Unfounded Fears

I hoped when I posted recently about paranoia on the Republican right that I could safely forget about the topic for a while. After all, trying to respond to every accusation about the evil intentions of the Federal government, or the Bullock administration, or the Democratic Party, or the Responsible Republican caucus could easily become a full time, crazy-making job. But I couldn’t quite ignore it when I came across this post from Rep. Kerry While, on his Facebook page.*

What’s apparently set off alarm bells for White is that the Interim State-Tribal Relations Committee recently passed a resolution in support of the Salish Kootenai water compact, which White, as you can see, doesn’t like one little bit.  This worries me some, because I’m pretty sure the compact will be coming back to the 2015 Legislature, I’ll be supporting it, and I can just about see White’s hand flying to the red button when the bill hits the House floor.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that supporting the compact is in White’s job description as a member of the Montana House. But it is in his job description that he consider bills carefully, listen to all sides, and ultimately base his yea or nay on sound, legitimate reasons and not on unfounded fears. But so far, unfounded fears appear to be all he’s got.

Case in point: White is afraid that because the Flathead compact recognizes tribal water rights off the reservation, all the other tribes in Montana “will surely reopen their compacts” and claim the “rest of our state water.” But there is no way that could happen. Every tribal water compact that has been negotiated contains language that requires all the parties to agree before the compact can be reopened. Every compact states that it is the final settlement, for “all time,” of all tribal water rights claims. And no Montana tribe, other than the Salish and Kootenai, has ever asserted a claim to off-reservation rights.**

White is afraid that the compact “gives over” state water to the Federal government (in trust for the Tribes), that the Federal government will “gain control” of constitutionally protected state water, and that property owners will be required to “relinquish all claims to their life blood.”

Now I’m not sure that White has actually read the compact, but if he has, he should know that what it does is recognize and quantify various tribal water rights and put a lot of side boards on how those rights can be exercised.  As every water right holder in Montana should know, what a water right allows its owner to do is use a given amount of water in a particular way, and it also tells the owner where they stand in line when, as sometimes unfortunately happens, there’s not enough water in a basin to satisfy every claim on it. Tribal water rights are the same thing. They don’t give ownership of water to anybody or in any way diminish the state’s constitutionally recognized ownership of the underlying resource. They don’t give “control” over water to anybody. They don’t give the Tribes (or the Federal government, if you insist) anything that thousands of other Montana water rights holders don’t have.  And recognizing that one party (tribe, rancher, household, business, or what have you) has a senior right to water from a particular source does not “take away” the junior rights of other parties to water from that source.

In one respect, the compact, far from taking away the water rights of property owners, will actually enhance them. It works like this: as a matter of long established law, the Tribes water rights are senior to everybody else’s. And being senior, the Tribes could, at a time when there wasn’t enough water to go around, tell all those juniors to stop using water. This is termed “making a call” on juniors, and here’s the thing: in the compact the Tribes have agreed either to waive their right to make a call, or have made their senior claims modest enough that the likelihood of most such shortages occurring in the first place is very, very small. Most junior water users across Montana don’t enjoy that kind of protection.

One other thing: you may be wondering about White’s obscure remark regarding Tutvedt and the $22,000 the Tribes contributed to his PAC. Needless to say, I am not a Republican insider, but anybody who’s paying attention knows that Bruce Tutvedt and Kerry White are on opposite sides of the Republican Great Divide. Last spring, when the two factions were running primary campaigns against each other, the Tribes made a $22,000 contribution to the PAC Tutvedt put together to support his side, presumably because his side supports the compact.*** There’s been a certain amount of tongue wagging  on the Republican right about all this, the suggestion being that there's something inappropriate about the Tribes making campaign donations to Republican legislators who support the compact. But for better or worse, that's the way the system works: donors support legislators whose positions they agree with. And in this case, at any rate, that's crystal clear. There's no dark money, no mysterious donors, no hidden agendas,

That's not to say that we shouldn't be worried about the oceans of money in politics or PACs, and their donors, throwing their weight around. But it strikes me as a little unseemly of White to raise the issue. After all, almost 60 percent of the money that he raised in his primary campaign this year came from – you guessed it – PACs. You can find his campaign finance report on the Commission of Political Practices website.

