The quote, from a candidate who I will let remain nameless:
TAPPER: But…proponents of school choice say that the best way to change the status quo is to give parents, inner-city parents a choice. Why not?
[Candidate]: Well, the problem is, is that, you know, although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom. We don’t have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools.
So what I’ve said is let’s foster competition within the public school system. Let’s make sure that charter schools are up and running. Let’s make sure that kids who are in failing schools, in local school districts, have an option to go to schools that are doing well.
But what I don’t want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools. That’s going to make things worse, and we’re going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country.
Finally, note the political mastery here. Take the question of how many kids would leave government schools for private schools under a full school competition system. [He] wants to be on both sides of this assumption, sometimes assuming the number is small (when discussing benefits) and then assuming the number is large (when discussing costs). [He] is a master because he makes this switch back and forth from sentence to sentence. First, the number leaving public schools is low, since choice would just benefit “some kids” (Bad old rich ones at that) and leave our [sic] “a lot of kids.” He again in the next sentence implies the number switching must be low, because there are not many private school spots. One sentence later, though, the number switching is high, since it would be a “huge drain of resources.” And then, in the third paragraph, the number switching is very high, since all that are left in public schools are a small core of the “hardest-to-teach kids.”
I recently ran across another instance of having it both ways, not related to politics, but to the topic of peak oil. Some peak oil group had produced a ~50 page report about peak oil, which I was alerted to by a comment from the blog author who stated that high prices won’t crush demand. The report was a pretty decent collection of other reports and data sources. However, it starts by clarifying that peak oil predictions of the past weren’t really wrong; it’s just that things didn’t happen as they predicted. The reason, they claim, is because the oil shocks of the 70’s caused an economic slowdown which reduced demand, which, in turn, led to reduced oil consumption and finally a delay in the timing of the peak by ~10 years. It then goes forward without doing to much to deal with the possibility that there is uncertainty in their projections. But even worse, it seems to go forward with the idea that as oil becomes scarce and prices rise and economies collapse that demand will not change. Brilliant. Of course, from what I saw, there wasn’t any actual economic analysis. There was just an assumption that decreased oil production would cause permanent economic depression (they may have used the phrase “ever-worsening”, which I think implies “permanent” and may even be worse), which leads to a conclusion that oil production will cause permanent economic depression.
As I look at this report, I really wish I had a full day to pick it apart. For example:
Because of ever-worsening economic depression and rapidly rising energy costs, banks will hesitate in making loans for projects that have uncertain profitability due to high future energy costs. Such projects include: ultra deep water production of oil and natural gas; development of coal GTL; construction of nuclear power plants and wind turbines; relocation of populations from metropolitan areas to agricultural areas; and development of cargo rail, passenger rail, and public transportation.
That paragraph is nothing if not bass-ackwards. Investment in such technologies suffers when future profitability is uncertain because every indication is that future energy costs with be low!
