Honor roll student jailed for truancy

A little over a week ago I came across an article about a girl that was thrown in jail for a day because of her numerous absences in High School, also known as "truancy". Here are the highlights:

• Diane Tran, 17, thrown in jail for one night because of repeated absences from school

• Honors student has been working two jobs to keep family afloat since parents' divorce

• Has been taking advanced placement and college courses in addition to jobs and missed school due to exhaustion

• Spent the night in jail for truancy

School is a service. Money (Via taxes, tuition, fees, etc.) is given to institutions to serve our kids. The school is providing a service to the children that attend. Imagine how screwed we would be if Apple could throw us in jail if we didn't visit iTunes regularly enough. The law/rule/regulation of truancy should not exist. If kids do not want to take 4 years of high school they should not be compelled to.

For the sake of argument let's follow the reasoning that says schools should be allowed to compel children to consume their services.

The judge makes a case that he can't allow exceptions. Many people have echoed this saying, "If you don't punish her then you have to make case by case decisions about how the law is applied! This would lead to madness!" We have to remember this is Sparta.

But seriously, it is clear the truancy law was made strictly for lazy students that suck at life. That's the spirit or intent of the truancy law. Clearly this girl doesn't fit that criteria but  was thrown in jail because legislators didn't think of every possibility. Add the fact that courts literally handle infractions case by case and person by person, not in large herds of people who committed the same crime. It's hard to give credibility to the judges remarks. To allow an exception here would not be a violation of the law but its intended enforcement.

We don't need better laws, we need wiser people (I said wiser, not smarter). I notice when people say they want better laws they really mean they want more stipulations. The problem is that it is impossible to think of every possibility before it happens which is why you need administrators of the law to have wisdom to react to what is happening in front of them. Otherwise you have outcomes like this one, where an extremely responsible young lady is jailed for being irresponsible.

Planning for every exception hardly ever works, here's an entertaining video making my case. Skip to 2:00 and listen until 3:41.
Afterburner with Bill Whittle: The Train Set

Let's not outsmart our common sense.

Federal Deficit Numbers by POTUS from 2001-2012

I recently read an article that stated federal spending was lower under Obama's presidency when compared to Bush's. I found that odd so I did some digging.

The author is talking about the rate of the economy with reference to GDP. That's a way to get a picture of the debt issue. The problem is that the president doesn't have as much control over GDP as he does over spending. I prefer looking at spending in terms of real purchasing power. In other words looking at deficit spending by looking at the total debt accumulated by year adjusted for inflation. This more accurately shows the spending habits of the federal government.

So that's what I did. I used as unbiased numbers as I could. Inflation rates I found from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I used total debt numbers from Treasury Direct. This data unfortunately doesn't have FY 2011 or current FY 2012. So I used an ABC article for FY 2011 and using CBO projections (From January which have since been revised and probably will be revised again), for FY 2012.

That said here is what I found. (Add 2000 years to the x-axis for actual years)

Then I ran the numbers for the average deficit per year. I used 4 years for Obama since I included the projections for FY 2012 and 8 years for Bush. Again all these numbers are adjusted for today's dollars. 

Obama has spent an average of 2.48 times the rate of Bush each year. Including inflation, or current day purchasing power Obama has already outspent Bush. To be clear accounting for inflation actually makes this look better for Obama. If you look at the raw numbers Obama outspends Bush 2.78 to 1. 


So when the author of the above article claims that spending 248% more on average than the baseline is a reduction in spending I can't help but think that context is being twisted to paint a rosy picture.