*This is a screenshot, but last time I checked, the post was still up on White’s page and available to all you Facebookers out there. Click here.

** The basis for the Salish and Kootenai claim to off-reservation water rights is specific language in the Stevens treaty that established the reservation. No other tribe in Montana negotiated a Stevens treaty and no other tribal treaty has comparable language. If you want to delve further into what the completed tribal compacts actually say (as opposed to what White apparently thinks they say) click here.

***Full disclosure: Bruce Tutvedt and I co-authored an opinion piece supporting the compact, which I posted here back in August.

Twisting Words

I’m calling a foul on Sen. Alan Olson.

At a meeting of the Energy and Telecommunications Interim Committee on Sept. 8, Sen. Olson took me to task for what he apparently believes, or wants you to believe, is my indifference to the wellbeing of the coal miners he represents. I don’t care about these folks, he says, because after all, there are no coal miners in Missoula, and that makes me “flippant” about the impact of the EPA’s proposed carbon standards on his constituents.

It just ain’t so.

What apparently got Sen. Olson’s back up here was a letter that I and four other legislators (who somehow managed to escape Olson’s wrath) wrote back in August, objecting to a proposal by Rep. Keith Regier that the committee write to President Obama expressing adamant opposition to the EPA carbon standards. The draft letter Regier proposed to send was rife with indisputable errors of fact, and  no matter what position it took on the standards, had it been sent it would have reflected badly on the Montana legislature.*

One point in particular in Regier’s letter that we disputed was the claim that the EPA rules would have a “devastating” effect on Montana. Here’s what we said about that:

Although reducing carbon emissions will inevitably require reduced domestic use of coal (unless cost-effective sequestration can be brought on line), at this point it is impossible to know how much Montana’s production will be reduced. Suffice it to say that nothing in the proposed regulations suggests that production will be eliminated, and any reduction in output and employment in the coal industry that does occur will represent a very small fraction of output and employment in the state as a whole. Moreover, to the extent that the regulations call for accelerated development of renewables and energy efficiency investments, there will be positive impacts on employment and output offsetting negative impacts in the coal industry. Accordingly, it is incorrect to conclude that the impact of the regulations will be “devastating.”

And that’s it. That is the sum total of what we said about potential lost jobs in the coal industry: that they would “represent a very small fraction of … employment in the state as a whole.” Indeed, as Thomas and Donovan Power pointed out in a Missoulian column earlier this week, jobs in coal mining amount to about two-tenths of one percent of all the jobs in the state. And you’ve got to remember that even in the worst case, only a fraction (currently unknown) of those jobs will be lost due to enforcement of the EPA regulations.

What we didn’t say in our response to Regier’s letter was that we didn’t care about what happened to coal miners. We didn’t deny the hardship experienced by workers and their families when they lose jobs and livelihoods. We weren’t “flippant” about anything. And we don’t question Sen. Olson’s good intentions when he fights to keep the people in his district working.

But he should fight clean. We offered a reasoned and, I believe, correct assessment of the potential impact of carbon regulations on the Montana economy.  Knowing what that impact will be is critical to formulating the state’s response to the rules. If Sen. Olson disagrees with that assessment, he should explain why. Twisting words to make us sound callous and indifferent is no substitute for that.

*You can read both Regier’s letter and our critique here.

Paranoia

Paranoia about the nefarious and conspiratorial intentions of the Federal government, “Washington bureaucrats,” and the Obama administration has been part and parcel of the conservative Republican mindset for some time now. You know: Obama’s going to take away your guns, indoctrinate your children, march you in front of death panels, make you read the Koran, raise your electricity rates to astronomical levels, etc., etc., etc.

If you’re like me, you’ve pretty much learned to let these ravings slide. Some of them are even kind of funny. But at times they can get your goat. Take, for example, this recent Missoulian opinion piece, by Joanne Blyton.

