Calvert Publications
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- The 2008 General Assembly Session: An Intellectual Vacuum
George W. Liebmann
2008-03-23
Consideration of the work of the 2008 General Assembly causes one to recall the observation of Gertrude Stein: "There's no there there." The Governor proposed an essentially nonexistent legislative program, having run out of ideas in his second year, after having raised almost every available tax except the two most obvious candidates for increase: the gasoline tax and the alcoholic beverage tax. - Missing Issues
George W. Liebmann
2008-01-30
Americans in both parties report themselves uninspired by the current crop of Presidential candidates. Yet Americans know that significant domestic problems are unaddressed: that the public high school system is a disaster area; that the savings rate is nonexistent, being discouraged by over-liberal credit and justified fear of eventual inflation; that transportation infrastructure is deteriorating; that both local and national policies favor sprawl development and the mismanagement of public lands; that families with young children are under great economic pressure, while the elderly are the darlings of the tax and benefit systems; and that police, prison, and judicial bureaucracies are ever-expanding. - Move Beyond School Voucher Fantasy to Focus on Real Reforms
George Liebmann
2008-01-06
The recent, ringing defeat of a referendum on school vouchers in Utah - generally thought of as America's most conservative state - should be a wake-up call to critics of our public school system. The proposal failed for several reasons apart from the might of the teachers unions. Chief among these is that it was perceived as a solution in search of a problem: an effort by a group of doctrinaire conservatives to sell an intellectually tidy "free market" panacea without taking the trouble to first convince the electorate that schools, and particularly high schools, have serious flaws. - Clinton Coronation?
George W. Liebmann
2007-11-07
A rash of recent newspaper stories have proclaimed, a year in advance of the Presidential election, Sen. Hillary Clinton to be the next Democratic nominee, and the next President. The fixation of these stories is on campaign contributions and poll results, a sort of 'inside baseball' that our great newspapers now seem to regard as central to their informing function. But the oceans of ink expended in recirculating data provided by campaign organizations shed remarkably little light on what her interests in life are, what sort of public officer she has been, what her education has been, what methods she regards as acceptable or unacceptable, what campaign promises she has made and what their implications are, what sorts of people she surrounds herself with, what standards she will apply in making appointments, whether her political style is characterized by candor or the opposite, what importance she attaches to the less fashionable guarantees of the Bill of Rights, the vertical separation of powers, or federalism and localism, whether she is tolerant or vengeful in her attitude to those who differ, and whether she is a realist, a chauvinist, an opportunist, or a 'liberal imperialist' in her approach to international relations. Such questions have not been seriously asked about her, or about any of the other candidates. They deserve answers. - Enter O'Malley
George W. Liebmann
2007-09-24
The new administration has now been in office for nine months, an acceptable period of gestation, and it is now not too early for a preliminary assessment. Let us first accentuate some positive developments:
1. The administration appears to have placed the Departments of Public Safety and of Juvenile Services in the hands of fully qualified professionals, who have made difficult and overdue decisions.
2. The administration has made serious improvements in the handling of environmental issues. Historic tax credits and open space funds have been enhanced. There has been long-overdue enforcement of air pollution constraints against Baltimore's public utility.
3. Qualified people have been appointed to preside over the Public Service Commission and the office of the Insurance Commissioner, the two most important regulatory agencies. The administration has not indulged the illusion that in a mixed economy, 'business-friendliness' is demonstrated by appointing semi-competent regulators. - Taxes and Revenues: The Road Not Taken
George W. Liebmann
2007-09-24
A year into the new administration, and a few months or weeks before the next legislative session, special or general, there is no sign that any study inspiring public confidence has been undertaken of the state’s revenue and tax structure. Instead there is vague talk of conversations between the Governor and Senate President Miller, inspiring the same confidence among budget students that the Willy-Nicky agreement between Czar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II inspired among diplomats, and for the same reasons. One finds here no Cooper-Hughes Commission, not even a Linowes Report. There is no effort to see things whole, in order to give the state a modernized tax structure, not a stop-gap designed to get through the next general election. There is certainly no effort made to balance revenues and responsibilities between state and local governments, to end the annual beg-a-thons. There is not even the agreed body of statistics that a study commission would produce: the administration feels entitled to its own facts. - Educational Follies
George W. Liebmann
2007-09-24
Readers of the Baltimore newspapers have been regaled by a series of advertisements placed by the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, which has reached an impasse in contract negotiations with the school board. The school board proposes to slightly reduce the allowed weekly amount of what is quaintly called ‘preparation time’, in order to have additional time for compulsory annual workshops for teachers, which actually prepare them to teach classes.