Northwest Herald Editorial Board John Rung, Kate Weber, Dan McCaleb, Jason Schaumburg, Kevin Lyons, Jon Styf, John Sahly, Val Katzenstein
OPINIONS THURSDAY NWHerald.com
OUR VIEW
February 19, 2015 Northwest Herald Section B • Page 2
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SKETCH VIEW
Let students go unranked A trend for some school districts in Illinois has found its way to McHenry County: eliminating class rank. Crystal Lake-based School District 155 has held forums on the topic. If it decides to eliminate class rank, it would join other northern Illinois districts in doing so, including Barrington District 220, Glenbrook District 225, Highland Park and Deerfield District 113, New Trier District 203, Maine Township For the record District 207, Palatine-based District When was the last time you 211 and Arlington were asked about your high Heights-based school class rank on a job District 214. interview? The graduating class of 2019 would be the first to be affected by the proposed change should the school board decide to approve it. We support the proposed change, for a number of reasons we will leave unranked. Class rank often is a determining criteria in college admissions, but it’s a flawed statistic. A student with a 3.7 grade-point average might not reach the top 25 percent of his or her class in one school district, but might be in the top 10 percent in another district. Prairie Ridge Principal Steve Koch said students are avoiding electives because they’re not weighted and can drag down their GPA in comparison to their peers and the decreasing emphasis colleges are placing on class rank. Isn’t that the opposite of what we want out of our education? An elective is a chance to pursue a passion or broaden your horizons. It’s an unnecessary stressor that doesn’t do anything to prepare kids for the real world. When was the last time you were asked about your high school class rank on a job interview? Our one major concern is that there are still scholarships out there based on class rank. But Paula Steiner, the Career Center supervisor at Prairie Ridge, said in the rare cases where valedictorian or salutatorian scholarships exist, the schools will work with students to make sure they get the assistance they need in applying for those. As long as that help is available, we see no reason to not support this change.
ANOTHER VIEW
Time to clarify union law Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner said he’d shake things up. Hence the headline “Fascism comes to Illinois” in a pro-union publication enraged by Rauner’s executive order relieving state employees of mandated “fair share” payments to unions they do not wish to join. Rauner followed his order by filing a federal lawsuit in Chicago that asks a judge to rule on the propriety of his action. Fascism? Not hardly. Actually, it looks like a good-faith effort to seek a clarification of the law after a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that raised questions about the legality of permitting unions to force payments from nonmembers. Political observers have suggested the legal issue might ultimately be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, there’s no downplaying the anger union leaders feel. Rauner’s decision, if upheld, will hit the unions right where it hurts – in the pocketbook. How much it will hurt is a matter of speculation. Rauner said he took action because “government union bargaining and government union political activity are inextricably linked.” “As a result, an employee who is forced to pay unfair share dues is being forced to fund political activity with which they disagree. That is a clear violation of First Amendment rights and something that, as governor, I am duty-bound to correct,” he said. Actually, it’s not that clear, although the governor accurately summed up the legal argument against allowing unions to coerce payments from roughly 6,500 nonunion public employees out of more than 40,000 on the payroll. Unions argue because nonunion employees benefit from contracts negotiated on their behalf they must be forced to pay for the costs of negotiations. If they do not, the union contends, they are “free riders.” The political arrangement between public employee unions and their political patrons is the subtext of this dispute. Rauner has complained public employee unions exercise undue influence on public officials – both Republicans and Democrats – because they help elect many of them to office by providing campaign donations and campaign volunteers. Once elected, Rauner asserts, these elected officials reward their union supporters with contracts that dearly cost taxpayers. So while the fair share question involves First Amendment issues, it has significant political consequences. Unions want access to as much dues money as possible. Rauner is intent on limiting the union’s power to force nonmembers to pay dues used to influence public policy through political donations. The (Champaign) News-Gazette
THE FIRST
AMENDMENT
IT’S YOUR WRITE He told us to shop To the Editor: Just two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush told Americans to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and “take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” So, on Feb. 8, I had to chuckle when Robert Meale wrote, “I wonder what President Obama would have said after 9/11 – ‘Don’t sweat it’?” Mr. Meale, I don’t deny you are a kind, loving man who cares deeply for this country and where it is going. However, it seems to me that commenting on topics such as 9/11, Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, the Munich Agreement, Obama’s policy on tackling radicalism abroad, the global war on terror and fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida, in that order, all in one letter might be a bit, well, ambitious. Partisan critics such as Meale sometimes offer a rosy version of history as a lens to understand the problems we face today, and that is definitely important in any dialogue of world events. Yet, boiling narratives down in as simple terms as he does misses the overall com-
plexity past and present leaders faced when making decisions. More importantly, to those who do read the news and keep up with current events, please choose your media wisely. Please vet your sources. Please cross reference sources as you research. Challenge yourself; read liberal and conservative columnists. An ideological bubble is comfortable because it is an ideological bubble. Pop it.
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economy. Corporations have created great wealth that is only in the hands of a few Americans.
Dan Kaplan Woodstock
Don’t forget lobbyists To the Editor: If Gov. Bruce Rauner feels the need to limit the influence unions have over their members, then he should also go after the lobbyists in the state House who influence our legislators. It is only fair. If unions cannot get dues from their members in order to work for their members, neither should lobbyists, who work for corporations, be allowed in the halls of our legislative bodies to give money to legislators to vote either for or against a certain bill. Unions have created a middle class that is the backbone of our
Donna Davis Woodstock
No choice with measles To the Editor: Heather Klatt is an advocate for letting vaccination for measles be a matter of parental choice (“Vaccination should be a choice,” Feb. 11). She is delusional on this topic, but also is clever enough to delude the average person. I will address one of her arguments. She cites a couple of cases where 60 percent of the children who caught measles had been
is 5 p.m. April 1. All letters are subject to editing for length and clarity at the sole discretion of the editor. Submit letters by: • Email: letters@nwherald.com • Mail: Northwest Herald “It’s Your Write” Box 250 Crystal Lake, IL 60039-0250
vaccinated. One might conclude your child is better off not getting vaccinated. But what about real facts? In a group of 100 children, five are not vaccinated. These are typical vaccination rates. A measles epidemic hits the school. Three of the vaccinated and two of the unvaccinated catch measles. Thus, her statistic of 60 percent is true. For the wise parent, your vaccinated child was one of a 95 of whom three got sick. For the misled parent, his child is one of the unvaccinated five of whom two got sick. In which group would a loving parent choose to place her child? Herm Faubl Huntley
Don’t let currency fear obstruct trade deals Both parties in Washington have coalesced on a common demon. They call it “currency manipulation,” and they’re busy designing bad policies to combat it. Congressmen want the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major free-trade deal, to include provisions against such manipulation. And they want to use the trade-promotion authority bill – which would make it easier for presidents to negotiate trade agreements – to require such provisions in future deals. These are bad ideas. Freetrade agreements enhance our wealth and that of other countries, and they’re less likely to be concluded if they’re tied to arguments about currencies. The congressmen argue other countries, especially China, are intentionally cheapening their currencies against the dollar, boosting their exports to the U.S., and reducing imports of American goods. They say this is a form of protectionism that is costing American jobs. And they want to retaliate by jacking up taxes on imports from the offending countries. One weakness of this case is you can’t draw a straight line from another country’s weak
VIEWS Ramesh Ponnuru currency to its trade balance to harm to Americans, as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Derek Scissors has pointed out. Philip Levy, who studies global economics for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said currency manipulation can’t be compared to the classical case of protectionism: Either a country is levying tariffs on some American products or it isn’t. Currency manipulation, by contrast, is in the eye of the beholder. There is no objective measure of what value a currency should have. The idea that countervailing duties can offset currency manipulation also is flawed. Because economists disagree on whether currency manipulation is happening in particular instances, and to what degree it’s happening, it isn’t clear how high this duty should be set. Dan Ikenson, a trade-policy analyst at the Cato Institute, noted if the duty is set too high, the effect will be to distort trade rather than to eliminate a distortion. He
also said a duty can’t do anything by itself to boost American exports to the offending country. (It can help U.S. exporters only if the pain it inflicts induces the foreign government to change its conduct.) Other countries have accused the U.S. of being a currency manipulator because of its monetary policy. They argued the Federal Reserve’s bondbuying program, which was halted last year, made the dollar cheaper and gave U.S. exporters an unfair advantage. How should governments distinguish between legitimate monetary policy and illegitimate currency interventions? Rep. Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the House committee that deals with trade policy, has tried to outline some criteria for identifying manipulators that wouldn’t make the U.S. into one. One assumes, though, that economic officials in other countries aren’t uniformly fools and would realize these criteria are rigged. Why would they accept an agreement that lets the U.S. devalue its currency but exposes them to sanctions if they do the same? Weak as the case is for punishing alleged manipulators, it
commands strong support. In the last Congress, 230 representatives and 60 senators signed letters demanding action. It may be, then, there’s no way to get Congress to pass the trade-promotion authority bill or to agree to the Trans-Pacific Partnership without responding to this demand. In that case, Congress should move forward with those two bills, then introduce a separate one getting tough on whatever it decides to count as manipulation. A bill like that would include arbitrary criteria and do very little to boost employment. It might very well face challenges at the World Trade Organization. And implementing it would be a headache for the Commerce Department, since every company facing competition from a country deemed to be a manipulator would want to slap duties on their competitors. But at least we wouldn’t be making this nonsense a roadblock to reaching a deal that helps all of us. • Ramesh Ponnuru, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a senior editor for National Review and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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