Blyton, a Republican House member from Carbon County, is all upset about the “gainful employment” rule being proposed by the US Department of Education, which establishes performance standards for vocational programs at community colleges and for-profit institutions such as trade schools. It’s a little complicated, but the basic idea is that under the rule vocational programs whose graduates exceed certain benchmarks with respect to their student loan burdens will lose their eligibility to participate in Federal student loans programs.* The idea is that if a program recruits students, teaches them a trade, tells them they will get a decent job when they graduate and helps them borrow money to pay for the training, it should deliver: Graduates should be gainfully enough employed to repay the loans and not have to use the lion’s share of their income to do it.

Now there is certainly room for a conversation about how this rule is written, how badly it’s needed, how well it will work, and whether it will have unintended consequences. One hopes that that conversation would be grounded in reality, but the representative from Carbon County doesn’t quite get there. According to Blyton, the Department of Education has embarked on a “strange quest to dismantle ‘for profit’ higher education.” She says the rule is an example of the “Orwellian doublespeak we see so often from Washington these days.” It would “severely restrict education opportunities for many Americans.” “It’s a blatant attempt to put a large swath of our higher education system out of business.” And it is “dangerous” because it gives the “Washington bureaucracy…new power to pick and choose favored institutions.”

This is all very odd. According to this report, the Department of Education estimates that there are about 8,000 vocational programs, housed mainly in community colleges and for-profit schools, that would have to comply with the standards. The programs enroll about a million students, which amounts to around 5 percent of total US higher education enrollment. And about 16 percent of these programs would fail under the proposed rule. So let’s get this straight: the rule applies to all vocational programs, not just to for-profit institutions. And while vocational programs are the principal offerings of for-profits, approximately 84 percent of them would not be affected by the rule. Students in the programs that would be affected make up less than 1 percent of total higher education enrollment. How can those numbers possibly be construed to mean that the Federal government wants to dismantle for-profit education or put a “large swath” of the higher education system out of business? How does establishing minimal standards for the success of programs amount to picking and choosing favored institutions?

Blyton is concerned about denying educational opportunity to the students who have no choice but to enroll in programs that can’t comply with the regulations, and well she should be. But she is tone deaf to the real problem these students face. Their educational background is typically poor, they are often disadvantaged economically and socially, their ability to evaluate the usefulness of the vocational programs on offer is limited, and as a result they can be easily deceived into enrolling in institutions that take their money – or worse, the money they borrow – and give them little or nothing in return. That, such as it is, is the educational opportunity we are talking about here. It certainly does not describe what most vocational programs or for-profit institutions provide. The vast majority give their students a useful education; that’s the same vast majority that will comply with the standards. But unfortunately, this educational market is one where bad actors can also easily get a foothold.**

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can go to this Department of Education site and download the “2012 GE Informational Rates.” Do it and browse around a little. You’ll find schools like the Southwest Acupuncture College in Santa Fe, whose graduates’ student loan payments are equal to half their income of $16,900. Or there’s the International Academy of Design and Technology in Chicago. Its graduates have to pay off student loans at an average of $4,300 a year, which is 22 percent of what they earn (better than the acupuncturists!) but 191 percent of their “discretionary” income, i.e. what they earn beyond the poverty level.

Now I’m not saying that the folks running these schools are snake oil salesmen, but there’s definitely a problem here. People are borrowing money to pay for vocational training that doesn’t appear to be doing them much good. Can we agree on that? Can we agree that this is an issue we should take seriously? And if the Department of Education wants to take this issue seriously, can we refrain from outlandish and unfounded accusations about what we think its “real” intentions are?

*Blyton’s description of these standards is a little off. If you want to delve into the details, check out this description by the American Council on Education.

** A wonkish aside: markets like this are characterized by what economists call “asymmetric information,” meaning that the sellers know a lot more than the buyers do about the true quality of the goods trading hands. Back in 1970, Geroge Akerlof wrote a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (“The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”) explaining why, in such markets, low quality goods tend to displace high quality ones. The paper became very famous and has been cited thousands of times in the past 44 years. For his work on asymmetric information Akerlof (with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz) was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics.