A recent poll finds that 18-29 year-olds want a bigger government with more services.

The Democracy Corps poll was conducted May 29 - June 19 and included 1017 18-29 year-old respondents.

Generally speaking, would you rather have a bigger government providing more services or a smaller government that provides fewer services?

Bigger government, strongly .................... 40
Bigger government, not so strongly........... 28
Smaller government, not so strongly......... 12
Smaller government, strongly................... 16
(Don't know/refused) ................................ 4
Total Bigger government.......................... 68
Total Smaller government ........................ 28

(via Atrios)

After some delay, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is now marking up the SCHIP reauthorization and expansion. Some resources on the bill:

• A summary of the chairman's mark
• A section-by-section analysis
• CBO's preliminary score
• Families USA's chart that compares the House bill with the Senate version.

Want more? Well, check out this American Prospect article, which says the House bill will insure 1 million more kids than the House version. CBO estimates that there are 5.4 million kids who are eligible for SCHIP but aren't on the program. The House bill would therefore provide funding for nearly all of them.

President Bush, as you probably know, says he's gonna veto any SCHIP expansion, the principle rationale being that government doesn't belong in health care.

My hunch is that this won't carry the day. SCHIP's focus on kids is its trump card. But Bush is right that SCHIP is only the beginning of the policy fight over health care, and when the focus isn't on kids or some other sympathetic demographic group, the arguments being made today could win out by tapping into public distrust of government, which the Bush administration has deepened.

The good news is that recent events have demonstrated the superiority of government-sponsored health insurance and government-provided health care, properly administered. Once neglected, hospitals in the care of the Veteran's Administration have been transformed into some of the best examples of how to efficiently deliver health care. Medicare has experimented with privatization in insurance and prescription drugs- both of which have turned out to be more expensive than if government just did it itself.

And the positive conservative agenda -give everyone tax breaks, privatize government and let the market do its thing- really has no prospect of success. More market forces aren't what's needed. Market forces create perverse incentives and do not encourage the information distribution needed for effective market competition and long-term care. The market prices goods arbitrarily. It encourages actors to provide health insurance to the healthy but not the sick. In other words, the market isn't the solution- it's the problem.

I don't expect SCHIP supporters to risk political capital and make this argument just yet, especially with an expansion being so likely. But at some point they'll probably have to show some leadership and challenge the dominant narrative about government and the market if they want to get anything done.

Dianne Ravitch, an NYU education professor, has an interesting article summing up the state of public education policy. She makes the argument that market-oriented reforms of the school system, like charter schools and vouchers, are no magic bullet.

The promise of charters was that the bad ones would be weeded out by public officials and the marketplace—since parents presumably would avoid sending their children to the poor performers. Unfortunately, there has not been enough weeding. Low-performing charter schools survive, and the students who attend them are getting cheated. For whatever reason, parents in the failing charter schools do not necessarily move out, either because they like the community or a teacher or something else (the same happens in low-performing regular public schools). The persistence of low-performing charter schools is a market failure.

For charter schools to be part of the solution, public officials must be far more vigilant in approving charter applications and much faster to shut down charter operators that cannot meet their performance goals. Meanwhile, regular public schools have shown little interest in replicating any of the successful models that have been piloted in charter schools. For example, while most people admire the KIPP schools, there are few if any public schools that are adopting the KIPP model; similarly, the Achievement First schools in Connecticut have been extraordinarily successful, but few public schools emulate them.

The experience with charters, at least as most of them are now structured, suggests that the U.S. public school system is not really comparable to a marketplace. It would be a disaster for public education if all the motivated children in a district went to charter schools and the unmotivated, underachieving students went to district schools.

In the end, Ravitch suggests that schools do the obvious and establish a national core curriculum- you know, mandate that all kids learn stuff and then test them to make sure they do. What hasn't done that? Market forces. What can do that? A government mandate.

Competition and the market has not saved us, not in education, public service provision or in health care. Once this country gets past its hang ups about government, and its starry-eyed view of the market, then maybe we can start making policy that works.

Regular readers of this blog may recall a time when I really didn't like GAO chief David M. Walker. He has a strange understanding of the long-term fiscal challenge. His speeches on the matter caused me to call him a nutcase.

Well, the world isn't always as simple as one would like it to be. On Tuesday, Walker gave eminently sane testimony on top problems in federal contracting and called for a re-examination of the proper role of contractors in providing government services.

In general, I believe there is a need to focus greater attention on what type of functions and activities should be contracted out and which ones should not, to review and reconsider the current independence and conflict-of-interest rules relating to contractors, and to identify the factors that prompt the government to use contractors in circumstances where the proper choice might be the use of civil servants or military personnel.

Indeed. Under what circumstances are government workers more efficient than contractors, and vice-versa? What kinds of decisions should only government workers make? What institutions do we need to ensure that the public gets the best deal possible?

I don't know if any one person has the answers, but experience and experimenting in government contracting at the local and federal level makes it possible to have a robust conversation. That needs to happen soon, and as far as I know, it hasn't.

Via Stephen Barr's Federal Diary.

Which contractors have racked up the most expensive misconduct charges since 1995? The answer's at Project On Government Oversight's federal contractor misconduct database, which has just been updated.

Some hints: Halliburton isn't even in the top 10. And two of the top three are household names.

OK -- quick: how many folks are serving Uncle Sam in Iraq right now? 150,000? 200,000? Try 340,000.

How's that? Per the Los Angeles Times:

More than 180,000 civilians -- including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis -- are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Including the recent troop surge, 160,000 troops and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.

The actual number of contractors might be higher -- private security contractors, hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the Times survey.

By a 15-14 vote, the Senate Appropriations Committee this week OK'ed the $21.8 billion Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill, H.R. 2829, over GOP complaints that it would essentially cut the IRS private debt collection program.

The bill provides a mere $1 million for the program for FY 2008 -- down by about $250 million from FY 2007. Democrats question the program's efficacy and cost, and cite concerns about the potential for abusive practices stemming from bounty-hunters' private possession of citizens' financial information.

If adopted in its current form by the Senate, the bill would go to conference, where this provision would need to be worked out. Last month, this provision was removed from the House bill on procedural grounds.

The Senate Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee, a part of the Senate Appropriations Committee, passed its version of the FY 2008 Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill (HR 2829) by a party-line vote of 5 to 4.

If you're still with me, this bill would do a couple important things. First, it limits funding for the IRS private debt collection program, but not so much that it would violate congressional procedures. A similar version of this limitation was struck from the House's bill on procedural grounds (See this Watcher article for more) . The Senate would not eliminate the program, presumably, but it could contain it so that it probably won't do much more damage.

Second, it funds IRS operations at $11.1 billion, which is significantly higher level than last year, but lower than the $11.6 billion that the IRS Oversight Board recommended. Full funding of the IRS could reduce the tax gap, which would free up more revenue for program expansions and make the tax code more fair and progressive.

And third, it would defund the part of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) that's in the executive branch. As you may recall, Vice President Cheney has been saying he's not really in the executive branch, and therefore isn't subject to an executive order that establishes some oversight over the OVP when it classifies information. This measure may make the OVP's operations more transparent to the public, and help Congress hold the Vice President accountable if he or anyone else in his office, besides Scooter Libby, has done anything wrong.

Of course, this is only the subcommittee- the bill has a ways to go. But it's off to a pretty good start.