Elected Officials Seem To Score Worse On Civics Test Than The Public

Could You Possibly Be Surprised?


Neatorama:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) administered a 33 question basic civics test to 2,500 randomly-selected people. Included were some who identified themselves as “elected officials”, although the story does not say how many elected officials there were, or what offices they held. The elected officials scored only 44% on the 33-question test, compared to a 49% average score for the rest of the respondents. One of the questions was “name two countries that were our enemies during World War II.”

Sixty-nine percent of respondents correctly identified Germany and Japan. Among the incorrect answers were Britain, China, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Spain.

Forty percent of respondents, meanwhile, incorrectly believed that the US president has the power to declare war, while 54 percent correctly answered that that power rests with Congress.

Asked about the electoral college, 20 percent of elected officials incorrectly said it was established to “supervise the first televised presidential debates.”

In fact, the system of choosing the US president via an indirect electoral college vote dates back some 220 years, to the US Constitution.

Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!

You can take the test yourself. Link -Thanks, AJ!

The Final Act Of Any Government Is To Loot The Nation: Part One

By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post
Monday, November 10, 2008; Page A01

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.

"Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no," said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. "They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks."

The entire story, in November 9, 2008's Washington Post