Posts Tagged Center
The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol and Public Policy.
America’s most recent moral crusade, the war on drugs, has been pronounced a failure by critics from the left, right, and center and now is favored almost exclusively by politicians, law enforcement agencies, and other groups with a stake in its continuation and a seeming imperviousness to information. In The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol, and Public Policy, Kenneth Meier provides evidence that the war on drugs has been a failure in the states but also demonstrates that this most recent attempt to expunge sin is akin to earlier failed attempts to regulate personal behavior. The analyses presented in the book underline the irrationality of many U.S. anti-drug policies but also demonstrate that forces in the policy environment make it difficult for us to learn from our policy mistakes. The book’s ultimate substantive contribution is a sophisticated, balanced, and well-reasoned analysis of the forces underlying the adoption, implementation, and effects of policies to regulate drugs and alcohol. Antidrug policies are exposed clearly as good politics but bad public policy. The frustrating fact, though, is that the results suggest that we seem unable to stop ourselves from embarking on Quixotic anti-sin campaigns despite our history of failure in the arena. Americans may be doomed to a future of badly designed and implemented policies intended to regulate sin.
Aside from this substantive contribution, Meier’s book represents an important addition to the study of public policy through his careful application of three approaches to policy analysis: cross-sectional quantitative analysis, quantitative historical analysis, and qualitative historical analysis. Meier applies each approach in this research, and the results are impressive. The study is contextually rich and empirically rigorous; rather than pursuing one line of inquiry and accepting its limitations, Meier acknowledges the weaknesses and strengths of each and uses them in complementary fashion. The volume of quantitative and qualitative data used for the analysis is enormous, and the overall effect of the blending of three forms of analysis is to provide a study that takes advantage of the best aspects of each approach while accounting for the weaknesses of each through the use of the others. This is not to say that one cannot find places to quibble with measures, model specification, and the like, but the breadth of evidence Meier brings to bear, and its consistency, renders such criticisms trivial.
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Toward an Improved Education Policy
Education is the foundation upon which our nation builds its prominence. For over a century, America has led the world in innovation. American prosperity grew through innovation and the ability of a skilled workforce to adapt and improve its skills. The key to continued world leadership by the United States will be our ability to continue to produce the best minds and most skilled, adaptable workforce.
Through globalization America has lost industrial skills. As industries left America the skilled workers and craftsmen had to find new livelihoods. The lost skills can not be passed to new workers. For each American company that relocated its manufacturing overseas, support companies were also lost. These are the companies that provided parts, supplies, maintenance and repair of the manufacturing facility as well as maintenance and repair of the products.
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The Problem of Public Policy and Bills on Obesity
The American Diabetes Association has been pushing efforts to combat diabetes through their comprehensive Diabetes Prevention Program. The DPP was conducted over several medical centers, involving participants who volunteered to have their eating and activity habits monitored and to follow dietary and exercise recommendations. Among the astounding findings of the said program is the correlation between the causes and prevention of diabetes with that of obesity. Even so, health programs such as the DPP could not account and counter the entire problem with weight-gain alone. People of power have to do something because they can.
Regrettably, public policy and bills on obesity have not been eagerly pushed through enough against one of the gravest threats to long-term health. Legislators are only as eager to listen on the chitchat-debates rather than to act (immediately) on the required public policy and bills on obesity.
Particular groups and districts though are positively assertive. Some state-lawmakers are forwarding bills requiring fast food and chain restaurants to post nutrition information such as caloric, fat and sugar content on menus to standardize public awareness on obesity. Other states are considering public policies restricting the sale of soda, candy, and other junk-foods in schools under jurisdiction, while others are appointing commissions for research or imposing physical education standards in schools. Others still propose public policy and bills on obesity imposing tax not only on fatty-foods, but also on sedentary models like movie-tickets, video-games and DVD-rentals, to be used as fund for nutrition and exercise programs. Read the rest of this entry »
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