Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

For all you fans of reducing government out there, maybe you should reconsider.  This NYTimes article gives a good illustration of situations when small government doesn’t make sense.  For years the government has allowed private companies to provide student loans at virtually no risk to the companies as the government insures the loans and provides the funding.  The companies just make money off that arrangement.  When the government makes the loans directly (even if it uses a private company to manage the loans), it saves billions.  In short, sub-contracting out to private companies services that government can provide directly only increases the cost.  It doesn’t decrease the cost, and here’s why: You introduce profit into the equation.

Do the math.  When the government runs the program, it looks like this:

cost of program = cost to provide the services

When government subcontracts programs, it looks like this:

cost of program = cost to provide the services + profit for corporation

In what situation can “profit for corporation” lead to lower costs of programs?  (It certainly hasn’t in healthcare; one of the primary reasons healthcare costs in the US keep going up is because insurance companies keep increasing their profits.  Take them out of the equation and healthcare costs will go down, not up.)

When I read that article this morning I remembered thinking about my father’s military experience. When he was in the military soldiers did the cooking and cleaning.  That was part of being a soldier.  Today, all of that is subcontracted out at ridiculous rates.  Soldiers don’t cook the food.  Why?  Can they not cook?  Of course they can.  The reason they don’t is because defense contractors see that as one more way to take money from taxpayers.  How could it possibly be less expensive to have soldiers cook their own food?

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a rant against soldiers having more leisure time.  It’s a rant about wasteful spending.  I’d love to pay less in taxes, just like everyone else.  But that means cutting out these ridiculous subcontractor scenarios where they simply add “profit for corporations” to the equation and then claim that it is cheaper for the American taxpayer because it “reduces government.”  That, of course, is crap!  It may mean bigger government to get rid of the subcontractors, but, ironically, bigger government sometimes means lower taxes.

Here’s a great NYTimes article this morning summarizing some recent genetic research on the origins of humans in Africa. We’ve known for quite some time that humans originated in Africa, but the current studies trace human ancestry to the southwest corner of Africa, something that had not been done before. That’s pretty cool. But even more cool – about 150 humans crossed into Arabia and their descendents settled the rest of the world. The fact that we can determine all of that through genetics is simply remarkable. Science rocks!

A student found this site and showed it to me the other day:

http://www.breathingearth.net/

Spend a few minutes perusing it.  Disturbing.

I caught this story a couple of days ago about a wealthy chiropractor trying to change Florida legislation on childhood vaccines.  I was so annoyed by it that I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Petersburg Times. They called yesterday to let me know they were going to publish it. Found it today:

Thank you for bringing this piece of disturbing legislation to my attention. I wrote my state senator, Arthenia L. Joyner, and my state representative, Michael Scionti, to encourage them to vote against this piece of legislation. I would not have known about it if not for you story. So, thank you.

But I’m also writing with a bit of criticism. In that story, Gary Kompothecras’ claims were basically left unchallenged. A recent study in the journal Pediatrics found no link between thimerosal and autism. By not mentioning this you are doing your readers a huge disservice. To date, there is no scientific evidence to suggest vaccines cause autism.

If people like Kompothecras get their way, the result won’t be a reduction in autism (autism rates are going up while thimerosal has been removed from childhood vaccines), but outbreaks of measles, as has already happened in the United States. Please do a good, scientific story on this topic. Educate the public, don’t spread fear.

Dr. Ryan T. Cragun, Tampa

On the agenda for tomorrow – posting footage of Toren.  Stay tuned!

I’m preparing a lecture for one of my classes in which we are discussing Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone.  In the 2nd chapter on political participation he claims,

“The distinction between intracohort and intercohort change is crucial to understanding what’s been happening to turnout in America over the last thirty years.  Very little of the net decline in voting is attributable to individual change, and virtually all of it is generational.  Throughout their lives and whatever their station in life and their level of political interest, baby boomers and their children have been less likely to vote than their parents and grandparents.  As boomers and their children became a larger and larger fraction of the national electorate, the average turnout rate was inexorably driven downward.” (p. 34)

To illustrate this, I created some cohorts in the GSS (1972-2006 dataset) and ran simple crosstabs, looking at whether or not someone voted in the presidential election by their cohort.  The result is depicted in the figure below:

From what I can gather from the figure, Putnam is wrong.  This isn’t a cohort issue at all – it’s an age issue.  Younger people are less likely to vote.  But by the time they reach retirement, they are just as likely to vote as are their grandparents.  Am I missing something?