experience compares to our peers in the developed world. It isn't clear, for example, if Europe and Japan have deinstitutionalized (or never institutionalized) their individuals with mental health conditions to the same extent as the United States, and if so, what the consequences of doing so have been there. The mental health institutionalization rates are indeed higher in Europe compared to a rate of about 25 per 100,000 in the United States (down from a peak in the 1950s of over 600 per 100,000), although they are declining in Europe from past levels:

Among countries in the European Union, the highest rate regarding the number of beds in psychiatric hospitals per 100,000 inhabitants in 2000 was in the Netherlands, which had a rate of 188.5. Other highs were posted in Belgium (161.6), Switzerland (119.9), France (113), and Finland (102.9). The average for the 25 European Union countries in 2000 was 90.1, down from 115.5 in 1993.

Japan's mental health institutionalization rate of 282 per 100,000 is the highest in the world, something particularly notable because the overall prevalence of mental health conditions in Japan is below the developed world average.

It is also worth pointing out that even if the residential mental health institution population were similar now to what it was in 1955, that it would still only be a tiny percentage of the population that receives or needs mental health care. For example, 60% of the population experiences depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol dependence and/or marijuana dependence by age 32. About 11% of adults in Colorado have experienced significant psychological distress (other than substance abuse issues) within the last year. Schizophrenia has a prevalence rate of about 1% in the general population, in contrast, and is about 80% genetic, and the prevalence rate and genetic component of bipolar disorder are on the same order of magnitude, but is more common and less strongly genetic.

The link between mental health issues and criminal justice involvement tends to be a "mental health plus" relationship. In one recent study, for example:

Mental illness alone is not a meaningful predictor of future violent acts, but is very significant when accompanied by a history of violence and substance abuse.

There were 3,089 people deemed to have severe mental illness—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression—but no history of either violence or substance abuse. They reported very few violent acts, about 50, between interviews.

But when mental illness was combined with a history of violence and a history of substance abuse, as in about 1,600 people, the risk of future violence increased by a factor of 10.

As the same linked post notes, relying on Colorado Department of Corrections date, in Colorado, "Moderate to severe substance abuse is a problem for 82.0% of male and 82.4% of female inmates. Moderate to severe mental health problems exist for 27.8% of male and 34.2% of female inmates."

Mental health problems are also much more likely to lead to serious criminal justice system involvement for individuals who are high school dropouts or have high school diplomas or GEDs but no college degree of any kind.

READ MORE - Deinstitutionalization Legacy Persists

Compromise Happened

Somehow, despite divided control of both the Colorado General Assembly and Congress, both Colorado and the Congress managed to approve budgets this month. This is what usually happens, even in times of divided government. It doesn't happen without fail. There have been a number of government shutdowns, although the longest one at the federal government level was twenty days, and most haven't been longer than a day or two.

The process does nothing to guarantee that a compromise is reached. No majority can single handedly impose its will. But, time and time again, deals are struck. Much of the time, government is not divided and the deals aren't so difficult to secure. But, even in the time periods when government is divided, there is usually a deal.

Most business deals work on the same basis as budget deals. Everything is decided on a quite short scale, or nothing is decided. Juries likewise resolve disagreements by consensus. Miraculously, when the choice is no deal, no budget, no verdict . . . most of the time deals are secured. There are frequently compromises, but deals are secured.

Courts determine the status quo in the absence of a deal. Most of the time, there is a sensible or at least workable alternative if a deal on legislation falls apart. If there is a deadlock in a redistricting matter, usually courts will intervene and draw a map themselves. But, this rarely happens with the budget. If no deal is reached, the money will not be spent. The budget is "must pass" legislation. Sometimes there are compromises for "essential services" if the rest of the government is shut down. But, those are usually handled outside the courts.

A functioning government that spends money on government services, when push comes to shove, is a better outcome than one that does not function.

Federalism lowers the stakes. One of the key benefits of federalism is that even in a system that sometimes produces government shutdowns from political impasses, the entire government isn't affected at once. Only a few states in any given year will reach an impass on their budgets, and they won't do so all at once. Local governments are not directly shut down by impasses at the state level. Federal government shutdowns still leave the state and local governments that employ the vast majority of government employees, any agencies whose appropriations bills managed to pass before there was an impass, and self-funding agencies like the postal service in business.

I'm a pessimist on this score. I worry about system failure. I worry about a prolonged failure to the political system to meet its basic responsibilities. We haven't had serious steps across that line in the United States. But, in other countries there have been long periods, many months or even years, of deadlock. The labor-management equivalent - a long strike or lockout due to failure to reach a deal - used to be much more common. Usually, those dire worst case scenarios don't happen. But, it takes more than Civics 101 and Constitutional law to explain what goes on when these miraculous agreements happen. A shallow analysis of the rules of our political system can't easily explain why negotiations break down so much less often than one might expect that they would, what is different about the times when they do break down, why the breakdowns are more or less intractable in different situations, and as a result, also can't explain how fundamentally stable our system of government that depends upon partisans who disagree compromisings in unspecified ways is within a coherent theoretical context. We have a good track record of compromise so far, but why?

READ MORE - Compromise Happened

Suthers Indicts Doug Bruce For Failing To File Taxes

Colorado's best known anti-tax activist, Doug Bruce, has been indicted for failing to file taxes by the state attorney general's office. Colorado's attorney general, John Suthers, is a Republican.

If convicted of the charges, Bruce could face up to six years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

Colorado Springs police officers arrested Bruce Friday at a post office in Colorado Springs. He was booked on a $10,000 bond into the El Paso County Jail, where he remains.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving defendant. Some of the evidence regarding his tax fraud was developed in connection with his failure to comply with subpeonas regarding a ballot initiative (taht were ultimately defeated) which he supported in contributions that were not reported on campaign finance form in 2010. He filed a false tax return alleging that he had zero income in 2005 and filed no return despite earning considerable income that was funnelled into a non-profit organization that he used for his personal benefit in 2006 and 2007. The amount of income not reported was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Doug Bruce is famous for getting TABOR (the taxpayer' bill of rights) into the state constitution, leading to serious problems with the fiscal viability of the State of Colorado during recesions.

READ MORE - Suthers Indicts Doug Bruce For Failing To File Taxes

Colorado Secures State Budget Deal

Colorado lawmakers – in both houses – appear to have reached a tentative agreement on the state budget[.]

Via Tim Hoover's blog at the Denver Post.


GOP Wins:

Restores "tax exemptions for certain agricultural products and for downloaded software."  The bull semen and other ag products exemption costs Colorado $3.7 million  The downloaded software exemption could have been worth $24 million (a disputed amount).


Democratic Win:

No local control over PERA contributions.

Hick Win:

The deal will maintain "a general fund reserve of 4 percent, keep at least $100 million in the State Education Fund[.]"

Compromises:

There will be a K-12 cut of $250 million not $332 million.  This is about $377 per kid instead of $500 per kid.  This works out to about $150K from the local elementary school that my son attends, and about $300K from my daughter's middle school.  Thus, each school will probably have to make some painful staffing cuts.  Don't ask me how the K-12 cut is constitutional, I don't understand myself although I have some hunches that aren't worth stating given my lack of confidence in them.

The deal will "transfer about $71 million in severance tax funds to help balance the general fund budget."

"The deal would allow retailers to keep 2.2 percent of the taxes collected instead of the [scheduled] full 3.3 percent [which was suspended during the recession], allowing the state to keep $20 million that otherwise would have gone to businesses."

Caveat:

This summary omits that ugly cuts that everyone agreed upon as necessary before negotiations began, and there are many.

No ballot issues to raise more revenues will be requested by the legislature in 2011, and many of the citizen initiatives to do so have been canned based upon poor opinion polling.  It isn't clear what happens if revenues turn out to be better than expected, as a recent state forecast suggested, or if the budget reflects the revised revenue estimates.

READ MORE - Colorado Secures State Budget Deal

The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

There are lots of differences between the prevailing American model and the Japanese model for K-12 education. One of those differences is that Japanese schools often have class sizes that many U.S. schools would consider unacceptably large, but use these larger class sizes to make it feasible to pay teachers higher salaries and generally, to build up the prestige of teaching as a profession. Also, many tasks that would be done by paid staff in American schools, like a significant share of the janitorial work and photocopying, is done by students in Japan, again, freeing up resources for higher teacher salaries. American law professors routinely teach classes of ninety students. Almost no high school teachers in the United States do that, although such large class sizes are unheard of in Japan.

Nicholas Kristoff argues, reasonably, that teachers are underpaid:

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

He also cites some studies that argue that good teachers produce good student results, although the general trend is that instructional inputs are related only dimly as second or third order effects to student academic performance and life success.

But, part of the reason that demonstrated results from instructional inputs are so equivocal, is because almost everybody is using the same basic model: 180 days a year of school for days of less than eight hours, modest amounts of homework, teachers mostly drawn from conventional teacher certification programs in public schools with reasonably similar class sizes, and low career long pay prospects for someone with a college degree. Private religious schools don't pay teachers very well either. There are differences, but those differences are mostly modest.

A few elite secular private schools pay teachers very well, but given the elite character of the incoming student body which is overwhelmingly either upper middle class, rich, or extremely academically talented, it is hard to tell if good teachers or good students are driving the results. Also, these schools typically have not only highly paid teachers but very modest class sizes, which make their model unattainable without immensely larger K-12 budgets.

The public will simply does not exist to pay for a system of public schools where the average student-teacher ratio is 8:1 and the average teacher makes $90,000 a year. The more typical story is like this one from today:

The fifth-largest school district in Colorado this afternoon expects to announce $30 million in cuts — including jobs and student activities, as well as increased class sizes — to meet its 2011-12 budget.

Today at 3:30 p.m., Adams 12 Five Star Superintendent Chris Gdowski will announce the proposed cuts, including an anticipated 185 job cuts. Last year, the district cut 188 full-time positions. Over the past five years, the district has cut $38 million from its budget.

For the 2010-11 school year, the operating budget was $268.8 million, about 88 percent of which was devoted to employee salaries and benefits.

Even if we did, we wouldn't get the results you see at Groton in classes full of kids who are two grade levels behind by the third grade, may not get a square meal on the weekends, have an older sibling in a gang, live in a single parent home with a parent who dropped out of high school, and are intermittently homeless. Government stinginess towards children in the United States is not limited to education spending.

