How Entitlements Ate the Budget Yuval Levin & James C
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THE DECLINE OF DINESH ALICE B. LLOYD HOW ENTITLEMENTS ATE THE BUDGET YUVAL LEVIN & JAMES C. CAPRETTA OCTOBER 1, 2018 • $5.99 • WEEKLYSTANDARD.COM Contents October 1, 2018 • Volume 24, Number 4 2 The Scrapbook Hurricane Trump, Beto male, & more 5 Casual J. F. Riordan, buried under tote bags 6 Editorials Nothing More Than Feelings • Run, Mike, Run 9 Comment Trump tries something surprising: self-control BY FRED BARNES 5 The (ever slower) march of Time BY PHILIP TERZIAN Wurst case scenario: Merkel’s coalition calamity BY CHRIstOPHER CALDWELL Articles 13 Astroturfing on Capitol Hill BY TONY MECIA & HALEY BYRD A lot of those spontaneous calls from constituents are the work of lobbyists 16 See Anything, Say Something? BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY The pros and cons of ‘mandated reporting’ 17 The Battle of the Bobs BY EthAN EPstEIN A surprisingly competitive Senate race in New Jersey 19 Great Books—32 Percent Off BY PHILIP LUKE JEFFERY 6 St. John’s College lowers tuition, a lot Features 21 A Failure of Responsibility BY YUVAL LEVIN & JAMES C. CAPREttA Washington fiddles while the entitlement problem metastasizes 30 Same As He Ever Was BY ALICE B. LLOYD In the 1980s, Dinesh D’Souza made his bones with puerile antics at the ‘Dartmouth Review’—American politics has finally caught up Books & Arts 37 Help Wanted BY CAITRIN KEIPER America’s love affair with amateur advice 41 Fear Factor BY JOHN WILSON Are our lives and our politics really dominated by fear? 43 The Retropedestrian BY THOMAS VINCIGUERRA The odd tale of the Texan who tried to walk around the world backward 45 Emmy Noether’s Beautiful Theorem BY DAVID GUASPARI One hundred years ago, she united symmetry and conservation in physics 47 Momma Drama BY JOHN PODHORETZ Comedy-thriller ‘A Simple Favor’ is memorable despite its forgettable name 30 48 Parody More FBI text messages COVER BY JASON SEILER THE SCRAPBOOK Category 5 Irrationality n Tuesday, September 11, as Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays O Hurricane Florence lumbered down humans’ role in increasing the through the Atlantic toward the Caro- risks, and he continues to disman- tle efforts to address those risks. It is linas, we received a text from a WEEKLY hard to attribute any single weather STANDARD colleague asking how long it event to climate change. But there is would take for the hurricane to become no reasonable doubt that humans are political. Somebody would blame priming the Earth’s systems to pro- Trump or the GOP for something—it duce disasters. was just a matter of when. THE SCRAP- BOOK wagered that it would take at least We have our doubts about claims till Monday before somebody in the that climate change (or global warm- media laid the blame for Florence at ing, as it used to be called) poses an the White House door. Our colleague imminent threat to civilization, and guessed it would be Saturday. Post continued: “If the Category 4 in any case, it’s never been clear to us In fact we were both wrong—it had hurricane does, indeed, hit the Caro- that many of the policies environmen- already happened. That very day, the linas this week” (Florence was a Cat 2 talists propose would do much besides Washington Post published an editorial when it landed, but leave that aside), ruin the industrialized economies titled “The Storms Keep Coming.” “it will be the strongest storm on and empower bureaucrats and trans- The online headline gets right to the record to land so far north.” Then the national elites. But what struck us point: “Another hurricane is about to editors really let loose: most about the Post’s editorial was just batter our coast. Trump is complicit.” this: that if the editors wanted to give “Last year Hurricane Harvey bat- the impression that climate change tered Houston,” the paper’s editors President Trump issued several warn- alarmism is just another convenient ings on his Twitter feed Monday, lamented. “Now, Hurricane Flor- counseling those in Florence’s pro- stick with which to smack Donald ence threatens to drench already jected path to prepare and listen to Trump—or indeed any administra- waterlogged swaths of the East Coast, local officials. That was good advice. tion they happen to dislike—they did including the nation’s capital.” The Yet when it comes to extreme weather, a terrific job. ♦ O’Rourke has circulated a photograph Of course, ridiculing O’Rourke Beto Male of himself as a child wearing a shirt for his name is a bold move for a man obert Francis O’Rourke is run- with the name Beto on it, but the christened Rafael and makes Cruz R ning against Sen. Ted Cruz of Washington Free Beacon discovered an seem a touch mean. We would have Texas. You may know the challenger item in Columbia University’s student advised the Cruz campaign to leave the better by the name Beto O’Rourke. newspaper, the Spectator, dating back nominative tomfoolery to respectable THE SCRAPBOOK is generally reluctant to to O’Rourke’s college days there, that outfits like the Free Beacon and, well, bring up the names and nicknames of called him Rob O’Rourke. THE SCRAPBOOK. public figures (after what Idaho senator The Cruz campaign has ridiculed Is there more to the story of how Mike Crapo must have O’Rourke for the name Rob O’Rourke the Ivy Leaguer became endured in middle change, most recently Beto O’Rourke the aspiring politician? school, he’ll get no grief with a country-music Will the real Rob, Robert, Beto, or from us!), but the ques- radio jingle: “If you’re Roberto please stand up? ♦ tion whether “Beto” is gonna run in Texas, a genuine family nick- you can’t be a lib- name or the result of a eral man. / I remember Jackpots political makeover has reading stories, liberal and Crackpots dogged the Democratic Robert wanted to fit challenger’s campaign. in. / So he changed his mazon CEO Jeff Bezos, aka Beto (pronounced name to Beto and hid it A the richest guy alive, recently Beh-toe, with a short e) with a grin.” (It sounds announced plans to donate $2 bil- is a Spanish-language better—well, slightly— lion to create a network of preschools. TOP: TRUMP, GAGE SKIDMORE! BOTTOM: BUCKMAN / AFP GETTY LAURA TRUMP, TOP: nickname for Roberto. What’s in a name? when it’s sung.) “The child will be the customer,” says 2 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD OCTOBER 1, 2018 Bezos. Maybe we’re old-fashioned, but the idea of pupils as “customers” doesn’t lead us to believe that Bezos has a firm understanding of the moral complexities of pedagogy or child care. The phrase sounds every bit like the tone-deaf hubris of our Silicon Valley overlords. Maybe the effort will succeed, but we’re not optimistic. Bezos is hardly the first zillionaire to decide he can fix education once and for all by dumping truckloads of cash on it. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg went on the Oprah Winfrey Show with Chris Christie and Cory Booker—then governor of New Jersey and mayor of Newark, respectively—and promised to donate $100 million to help New- ark’s abysmal schools become “a sym- bol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” In 2015, New Yorker writer Dale Russakoff published The Prize, a painstaking investigation into how that money was spent. His conclusion? Zuckerberg’s millions “enriched seemingly everyone, except for Newark’s children.” The Gates Foun- dation has spent bil- lions on all manner of education grants over the years, but in late 2014 Bill Gates flatly stated that his numer- ous failures here were proof he was “naïve.” A 526-page report from the RAND Corpora- of Philadelphia. Philly schools are still it is undertaking a widespread crack- tion released this summer a mess, but in 2013 Shyamalan wrote a down.” So thundered a Washington noted that a $575 million proj- book about his experience: I Got Post report on August 29. There’s just ect to improve teacher performance Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a one problem: It isn’t true. in just three school districts—nearly Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the The practices cited by the Post to half the money came from the Gates Five Keys to Closing America’s Educa- substantiate its claim—increased Foundation—was a failure: “Overall, tion Gap. Lest you think Shyamalan is scrutiny of birth certificates, higher the initiative did not achieve its stated just another filthy rich dilettante, well, numbers of passport denials—pre- goals for students, particularly LIM his book did get a glowing blurb from date the Trump administration. The [low-income minority] students. Newark’s school superintendent. ♦ paper has now appended a lengthy [S]tudent outcomes were not dramati- correction to the report, but the cor- cally better than outcomes in similar rection sidesteps the main problem: sites that did not participate.” The Post vs. the Post The whole point of the story was that Our favorite instance of education he Trump administration is the uniquely dastardly Trump admin- lottery flops, though, comes from ‘Taccusing hundreds, and possi- istration had come up with these poli- M. Night Shyamalan. The filmmak- bly thousands, of Hispanics along the cies. It had not. er’s personal foundation once tried to border of using fraudulent birth cer- One of the many outrageous mis- TOILET: BIGSTOCK TOILET: improve the schools in his hometown tificates since they were babies, and takes in the Post’s piece had to do OCTOBER 1, 2018 THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 3 wanted to verify some certificates signed by the doctor.