Commentary From the Mile High City

 
"Star of the conservative blogosphere" Denver Post

"The Rocky Mountain Alliance offers the best of what the blogosphere has to offer." -David Harsanyi, Denver Post
 
 contact
Joshua Sharf
PDA
 search

 notify list
to receive email when this site is updated, enter your email address:
 archives
 recent posts
 categories
24 (2 entries)
Anglosphere (1 entries)
Biking (1 entries)
Blogging (35 entries)
Business (173 entries)
CFA (3 entries)
China (5 entries)
Climate Change (3 entries)
Colorado (20 entries)
Denver (12 entries)
Design (4 entries)
Economics (39 entries)
Education (6 entries)
Electoral College (1 entries)
Environmentalism (3 entries)
Europe (0 entries)
Flying (2 entries)
Foreign Affairs (1 entries)
General (89 entries)
Gun Control (2 entries)
Health Care (7 entries)
Higher Ed (7 entries)
History (8 entries)
Home Improvement (1 entries)
Illegal Immigration (35 entries)
Internet (4 entries)
Israel (57 entries)
Jewish (49 entries)
Judicial Nominations (12 entries)
Katrina (0 entries)
Literature (1 entries)
Media (37 entries)
Music (3 entries)
Photoblogging (32 entries)
Politics (152 entries)
Porkbusters (5 entries)
Radio (16 entries)
Religion (1 entries)
Reviews (8 entries)
Robed Masters (4 entries)
Science (1 entries)
Sports (9 entries)
Taxes (2 entries)
Transportation (6 entries)
Unions (1 entries)
War on Terror (180 entries)
 links
 blogs
my other blogs
Three-Letter Monte
Blogcritics.org
PoliticsWest.Com
Newsbusters.org

Rocky Mtn. Alliance
Best Destiny
Daily Blogster
Drunkablog
Exvigilare
Geezerville USA
Mount Virtus
Night Twister
Rocky Mountain Right
Slapstick Politics
The New Conservative
Thinking Right
View from a Height

other blogs
Powerline
One Big Swede
American Thinker
Meryl Yourish
Instapundit
NRO Corner
Little Green Footballs
No Left Turns
A Constrained Vision

business blogs
800CEORead
Accidental Verbosity
Assymetrical Information
BusinessPundit
Carnival of the Capitalists
Catallarchy
Cold Springs Shops
Commodity Trader
Coyote Blog
Different River
EconLog
Everyone's Illusion
Fast Company Blog
Financial Rounds
Footnoted
Freakonomics Blog
ShopFloor.org
Lip-Sticking
Management Craft
Trader Mike
Carnival of the Capitalists Submission

business data
Inst. Supply Mgmt.
St. Louis Fed Economic Data
Nat'l Bureau of Economic Research
Economic Calendar
Stock Charts

colorado blogs
Pirate Ballerina
Pagan Capitalist
Boker Tov, Boulder
Colorado Pols
Jeff Sherman

<-?Colorado BlogRing#->

sites, not blogs
Thinking Rock Press
 help israel
Israel Travel Ministry
Friends of the IDF
Volunteers for Israel
Magen David Adom
CAMERA
 1939 World's Fair
1939: The Lost World of the Fair
The New York World's Fair: 1939-1940
The Last Great Fair by Jeffrey Hart
Iconography of Hope (U.Va.)
Images From the '39 Fair
Tour the 1939 New York Fair
Paleo-Future
Powered by
Movable Type 3.2

Main

January 7, 2009

The Post's "Moral Obligations"

These apaprently include paying for everyone else's college education.

These don't include examining how colleges are spending that portion of your taxes they end up with.

They do include raising your taxes.

State legislators must stand together on the steps of the state Capitol and make a compelling case to voters for a fix to the nonsensical budgetary constraints that Colorado government lives by.

Remember, Referendum C brought in far more money than expected, which the Democrats in charge of the legislature since 2004 plowed into long-term spending. The state government has been able to keep every dime it's brought in since 2006.

Some of that money is dedicated to certain uses. If the Post and its Democratic allies want to defund certain programs, they should name them.

Barring that, there are no budgetary constraints, only revenue constraints. Even last year's mercifully-dead Amendment 59 would have retained a taxpayer veto on tax increases, at least until they could persuade us to forgo those. How inconvenient for them to have to make the case for unlimited taxation power all at once, their surrender-by-degrees strategy having failed.

January 5, 2009

Free Us To Spend More

Tucked away in Friday's Denver Post was this little plea for flexibility from the state college presidents:

Several prominent college leaders want lawmakers to step aside and allow them to raise the price of tuition as they see fit -- especially with severe state budget cuts looming.

University of Colorado president Bruce Benson -- with presidents at other schools lining up behind him -- is urging the legislature to loosen regulations that public colleges and universities have to abide by in doing business every day.

Benson believes the schools could save money and time if they could make decisions for themselves and not have to run everything through the loop of the legislature and the state Department of Higher Education.

I'm sure they could save time, but saving money doesn't seem to be much on their minds. In fact, the one thing you almost never see is any questioning or examination of how colleges are spending their money.

Note that this is the same set of college presidents who ran as from the plague from a suggestion that they get exactly that flexibility in return for forgoing state support altogether. Translation: keep funding us, but relinquish any control or right to question how we spend or what we charge.

Yeah, that's going to go over well in a recession.

The single best description of the big business that colleges have become is still, "Higher Ed, Inc.," by James B. Twitchell, published almost four years ago.