On the other hand, the Detroit model: dramatically increasing class sizes while paying their teachers 30% below the going rate for teachers in the state, despite the fact that they are teaching students with the greatest educational needs, and simultaneously increasing commuting time for students on their way to and from school, is pretty surely not a good way to improve educational quality either. To some extent, you get what you pay for.

Nobody has ever tried in recent history for a sustained period to set up a K-12 education system in which entry level teachers teaching ordinary average neighborhood kids are paid as much as entry large law firm lawyers in the same area, and can expect to receive that kind of compensation for their entire careers, but teach very large classes by American standards with very little staff assistance.

Of course, it isn't at all easy to break out the impacts of particular parts of the Japanese or American models. The Japanese spend more days in school. A larger share of American kids are college bound than in Japan. Cram school for college entrance exams to supplement ordinary high school education are the norm. Japanese educators are less reluctant to use drill and kill instruction methods, and more liberal in putting social pressure on kids to perform though public disclosure of academic performance. Extra-curricular activity participation is more of an expectation in Japan. Many American kids have more educational choices that comparable Japanese kids. American higher education, particularly at the graduate level, has a better reputation for rigor than Japanese higher education. American teachers have a much larger proportion of very low income students and far more students who are non-native speakers of the language of instruction. Japan starts foreign language instruction sooner and has very little sex education.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, given the tendency of K-12 education systems to pay teachers of older students more than teachers of younger students, the evidence on educational performance and education seems to indicate that the importance of educational quality is greatest when kids are youngest and lower when kids are older. Kids who need remedial work upon entering college were mostly behind already by the time they were in the 6th grade.

If we are to set compensation based on potential lifetime educational performance impact (and no school system in the world does this, to the best of my knowledge, although many do mandate smaller class sizes for younger students), we should be paying the highest salaries to pre-school and kindergarten teachers, the next highest salaries to elementary school teachers, the next highest salaries to middle school teachers, and the lowest salaries to high school teachers. Instead, the pay of teachers seems more closely related to the proportion of the teachers who are men, which is greatest for the older ages. As usual in the American labor market, the supply of similarly skilled labor is more important in setting compensation levels than the value of what workers produce.

But, moving in the direction of the Japanese business model for teacher pay, and paying early education teachers much more than we do, is certainly something worth considering.

READ MORE - The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

Friday News Dump

In Colorado

* Colorado's unemployment rate in February, of 9.1%, is the highest the state has experienced since the Great Depression and above the national rate of 8.9%. The oil bust of the early 1980s brought the rate to its previous peak of 8.8%. Also, unemployment estimates for Colorado over the last couple of years turn out to have been greatly understated, since the census revealed that the population figures used in making the original unemployment predictions were too low in high unemployment areas. Colorado's record lowest unemployment, since 1976, was at the turn of the millenium when it dropped to a little under 3%.

State officials have blamed migration to Colorado and the decision of many people who have given up looking for work to return to the workforce. Still, the fact that unemployment is climbing, rather than falling, long after the "recovery" in GDP terms has been underway, is discouraging. Unemployment is alawys a lagging indicator, but the employment situation has been worse and longer lived in the current employment recession than any since the Great Depression.

* Despite an immense state budget deficit, House Republicans in Colorado are still proposing large new tax cuts, in excess of $60 million.

* Colorado's proposed state budget will include more cuts to the Fort Logan psychiatric hospital, continuing a trend of decreasing mental health hospital capacity. The current cuts would close a juvenile ward that current houses an average of a dozen inpatients. The Joint Budget Committee argues that private facilities in the state offer the same services at a lower price and can handle another dozen patients.

In Other State Legislatures

* Both houses of Wisconsin's state legislature has passed a bill ending collective bargaining for public sector workers in Wisconsin's state and local governments. Republican Governor Walker has promised to sign the bill, which he championed. Naturally, the bill received voted only from Republicans, and a few Republicans broke ranks to join with Democrats in opposing it. Protests continue in Madison, with farmers set to encicle the state capitol with tractors next. Public opinion in Wisconsin has shifted decisively away from the Republicans and towards President Obama and the public employees unions in Wisconsin as a result of the union fight. Recall efforts are underway targeting a number of legislative anti-union Republicans, although it isn't clear if these will make the ballot or have a realistic chance at succeeding. Similar efforts are making progress in other Republican controlled states.

* The Governor of Illinois signed a bill abolishing the death penalty in that state, appropriating the funds that would have been used for death penalty litigation to a trust for murder victims, and pardoned the fifteen people on death row there. Illinois is the 16th state in the United States to abolish the death penalty.

* Kentucky has joined the list of states addressing state budget shortfalls with sentencing reforms, particularly with milder sentences for non-violent drug users.

Kentucky . . . became the latest to make the shift when Gov. Steve Beshear signed into law a measure increasing spending on rehabilitation programs and intensive drug testing. The law also reduces penalties for many drug offenses and may allow some traffickers and users of smaller amounts of drugs to avoid prison.

Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are among those that have pending bills to reduce penalties for drug offenders, in some cases by directing defendants into treatment programs. Similar laws have taken effect in South Carolina, Colorado and New York in recent years. States have maintained stiff penalties for more-serious drug crimes.

While the changes are part of broader belt-tightening efforts, they also reflect a growing belief among state lawmakers that prosecuting drug offenders aggressively often fails to treat their underlying addiction problems and can result in offenders cycling in and out of prisons for years — a critique long voiced by groups that advocate in favor of defendants' rights. . .

