One concern people have with the idea of higher street parking fees is the burden this would place on the poor. This kind of worry is, I think, often overstated — middle class people underestimate the extent to which poor people do less driving than the middle class and are in fact the primary victims of driving-oriented public policy.

But another point I would make about this is that a great many of things we would like to do to help poor cost money. And so to do them, you need to find ways to secure revenue. And revenue-enhancing measure is going to be politically difficult to pass and is going to cause some hardships. One consequence of this is that it’s good to look at revenue measures that also accomplish other policy objectives. Auctioning carbon permits will help avert catastrophic climate change and raise funds that can be used to, among other things, further help the cause. Charging market rates at parking meters alleviates parking shortages and reduces idling, thereby reducing emissions and congestion. Congestion pricing for roads reduces traffic jams. Unlike many other kinds of taxes, these car-related are measures that will increase economic efficiency and boost growth.

As an illustration, the DC Council is going to consider a bill to raise parking meter fees and use the money to continue funding the important and effective “housing first” anti-homelessness program that, otherwise, will get the axe due to the economic downturn. The increased fees would probably be useful on their own terms even if the money was just buried in mines because of its beneficial impact on the parking/traffic situation, but the fact that the revenue can actually be put to use on crucial social services further bolsters the case for the step.

I don’t disagree with Hendrick Hertzberg very often, but I think this is wrong:

Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.

For one thing, we need to start out with the fact that decreasing class size isn’t an alternative to addressing school finance issues and the lack of equity involved. Obviously, to have smaller classes you need more teachers and that would cost more money. And more money should be spent, especially on schools with lots of poor students (see this from Robert Gordon for some proposals to improve funding issues). But even once we’re assuming that struggling underfunded schools are going to be getting more money, I don’t think it’s totally clear that reducing class size is the best use of the marginal dollar.

There are already a lot of difficulties involved in getting the best staff available into the schools that need them the most. If you simply expand the number of people you’re trying to hire for what are currently the least-desirable positions, you’re going to wind up decreasing the average quality of your staff when we really need to increase it. Clearly, there are a lot of schools in the United States and perhaps some of them have class sizes so large that reducing them is really the most pressing need. But in most cases, I would say that creating financial incentives to better fill hard-to-staff positions is going to be a better use of money than creating new positions.

I thought that a lot of the ire directed at Bill Ayers by conservatives during the campaign was pretty ridiculous. Not only in terms of the transparently ridiculous efforts to “link” him to Barack Obama, but in terms of the level of outrage directed at his misdeeds. When I tally up all the Vietnam-era wrongdoing in this country, Ayers, the Weather Underground, and their absurd terrorist plots don’t come to the top of my list. The architects of the war are responsible for the deaths of many people.

But being the target of unfair criticism does not, on its own, exonerate a person. And Ayers’ odd little New York Times op-ed only re-enforces one’s sense that unfair criticism can certainly be directed at a guy who very much deserves to be the target of criticism. An inability, down to the present day, to see that what the Weather Underground was up to was wrong, counterproductive, and insane is really hard to grasp.

One underappreciated aspect of the American system of government is that we have way more political appointees in the executive branch than is common in most democracies. Political appointees will go three or four levels deep into the org charts of agencies, and the top administrators are also staffed by a lot of political appointees rather than by career professionals. In the State Department, it’s customary to give a lot of the political positions (usually at the Assistant Secretary level) to career foreign service officers, but in some agencies there are politicals everywhere.

And as Shankar Vedantam explains in The Washington Post they do a way worse job than the bureaucrats do:

The United States has a far larger number of political appointees in government than any other industrialized democracy. Growing evidence suggests that while presidents and political parties appoint partisans in the belief that loyalists will drive the president’s agenda forward, appointees may actually damage the long-term interests of both presidents and their parties. [...]

In an unusual new analysis, another political scientist compared the Bush administration’s own evaluations of more than 600 government programs with the backgrounds of the 242 managers who ran those programs. David E. Lewis, who is now at Vanderbilt University, found that three-quarters of the managers administering the programs were political appointees while a quarter were career civil servants.

The political appointees were better educated, on average, than the civil staff. Many had stellar records in the private sector or on the campaign trail. Side by side, the political appointees just looked like a much smarter bunch than the careerists.

When it came to performance, however, the bureaucrats whipped the politicals: Programs administered by civil servants were significantly more likely to display better strategic planning, program design, financial oversight — and results. These findings, remember, were based on the Bush administration’s own evaluation system — the Program Assessment Rating Tool, administered by the Office of Management and Budget.

It would be nice to see some efforts made to scale back the quantity of political appointees. My understanding is that the Department of Homeland Security, which was born under the horrific misrule of George W. Bush, has an especially large problem in this regard. That said, when thinking about this it’s important to recall that conservative administration generally don’t want the government to be administered effectively. It was not incompetence that led the Bush administration Justice Department to stop enforcing non-discrimination law, it was deliberate malice. Conservatives think it should be easier for businesses to get away with racial and gender discrimination, just as they stand foresquare behind efforts to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Similarly, labor law was enforced poorly under Bush by design not by accident. The administration went out of its way to prevent the EPA from doing it’s job. The examples are almost endless.

And of course this is part of the problem with having so many political appointees. But it’s also why they’re hard to get rid of. Career bureaucrats tend not to go work for an agency unless they believe in its mission. And to conservatives one of the main tasks of a president is to ensure that many rules go unenforced so that the conservative donor class can better trample the public interest. It’s easier to do that the more political appointees you have, and if an occasional Katrina happens, that’s a small price to pay.