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Is This an I.Q. Test ?. . . Oui!

Over the last few days, I have read multiple newspaper descriptions of what was happening in France with the protests of the “gilets juanes.” The fires and the widespread rioting were precipitated by a gas tax increase. As I read the various articles I could not help but play a substitution game – substituting “California” for “France” and “Governor. Brown” for “President Macron.” (A lot of what follows are sentences taken directly from various news articles.)

I invite you to play the substitution game along with me. Have fun!
12/3/18
The worst rioting to hit France in years left President Macron weighing an emergency crackdown on protests. The gilets juanes (yellow jackets) movement was sparked in October by Mr. Macron’s decision to raise fuel taxes. The protests gained strength in areas outside big cities where people depend on cars. The movement has broadened to those who say that Macron’s policies punish the working class. The outbursts of violence raised the stakes for Mr. Macron plans to push through his economic overhauls, as Mr. Macron’s party is firmly in control of the legislature. Many at the protesters said that low wages and high taxes make it impossible for ordinary French to make ends meet, “It’s always the little guy who pays.”
12/4/18
“There is no Plan B because there is no Planet B,” Emmanuel Macron lectured Donald Trump last year. The French President has viewed stopping climate change as a grand legacy project, and he had hoped to use higher fuel taxes to discourage driving for the sake of slashing carbon emissions. It did not matter to him that French emissions were already low on a per-capital basis. But this did matter to lower income voters whose use of cars for daily life and business was about to become much more expensive!
12/5/18
President Macron stopped his fuel tax increase after concluding that marginal reductions aren’t worth knee-capping an economy!
Now that you have read the aforementioned paragraphs, what is the basic difference between France and California? I could be glib and say that the people in France are just smarter as they apparently can recognize when they are getting shafted. Also, however, note that President Macron was honest when detailing the reason for his tax hike, whereas Governor Brown danced around the truth when he said that the only reason for his gas tax increase was that the infrastructure was in dire straights. His additional white lie was that this was the only way to remedy the problem. Perhaps if Macron had sold his gas tax as a way to fix infrastructure, the rioting would not have occurred on Paris streets . . . err . . . no, this could never happen because the French are, indeed, much smarter than Californians!
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Educational System Gets a D

Last month the ACT released its annual report, the Condition of College and Career Readiness, and the news is not good. As a whole the nation did not do very well, as the percentage of students meeting college-ready benchmarks (CRB) dropped slightly in all subjects tested, specifically English, science, reading , and math. More disturbing in this age of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is that math readiness was at a 14 year low indicating that only 40% of 2018 graduates could succeed in a first year college algebra class! This is down from 46% in 2012. (National grade = ‘C’) What makes these numbers even worse is that the graduating students who took this test made up only approximately 60% of the graduating class, and in some states only those students who were applying to higher tier colleges found it necessary to take the ACT. Worse yet 35% of the graduates who took the test met none of the four ACT benchmarks that determine college readiness in subject areas (up from 33% in 2017). (National grade = ‘F’) In conclusion, for the nation as a whole, the average grade would be ‘D’, as the country as a whole did not do very well, and actually appears to be regressing.

How are individual states doing? It is difficult, if not impossible to compare all of the individual states with each other. For instance on the nationwide map for 2018, California has a much higher composite ACT score (>24) than Wisconsin (20-22), but in Wisconsin all high school seniors take this test, whereas in California only 31% took the ACT, and for the most part, those students are applying to higher tier colleges.

In 2018 how did California do compared to prior years? What sort of letter grade, in general, should we give the California Educational System.
From 2013-2017, in general students in California did somewhat better in meeting ACT CRB in Reading and Science, but did worse in Math. (Here the grade appears to be a ‘C’.) However even though there appears to be an improvement in Science, only 54% of graduates taking physics in high school met the ACT CRB! – i.e. only 54% were college ready in physics! Likewise only 56% of those who had 3 or more years of high school math met the benchmark – only 56% of this select group were college ready in math! (Grade = ‘D’)
 If we then look at these same CRB in that select group of graduating seniors in California, the findings are depressing as 20% of that select group who took the ACT failed to achieve a CRB in any of the four tested subjects( 0/4!). (Here I give the California Educational System a grade of ‘F’, as it has apparently failed 1/5 (20%) of those students who took the ACT.)
When we look at different racial subgroups within California, the results are equally depressing, as there is a wide disparity in CRB. White/Asian students met CRB in 3 or 4 of these same subjects about 70% of the time (Grade =‘B+’, whereas African-American/ Hispanic students met 3 or 4 only 25% of the time! (Grade= ‘D’) In conclusion, the California Educational System gets an overall grade of ‘D‘.
We in California are spending quite a lot on education. Are we getting our money’s worth ? An overall grade of ‘D’! . . . I think not, but why not?
The bottom line is that while California is not getting its money’s worth in education, the situation is not getting any better. As usual those Democrats that run the state are either incapable of solving the problem or don’t really care, and those African-American/Hispanic students, that need education the most, are paying the price!
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Change Behavior ?

“He’ll have trouble reassembling his 2016 coalition unless his behavior changes.”

So says an editorial writer from the Wall Street Journal two days after the 2018 midterm elections. I realize that those that write editorials in major newspapers are supposed to be smarter and more well informed than us peons that merely read these editorials, but I must humbly disagree with these sorts of prognostications that apparently can emphasize only one side of our President . . . the side that they do not like, namely his sometimes “quirky” behavior.

As for myself, I am not having a problem with most anything that he does because what I see are the results of his actions, and what occurred in these midterms was an example of President Trump getting results. What happened in these midterm elections was something that has happened only three times in the last hundred years, namely that the sitting president’s party gained seats in the Senate while losing seats in the House. To put the results of this recent midterm in a historical perspective, since WWII the sitting presidents party has lost an average of 37 seats. (The Republicans have lost a total of 36 seats when combining both the House [-39] and the Senate [+3] results.) More recently, at the midterm of Barack Obama’s first term, the Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate (-69 total!). Likewise at the midterm of Bill Clinton’s initial term as president the Democrats lost a total of 63 seats, -54 in the House and -9 in the Senate.

So what I am seeing is really pretty good for a sitting president as far as initial midterms go. More importantly how did the Republicans pull off this +3 in the Senate? Certainly the disgusting behavior of the Democrats during the Kavanaugh conformation hearings had a lot to do with the defeat of the anti-Kavanaugh senators at the midterm ballot box. (Note that the only Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh was re-elected. A coincidence? Not likely.) Without question it was President Trump and his campaigning in various states that was primarily responsible for the Senate gains. In the six days prior to the 11/6/18 midterms the President held over-flowing campaign rallies in eight different states, including Florida, Missouri, Indiana, and Tennessee – note that the Republican Senate candidates won in all four of these aforementioned states. He also held rallies in Ohio and Georgia in the last few days of the campaign, and in these two states the Republican candidate beat out the Democratic opponent for governor in two very close races. And just in . . . the Republicans held on to their Senate seat in Mississippi, thanks in part to two big Trump rallies (one in Tupelo and another in Biloxi) the day before that election.
Conservative America should be saying, “Thank you for your extra effort, Mr. President!”
So after digesting the results of the midterms, I think that I would re-phrase the comment from the Wall Street Journal to instead read, “He’ll have no trouble reassembling his 2016 coalition unless his behavior changes.”