The state measures mark a sharp retreat from the war on drugs, which gathered steam in the 1980s and '90s with mandatory-minimum and three-strikes prison sentences that resulted in some drug offenders being locked up for decades. Drug arrests nationwide climbed from about 580,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million in 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Although some states started rethinking drug punishment before the recession, many more states have come on board in the past two years. In 2007, Texas began shifting more drug offenders away from prison, which helped hold down the inmate population. The changes cost $241 million, less than half what the state anticipated it would have spent to build three new prisons.

* Ohio's criminal sentencing commission has released a new report on the causes of that state's prison overcrowding problem. According to the report, "recent growth in Ohio’s prison population — even with mandatory sentences and scores of bills that increase penalties for particular offenses — is not driven primarily by intake (although it is a factor). It’s largely fueled by increases in inmates’ average length-of-stay."

* Connecticut voters in a survey favored the decriminalization of marijuana (79% favor medical marijuana and 65% favor decriminalization), legalizing Sunday liquor sales (65%), and reinstating the death penalty (68% up from 59% in 2005 after a high profile murder). But, majorities there don't favor allowing grocery stores to sell wine or liquor. Connecticut currently has a death penalty but its legislature is considering repealing it.

* Connecticut last year joined a list of states that automatically treat some teens under the age of eighteen as adults in the criminal justice process; New Hampshire changed its law in 2008. Similar proposals are pending in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The only other state that automatically tries some teens under the age of eighteen as adults is New York State. Budget savings and increased sensitivity to the distinctiveness of juvenile offenders has prompted the changes. For example, a recent study found that:

[I]nmates in adult facilities (surprisingly) give better reports than youth in juvenile facilities on several measures (including criminal activity and victimization), they also fare much worse on other measures. Importantly, the inmates in adult facilities report substantially and significantly greater rates of PTSD and mental illness symptoms, and are much more likely to be afraid for their safety, compared to those in juvenile facilities.

Colorado never had a law that automatically tried older teens under the age of eighteen as adults, but did give prosecutors the authority to directly file many serious criminal charges against older juveniles as adults without court approval; that authority was recently narrowed by Colorado's General Assembly.

* California is building a new death row prison at a projected cost of $356 million, as a partial response to federal prison overcrowding litigation in the state, in which inmates have been successful on the merits, but not seen many results.

California has 713 inmates awaiting execution. . . . By comparison, Florida ranked second, with 398, and Texas was third at 337. . . About 700 condemned men are confined at San Quentin, north of San Francisco, in facilities built to hold 554, according to the Corrections Department’s website. (Nineteen women face execution and are held in Chowchilla, a prison in the Central Valley.) On average, the men are likely to spend 17 years in the aging cell blocks, according to the prison system. . . . Since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment, 53 condemned inmates have died from natural causes while on death row. Eighteen committed suicide and 13 were executed. Six died from other causes.

Other Domestic News

* Long Island Republican Congressman King has launched hearings in the House Homeland Security Committee into the radicalization of Islam, over objections that this amounts of a McCarthyistic inquiry that is singling out a single religion that may incite further terrorist sentiment against the United States.

* In Skinner v. Switzer, the U.S. Surpeme Court found, in a narrow 6-3 decision, that a Section 1983 civil rights suit by a death row inmate (as opposed to a habeas corpus suit) was not procedurally barred by prison litigation reform statutes. The inmate challenged an interpretation of a Texas law that prevented him from securing post-conviction access to DNA evidence in his muder case that might implicate another suspect (now dead). The court ruled in his favor because DNA testing itself does not necessarily lead to the setting aside of his conviction, as it could show that he is guilty or be inconclusive (and hence is not duplicative of habeas corpus relief), and does not violate the Rooker-Feldman doctrine because while a "state-court decision is not reviewable by lower federal courts . . . a statute or rule governing the decision may be challenged in a federal action"). The ruling also provided yet another case where heightened pleading standards in federal civil litigation were held not to bar a straightforward lawsuit brought by a prisoner.

* Excessive federal child pornography laws continue to produce absurd results:

In the spring and summer of 2006, Eric Rinehart, at the time a 34-year-old police officer in the small town of Middletown, Indiana, began consensual sexual relationships with two young women, ages 16 and 17. One of the women had contacted Rinehart through his MySpace page. He had known the other one, the daughter of a man who was involved in training police officers, for most of her life. Rinehart was going through a divorce at the time. The relationships came to the attention of local authorities, and then federal authorities, when one of the girls mentioned it to a guidance counselor. Whatever you might think of Rinehart's judgment or ethics, his relationships with the girls weren't illegal. The age of consent in Indiana is 16. . . . Rinehart got into legal trouble because one of the girls mentioned to him that she had posed for sexually provocative photos for a previous boyfriend and offered to do the same for Rinehart. Rinehart lent her his camera, which she returned with the promised photos. Rinehart and both girls then took additional photos and at least one video, which he downloaded to his computer.

In 2007 Rinehart was convicted on two federal charges of producing child pornography. U.S. District Court Judge David Hamilton, who now serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, reluctantly sentenced Rinehart to 15 years in prison. Thanks to mandatory minimum sentences, Hamilton wrote, his hands were tied. There is no parole in the federal prison system. So barring an unlikely grant of clemency from the president, Rinehart, who is serving his time at a medium-security prison in Pennsylvania, will have to complete at least 85 percent of his term (assuming time off for good behavior), or nearly 13 years.

* An NPR executive resigned after remarking in a secretly recorded conversation that the Tea Party was full of racists, despite the fact that this is true.

* Oil prices are rising on Mideast turmoil.

* Blockbuster, the dominant player in the storefront video rental market, reached an agreement with its creditors to be auctioned as a business to the highest bidder, rather than having its assets liquidated. Netflix, video on demand, and kiosk video rentals have destroyed its profitability. The chain, which grew dramatically through acquisition of competitors, also probably simply had too many stores for the market's demand and hasn't been able to shutter them fast enough. For example, in Denver at 6th Avenue and Grant Street, it once had two stores less than a block apart - both are now shuttered.

* Department store H&M has decided to open up stores in greater Denver, with the Saks location at the Cherry Creek Mall which is closing likely to be one of them.

Abroad

* Japan has had two major earthquakes in the last week. One was magnitude 7.2 on the Richter scale, and the last night there was an 8.8 magnitude quake that also gave rise to a Tsunami that reached as far as Hawaiii this morning and will be experienced as far off as Peru. The first Japanese quake produced only minimal damage. The current one killed about a hundred people and led to considerable property damage in a few industrial areas mostly from the tsunami waves rather than the earthquake itself. Similar magnitude earthquakes in Iran, Indonesia and Haiti have produced massive loss of life and long term devistation, but Japan's earthquake conscious building codes and better prepared people prevented the damage from being greater. A smaller earthquake in China this weak produced loss of life and property damage comparable to that experienced by last night's massive quake.

* Civil war continues to rage in Libya and France has recognized the rebels as the legitimate government of the country; NATO nations remain reluctant to intervene militarily there. Egyptians will vote on amendments to military proposed amendments its constitution this month to prepare for prompt democratic elections that will transfer power from a military council to civilians. Protestors in Jordan have complained that a new prime minister is stalling on proposals for political reforms, using the fact that the country's 32 political parties are too fragmented to produce quality elections; the main democratic reform that has been demanded is to shift control of the executive branch from the king to a prime minster selected by parliament. Police in a predominantly Shi'ite part of Saudi Arabia shot five protestors at a small demonstration; protests in the absolute monarchy have been muted compared to elsewhere in the region - in part because Saudi Arabia is more repressive and in part because the current Saudi King is popular with majority Sunnis in the country.

* The Daili Lama in Tibet proposed on the anniversary of the day of Tibet's failed 1959 bid to free itself from China, to transfer political power of the government in exile to elected leaders, leaving himself and his successors as spiritual leaders only. Proposed succession to his position is currently unclear as he has also proposed reforms to the traditional approach rooted in the notion that he is reincarnated. China remains officially outraged at any talk of Tibetan independence, or the notion that Taiwan is not part of China. China is also cracking down in an effort to prevent the Jasmine revolution of the Middle East from spreading to it.

Medicine

* A drug to prevent the spread of M.S. has worked in a mouse model. A mouse model of a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease and damage from minor strokes in the brain has also been successful. A new drug to treat lupus has come on the market. Progress has been made in developing a new class of anti-malaria drugs based on a chemotherapy drug.

READ MORE - Friday News Dump

Detroit Public Schools In Death Spiral

The Michigan Department of Education gave Detroit Public Schools deadlines this month for moving forward with a deficit-elimination plan.

The plan calls for closing 70 schools [out of 142] by 2013, increasing high school class sizes to more than 60 students, and outsourcing and consolidating services with the city and the countywide education agency between this year and 2014.

The cuts will meet the goal of eliminating the deficit, but [state-appointed emergency fiscal manager Robert] Bobb contends the plan is not in the best interest of educating DPS students and could drive students away. The district has about 74,000 students, down from about 175,000 in 1999. It is expected to drop to about 58,000 students in 2014.

From here

Two years ago, the Detroit Public Schools had 194 schools.

Starting this fall, the district plans to boost class sizes in grades 4-12 and at all grade levels by fiscal 2012, which begins July 1, to save $16.8 million. The plan would hike class sizes for:

Grades K-3 from 17-25 students to 29 in 2012-13 and 31 in 2013-14.

Grades 4-5 from 30 students to 37 in 2012-13 and 39 in 2013-14.

Grades 6-8 from 35 students to 45 in 2012-13 and 47 in 2013-14.

Grades 9-12 from 35 students to 60 in 2012-13 and 62 in 2013-14. . .

[T]he district . . . [may] save another $12.4 million from the school closures if it "simply abandons" the closed buildings. Past policy has been to keep the closed schools clean and secure, officials said, but the district could cut costs by eliminating storage, board-up and security. . . .

In the past year, debt in the district has increased by more than $100 million, brought on by a mix of revenue declines in property taxes, reduced state aid, declining enrollment and an unplanned staffing surge this past fall.

The Detroit Public Schools face a deficit of $327 million this year ($4,419 per student). The median salary of teachers in the Detroit Public Schools is about 30% below the median salary of teachers in Michigan.