We'll be interviewing CU Regent Tom Lucero, who's already announced he's running for CD-4 in two years, tomorrow evening on our Blog Talk Radio show, and you can bet that funding and spending at our state's universities will feature prominently.

December 21, 2008

Colorado Tuition Rises - No Focus on Spending

So, once again, students in the Colorado university system and their parents will be asked to pay more for tuition.  The Rocky slips this university talking point into its report:

Low state funding has driven heavy tuition increases every year since the beginning of the decade.

Of course, how the money's being spent escapes all attention. Good luck figuring out how much it takes to educate a 4-year student at CU; the university's allegedly been trying for years to figure that out, and still can't provide a number.

The fact is that universities themselves are increasingly perceived as irrelevant, even as their degrees become an ever-more important entry ticket to the professions. It's the price they're now paying for having assumed their importance for so many years, rather than having earned it.

November 29, 2006

Wednesday Morning

Snow. Cold. When they gang up on you, the roads turn into skating rinks. For the first time, I had to use the 4WD just tooling around town. Of course, the Jeep is rear-wheel drive normally, not front-wheel as I'm used to, but even 4WD doesn't help your braking all that much. It just means that you slide straight. The snow's still coming down even now, but tomorrow's supposed to be sunny, so perhaps there will be photo-ops anew.

So having finished the NASD licensing steeplechase, and not yet having renewed the Quest for the CFA, I've got a little time on my hands in the evenings, and I've decided that at least one of the adult ed classes at the shul must be for me. Last night I tried out the beginning Talmud class - the nth beginning Talmud class I've tried - and it went pretty well.

Business-halachah-legal geekery follows immediately.

We're learning Tractate Makkot, and it deals in part with the penalties for perjury in civil cases. The basic rule is that if you lie under oath as a witness, and if that lie would have cost someone money, you owe that person damages equal to what you tried to cost them. So if you falsely claim that someone stole $1000, and that lie is uncovered and the claim denied, you owe the accused $1000, since that's what you tried to do him out of.

Apply this to a loan. You claim that Bob borrowed $1000 for 30 days and now needs to pay it back. Bob claims the loan was for 10 years. What would your lie have cost him? Not $1000, since everyone agrees that he needs to pay that back anyway.

In fact, you'd owe Bob what he would have been willing to pay to have the money for 10 years, minus what he'd be willing to pay to have it for 30 days. I'm not sure how they would have calculated this back in 200 CE, but nowadays, you'd just apply the short-term and long-term interest rates to determine the value of having the money on hand. (There are halachic issues with charging interest, but set those aside for the moment.) In short, the raabis understood, at least at some level, the notion of opportunity cost and the time value of money.

Pretty neat, huh?

Less neat is this week-old piece from the Denver Post about minority enrollment at CU. Since this is a report about a report (a Boorstinian pseudo-event of the first order), objections to the diagnosis and prescriptions are anticipated and dismissed:

The study accused flagship universities of blaming their low diversity on inadequate state funding and the K-12 system.

Instead, they should direct more financial aid to low-income students, recruit minority students more aggressively and focus on helping minority students succeed in college, the report said.

Unasked by the reporter or by the CU administration: of the Colorado high school graduates who qualify as "minorities" under their definition, how many can actually read at 12-grade levels, and why is it CU's job to remediate this problem?

February 13, 2006

Capitalism for Credit

Having been more or less driven off campus by the radicals, you won't really find too many college courses defending capitalism any more. Well, the Independence Institute has somehow managed to sneak a 2-credit course past the censors and into the CU system. While it's open to anyone for $75, college students are particularly encouraged to attend.

The reading list and syllabus look very solid for 15 hours of attendance, and you can register either through UCCS or the II itself.

Looks a little bit like a handy, bite-sized version of the LPR, and maybe it'll leave graduates wanting more.

January 17, 2006

Legal Clinic

No, not what Sam Alito administered to the Senate Democrats.

What public law schools are funding - primarily to advance leftist legal theories in court.

Instapundit refers to Heather MacDonald's assessment. Judging from the list at CU's Law School, I'd aay she's got a point.

Your tax dollars at work.

December 18, 2005

Should Law Schools Require Legal History?

Probably. It appears that students do study certain landmark cases in their specialized classes. And yet, there's little if any sense of the overall development of American law. With over half the curriculum given over to electives, there's plenty of room to add in a few more required courses. She mentioned that while DU does have an elective legal history course, it was taught at the undergraduate level, with little if any legal analysis required.

I was talking with a law-student friend of mine yesterday, not particularly conservative, and she remarked that after having actually read Roe, she was surprised to find just what a lousy opinion it was, especially compared to earlier opinions, and that she'd be perfectly happy overturning it and starting from scratch.

Imagine the effect of such a course on the bulk of law students, and then ask why such a course isn't required.



  booklist

Power, Faith, and Fantasy


Six Days of War


An Army of Davids


Learning to Read Midrash


Size Matters


Deals From Hell


A War Like No Other


Winning


A Civil War


Supreme Command


The (Mis)Behavior of Markets


The Wisdom of Crowds


Inventing Money


When Genius Failed


Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking


Back in Action : An American Soldier's Story of Courage, Faith and Fortitude


How Would You Move Mt. Fuji?


Good to Great


Built to Last


Financial Fine Print


The Day the Universe Changed


Blog


The Multiple Identities of the Middle-East


The Case for Democracy


A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam


The Italians


Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory


Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures


Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud