You see, I’ve discovered Portland’s Charter Schools. For a fair background about our Charter schools, refer to this Portland Mercury article, and for an overview of the charter movement, see The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Awareness Dawns

A couple weeks ago, we got the fateful phone call. It was the middle school guidance counselor, "I___ will not be successful if he goes to Wilson High School. He’ll inevitably drop or fail out. You should consider alternative schooling." His poor performance was no surprise to us, but we were very interested to hear her ideas, since we were completely exhausted by trying to force the kid to succeed.

One of the alternatives she proposed was sending him to a charter school, specifically Trillium. I don’t know how I’d missed it up until then. I suppose I thought that I thought most or all so-called alternative schools were gang schools or lightly veiled schools-for-the-slow.

The Visit

We visited last week and we were simply blown away. Yes yes YES, we want our son to go to Trillium. Yes, we want him to experience a school where we counted no more than ten students in any one class. Yes, we want him to go to a place where we witnessed a physical altercation being resolved by peer mediation. Yes, we want him to have a chance to take African Drumming class alongside Japanese. Yes, we want to give him a chance to replace apathy and failure with engaged interest.

In fact, we were so impressed that we applied for admission for our daughter who’ll be entering first grade next year. We want all that for her as well, even though she’s very much her brother’s opposite when it comes to school. Frankly, my wife and I both wished we could have gone to a school like that.

Taxes and staying put

Dustin and I have been considering moving to Mexico for a long while now. But if this works out, and it is what we believe it could be, we’ll stay put while our children receive a truly outstanding education. I don’t even mind the high taxes we’ll have to pay to do that.

Technorati Tags: charter school, charter-school, education, taxes

I certainly haven’t always felt that way. I can recall a time in the not too distant past when I agreed with my fellow “downtrodden white collar workers”, arguing that executives should be limited to some set multiple of the wages paid their lowest level employees. The only way to support such a foolhardy notion is to demonize business people, arguing that they are merely exploiting people, that they are basically parasites.

I certainly put other, more obviously selfless folks above business people in the moral-scale-of-worthiness I’d constructed in my head. Firemen, doctors (the good ones, not plastic surgeons), and teachers all seemed infinitely more important to society than businessmen.

What I never asked myself was, “who is going to pay the salary for these people?” Who will contribute to the volunteer fire department? Who will enable the volunteers to feed and clothe their families so that they may spend time in charity work?

Business, that’s who. Government can’t do it, at least not by itself, as it is also supported through the industry and sacrifices of business people.

In the last century, the U.S. has gone from a primarily agrarian economy to a vastly more interdependent and commerce oriented one. Where in the past, the basic supporter of society might reasonably have been seen to be a farmer, I argue that today it is the business people.

We are the bedrock of society. We provide the base that allows others to carry out their own passions and lives. This is no Objectivist praise of selfishness, this is the simple observation that we are the engine that drives the modern world. Without us, there can be no noble teachers or doctors.

It’s not just a noble calling, its a full on spiritual one. Serving society with every ounce of energy at my disposal, I am proud to be a businessman.

Technorati Tags: business, philosophy

Currently the U.S. is at about 65.5%, much less than many of the worlds great economies.

But on to the main point

The optimist argues that paying off the national debt will certainly cost big bucks for our children. If the average tax debt per capita is currently $2,290, it will need to rise to $9,828 in about 25 years. That’s scary, but not so once you realize that this is simply the status quo moved out 25 years at a 6% growth of the GDP. Get it? The numbers are huge, but the same relative burden that they are now.

He further argues that the best way out of debt is to raise our income rather than tightly cap spending.

In short, the right way to raise taxes on future generations is to raise their pay. The right way to raise their pay is through real economic growth. And the pathway to real economic growth includes growth- and productivity-friendly federal laws and policies.

He ends his article with the excellent points:

Wouldn’t it be unexpectedly strange—and invigorating—to see the fiscal debate shift towards how to raise everybody’s pay by fostering the creation of new, better jobs in new, better companies and industries, and by leveraging an ever-growing stock of intellectual capital? It would be a long-overdue change-of-subject, in my opinion.

Yes. It would change the subject from fear to hope, from pessimism to optimism, from “how to avoid deficits” to “how to make better investments in our future.” Anyone who has ever bought a home or grown a business knows that borrowing money to help fund good investments is perfectly sound financial practice. So why can’t our leaders get behind that simple concept? Wouldn’t it be refreshing if they stopped talking about deficits, and started talking about how they’ll work towards growth-friendly laws and policies—i.e., “good investments”?

Technorati Tags: politics, deficits, GDP, taxes

It isn’t that I don’t think we will eventually hit such a point, where production inevitably begins to decline despite companies and countries’ best efforts. That’s obvious. What I believe is that it isn’t all that close, more like decades than years. Further, I believe that technology will extend the down-ramp for many years. Further yet, I think the world will be ready at that point to transition to something else.

How can I think this?

Well, firstly, I am an optimist. I don’t understand the point of pessimism, to be honest. It feels like such a limiting and self-defeating world-view. You can see it in some of the peak oil fans’ writings, where they argue that the world’s economies must shrink to avoid disaster. As Guy Kawasaki would say, "That’s Bull Shitake." It doesn’t help anything, because no one will voluntarily go that direction.

In Paul Zane Pilzer’s excellent “The Fountain of Wealth”, he makes several points about this doom and gloom thinking. One of the most convincing is the parallel between petroleum and whale oil. In the 1800s, the entire world economy was as dependent on whale oil as we are today on petroleum. Did the world end when the whales basically ran out? No. We switched to something else, remarkably quickly. This despite the doom warnings from all the economists of the day.

The Economist makes these points very strongly, with a capitalist twist. They argue that the sky-high price of oil today is actually giving incentive to competitors. It is hard to compete with $20 oil, but reasonable to try with $60+ oil.

From the Economist article Steady as she goes:

But is the world really starting to run out of oil? And would hitting a global peak of production necessarily spell economic ruin? Both questions are arguable. Despite today’s obsession with the idea of “peak oil”, what really matters to the world economy is not when conventional oil production peaks, but whether we have enough affordable and convenient fuel from any source to power our current fleet of cars, buses and aeroplanes. With that in mind, the global oil industry is on the verge of a dramatic transformation from a risky exploration business into a technology-intensive manufacturing business. And the product that big oil companies will soon be manufacturing, argues Shell’s Mr Van der Veer, is “greener fossil fuels”.

What of the notion that oil scarcity will lead to economic disaster? Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute, an American think-tank, insist the key is to avoid the price controls and monetary-policy blunders of the sort that turned the 1970s oil shocks into economic disasters. Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and the former chief economist of the IMF, thinks concerns about peak oil are greatly overblown: “The oil market is highly developed, with worldwide trading and long-dated futures going out five to seven years. As oil production slows, prices will rise up and down the futures curve, stimulating new technology and conservation. We might be running low on $20 oil, but for $60 we have adequate oil supplies for decades to come.”

Alternative fuels will not become common overnight, as one veteran oilman acknowledges: “Given the capital-intensity of manufacturing alternatives, it’s now a race between hydrocarbon depletion and making fuel.” But the recent rise in oil prices has given investors confidence. As Peter Robertson, vice-chairman of Chevron, puts it, “Price is our friend here, because it has encouraged investment in new hydrocarbons and also the alternatives.” Unless the world sees another OPEC-engineered price collapse as it did in 1985 and 1998, GTL, tar sands, ethanol and other alternatives will become more economic by the day.

Technorati Tags: economics, oil, peak oil