About 54,000 students in the District attend charter schools, leaving the district with infrastructure and debts it lacks the revenue to support as its student base shrinks and the property tax base and population of Detroit decline.

The Detroit Public Schools are 90% African-American (and 2.4% Anglo), and 87.2% of Detroit Public Schools students are in the free and reduced lunch program because they are poor. Michigan public school students statewide are 20% African-American (and 71.2% Anglo), and 40.8% of them are in the free annd reduced lunch program.

Remarkably, despite the challenges it faces, the Detroit Public Schools managed a 62% graduation rate in the most recent year. The Denver Public Schools, which a much healthier economic environment and much larger proportion of middle class students, manages only a 52% graduation rate.

READ MORE - Detroit Public Schools In Death Spiral

The Showdown In Wisconsin

Republican Governor [of Wisconsin] Scott Walker . . . is pushing a proposal that would eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers and make them pay half the costs of their pensions and at least 12.6 percent of their health care coverage. The changes amount to about a seven percent salary cut.

From here.

The budget shortfall that is being used to justify the step cuts to state employee pay and denying unions their collective bargaining rights, of course, is a crisis of Governor Walker's own making created by tax cuts that he backed. Unions are willing to discuss compensation custs, but not the loss of their collective bargaining rights.

A core principle of American political conservatives is that unions are bad and should be busted at every available opportunity. As I've noted before at this blog, one of the key points in the Republican playbook at the moment is that public employees, particularly unionized ones, are overpaid relative to private sector workers (despite evidence to the contrary) and that they employees should bear a large share of the public spending cuts that Republicans campaigned on in the 2012 election.

In Wisconsin, where the 2012 election left Republicans in charge of both houses of the state legislature and the Governor's office, they have the votes to put that ideology into action. While private sector union-management relations are governed by the federal government's National Labor Relations Board, states have considerable freedom to adopt laws concerning the rights of their public sector unions.

Since they don't have the votes to win this battle in the legislative process, Wisconsin union members have marched in force (25,000 strong) on the state capital as the legislature considers the bill and state senate Democrats have removed themselves to an undisclosed location to deny Republicans in the state senate the quorum they need to pass the bill, echoing a similar tactic used in Texas redistricting battles within the last few years. Wisconsin also lacks the citizen's initiative process present in states like California and Colorado, that might have given public sector union members in Wisconsin an end run around the normal legislative process. The unions have President Obama's support, but he has little power when it comes to labor relations in state and local government, an area where even the expansive commerce clause power of Congress probably does not extend.

America's private sector union movement in the United States is close to moribund. Maybe this is due to legislative changes, like labor laws that permit the permanent replacement of striking workers and tolerate significant management misconduct in organizing elections. Maybe it is due to the changing character of the economy that has reduced employment in traditionally unionized industries. Maybe labor is a victim of its own success. The causes are a matter of great debate and controversy. The result, however, is not. American private sector unions haven't been so impotent in numbers or as disinclined to cause work stoppages since long before the United States passed its first national labor laws during the Great Depression.

But, public sector unionization has soared and continues to grow in most states. (Colorado is an exception to the trend.) In part, this is because public sector unions, unlike private sector unions, have employees who can't easily be offshored and employers who can't convincing argue that their wages must be kept low in order to prevent them from losing their business to the competition. Civil service protections that public employees hold to protect them from politically motivated corrupt patronage systems have also made it safer to public employees to organize without fear of losing their jobs than comparable private sector employees. Recall that:

In 1950 . . .the unionized workforce of 14.3 million workers . . . made up 31.5% of the total work force.

In 2008 . . . the unionized workforce of 16.1 million workers who made up 12.4% of the total workforce. The public sector which is 36.8% unionized, is as unionized as the private sector was at its peak. The private sector, which is 7.2% unionized, has the lowest level of unionization in the private sector since the 1920s, if not earlier.

This is a huge deal. As I've noted before, policy more often changes through widespread imitation at historic moments than it does through isolated case by case rational analysis. If Wisconsin is successful in breaking its public employees unions and slashing public employee compensation, the trend will almost surely spread to almost every Republican controlled state in the United States. If public unions lose big in Wisconsin it could mean the end of organized labor unions as a potent force in the American economy and political system entirely for much of the United States.

While looming labor-management disputes in the NFL have attracted lots of attention, public sector unions at the state and local government level in places like Wisconsin are the bread and butter of the labor movement in the United States today. This dispute alone involves hundreds of thousands of middle class workers and their families losing three and a half weeks of pay a year.

Public sector unionization is a different animal than private sector unionization. Protection from unfair unemployment termination has generally been a secondary issue for them because they already have civil service protections. Some public sector unions are legally prohibited from going on strike. While private sector unions can organize politically for labor laws and other laws favorable to their members, public sector unions can organize politically to put union friendly politicians in direct control of their employer.

But, the potential for strikes by public employees to rise to the level of general strikes and to bring vital government services to a halt, whether or not it is legal for them to do so, has always loomed in the background, and covert "sick outs" and work to rule slowdowns remind negotiators of that fact. Denver's police (who publicly deny that this was the case) recently carried out just such a slowdown last year over dissatisfaction with the vigor with which the City of Denver had finally decided to apply to cracking down on instances of police misconduct. Wisconsin is experiencing its own sick outs right now.

Assuming that the political process will eventually prevail in Wisconsin and result in public sector union crushing legislation being passed there, the question is how Democrats and labor unions will respond. With the next election almost two years away, working through the normal political process may not seem like a sufficient response to a powerful political player that is facing deep pay cuts for every single one of its members without any opportunity to collectively bargain the matter and is also facing something close to their very extermination as a means by which the economic cause of state workers can be advanced.

If anything can produce a high profile showdown that could shut down the government of the State of Wisconsin entirely through a work stoppage, legal or otherwise, this frontal assault on public employees unions seems to be a good candidate for it. If public employees' unions in Wisconsin lose this fight, they may be gone for good, and may see much of the rest of the public sector labor movement follow them.

Can they win? There is really no way to know until it happens. The last general strike in the United States outside Puerto Rico was in 1934. But, if public sector unions in Wisconsin manage to inflict decisive political pain on the Republican party in the state, even if they lose on the legislative front for the time being, they may have a real shot at remaining a relevant force in American politics.

READ MORE - The Showdown In Wisconsin

Hick's Budget

Governor Hickenlooper has released his first state budget proposal. Some notable points:

* "Sixty-three percent of this budget is handled by less than 900 [state] employees." (For example K-12 and Medicaid.)

* K-12 is cut $375 million through $257 million in reduced general fund support and a decision not to backfill $117 million of local funding declines due to falling property values. The impact is $497 per student. It isn't clear what loophole in school finance laws in Colorado, which generally mandate no K-12 categorial spending cuts, is involved to authorize this step. It may be that there is a negative inflation adjustment and that some K-12 education funding is not "categorial."

* State funding of higher ed is reduced by $36 million from $555 million to $519 million. Higher education is also losing $89 million of federal stimulus funds for a total cut of $125 million, which is $877 per college student.

* Closing Fort Lyon Correctional Facility with 485 elderly prisoners who will be relocated that cuts 149 jobs and $3 million a year.

* Closing Closing Bonny Lake State Park near Burlington, Sweitzer Lake State Park near Delta, Harvey Gap State Park near Rifle and Paonia State Park near Paonia.

* The budget increases payroll deductions for PERA (public employees retirement) by 2.5 percentage points of take home pay saving $15.7 million on top of prior COLA-less years with prior increases in PERA contributions. Furloughs, which saved little general fund money, will not be repeated this year.

* Other general fund cuts of $376 million and 114 jobs are made.

* $42.3 million in revenues and cash fund transfers are used.

Colorado is in a very hard spot, with a $1 billion shortfall in a $7 billion general fund budget. It isn't even obvious that this round of cuts is big enough to balance the budget and this is on top of multiple rounds of past deep budget cuts in the Great Recession.

TABOR limits the availablity of tax increases to make up the shortfall without a vote of the people which is always too late for the current year's budget.

Much of state government is financed with users fees or other dedictated funds so cuts to those programs don't solve the state's general fund deficit.

Prison sentences already imposed make it hard to cut the corrections budget in the short term.

Medicaid already pays providers considerably less than market rates or the cost of the services provided and Medicaid beneficiaries have great difficulty finding providers willing to take new patients.

Colorado's funding for both K-12 and higher education is very near the bottom nationally. The state constitution puts limits on K-12 education cuts.

Medicaid, higher education, K-12 education and the corrections budget are the dominant components of the state general fund budget.

READ MORE - Hick's Budget

Cutting the Deficit

House Republicans in Congress are learning that it is hard for them to keep their promises of budget cuts.

The hardest hit agencies would include the Food and Drug Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development and Agriculture. . . . Foreign aid on an annualized basis would take a 6 percent cut. . . .

— The Department of Homeland Security would face a budget freeze instead of the 3 percent increase proposed by Obama. . . .

— Republicans would scale back Obama's proposed 4 percent, $23 billion increase for the Pentagon. Instead, the military budget would grow by just $10 billion.

— Popular programs such as health research and federal aid to school districts appear likely to take a hit when lawmakers write the spending bill for the departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services. Republicans promise not to cut the minimum $5,550 Pell Grant for low-income college students.

I proposed a combination of tax reforms, cuts to the defense budget, and cuts to domestic spending last November after the election, as a response to the bad proposals considered by the deficit reduction commission and the Republican proposal made during the campaign. To the domestic spending proposal, I made then, I would also suggest deep cuts to federal higher education funds for for profit higher education, on the order of about $2 billion, in a way that would provide greater confidence of results.

Meanwhile the Colorado General Assembly is considering state budget issues as well. Last summer, I addressed some of the issues it is facing (although mostly longer term fiscal viability issues) in the form of a proposed overhaul of the state and local public finances in Colorado.

READ MORE - Cutting the Deficit

House GOP Priorities

They say that budgets are values documents where you disclose your priorities.

The non-partisan Legislative Council, upon whom the Colorado General Assembly has relied for budget estimates for as long as anyone can remember, says that the legislature needs to close a $1.1 billion shortfall to balance the state's roughly $7 billion general fund budget (much of which it is constitutionally required to devote to K-12 education). Republicans, who control the state house, have decided contrary to the economists, that the state will be $195 million worse off than state economists have estimated.

What did House Republicans then do to address this $1.3 billion revenue shortfall?

They voted to give a $3.7 million sales tax break to farmers for goods including bull semen. Agriculture, by the way, is having one of its most profitable years in recent memory, while the rest of the state economy is in the doldrums.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler, whose predecessor Bernie Buescher had decided to turn over $3.5 million of excess revenues to the general fund, meanwhile, decided last week that he'll keep the funds for new projects. (Although Gessler has backed down from a controversial plan to moonlight for his old election law firm after receiving advice from Republican Attorney General Suthers on the issue.)

READ MORE - House GOP Priorities

Colorado GOP Oblivious To Budget Reality

The dominant problem facing the Colorado General Assembly as it begins its 2011 legislative session is that the state needs to close a $1 billion gap in its $7 billion general fund budget.

So, what legislative proposals are GOP state legislators, who campaigned on fiscal responsibility offering at this critical juncture?

* Income tax cuts for parents who send their children to private schools.
* A repeal of hospital fees.
* Sales tax cuts for agricultural products producers.

What part of "we're broke" did they not see in the memo on the state budget? Cutting revenue is a wonderful thing, unless you can't pay your bills.

Bills to make it harder to register to vote are also on the Republican agenda.

READ MORE - Colorado GOP Oblivious To Budget Reality

The Republican Line On The Economy

I don't agree with Mike Rosen's policy prescriptions for our nation's economy and even his factual assertions are wrong, but his column today is a succinct summary of the Republican party line on the matter from an advocate for the position rather than a straw man argument that I have created myself, so I'm noting it for future reference. I quote some highlights from the narrative below to convey the gist of the message:

[T]he heart of the problem [of state budget shortfalls] is the unsustainable level of government spending and indebtedness driven by a cornucopia of entitlement, health care and welfare programs, along with overly generous government employee payrolls and lavish pension plans that have dwarfed growth in private-sector compensation in recent years. Our federal government is also upside down financially, only with more zeroes at the end of the numbers. . . .

Overseas governments are in a similar pickle, and their citizens are doing something about it: They're revolting (double entendre intended). In France, labor unions and students have staged protests and general strikes, outraged over the government's perfectly reasonable proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. . . .[Western European countries] nations spend a much smaller share of their gross domestic product on defense than we do, and they're still going broke. This is about the inevitable collapse of the democratic socialist welfare state. In the name of "social justice," compassion knows no economic bounds. Well, the bounds are there whether or not democratic socialists know or care about them. In the prophetic words of Margaret Thatcher, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Our current spending levels exceed our practical tax capacity. No nation can tax itself rich. It can only produce itself rich. Excessive tax rates are the enemy of production and a barrier to the creation of societal wealth. You can soak the rich . . . and you still won't come up with nearly enough revenue to close this runaway spending gap. . . . The economic solution is obvious: Government must spend less — much less — on all kinds of things at the federal and state levels.

He closes by identifying his position with those of the Revolutionary War Americans.

Shorter version: Stop spending money to help poor people, stop taxing rich people, and pay civil servants less.

What's wrong with this analysis?

1. The federal deficit is mostly due to unfunded increases in defense spending and tax cuts, with rising health care costs as a secondary cost. Other welfare state spending has not increased and the American welfare state is one of the most miserly in the developed world.

2. The biggest culprits in state budget deficits are cyclical drops in revenue caused by an unprecedentedly deep recession and rising prison spending. Colorado is very close to the bottom nationally in its spending on P-12 education, higher education and other social programs. Medicaid doctors are getting paid far less than market rates. Both the state and federal government are underfunding our roads and bridges. We do not have a $1 billion shortfall in Colorado because Colorado is overspending on social services. We have a $1 billion shortfall because we have no rainy day fund (as TABOR basically insisted), and because we made permanent tax cuts during a temporary economic boom that inflated tax revenues.

3. The empirical evidence makes its unequivocally clear that low tax rates and tax cuts do not spur economic development. While correlation is not causation, you can't have causation without correlation and there is no correlation between low taxes or tax cuts and economic growth, indeed, to the extent that there is a relationship, higher taxes are associated empirically with stronger economic growth. The truth of the matter is that not buying enough government services is bad for the economy too. Goods and services aren't worthless to the economy just because the government writes the check, and the people who get government spending inject it into the economy again faster than the rich who get tax cuts.

4. The payroll cost of government pensions in Colorado is very close to the cost of Social Security (which they replace) and a typical private sector 401(k) plan. The benefits are generous compared to typical private sector retirement plans and Social Security combined, but only because the state treasurer has managed PERA funds better than the private sector alternative. More generally, the benefits at government jobs aren't nearly as sweet as Republicans would have you believe. The health insurance deal, for example, is typically about the same.

5. Government, in general, pays top executives and the senior managers who work for them far less than comparable private businesses do. Michael Bennet did not leave his job as a corporate lawyer to become Superintendent of the Denver Public Schools because the pay for the job was so good. The guy who is in charge of running the entire immigrations and customs enforcement office for the United States makes about the same amount of money as a typical owner of a single McDonald's franchise store, or a junior associate attorney at a Wall Street law firm. Midlevel government workers earn salaries similar to those of midlevel private sector workers. Workers at the bottom in government come out a bit better than their private sector counterparts in job security and compensation, but also perform consistently with quality work, and the differential isn't what is breaking the nation's government sector budgets.

But, Rosen has given you the GOP line, such as it is.

READ MORE - The Republican Line On The Economy