US Officials Flunk Test On Civic Knowledge 334
A test on civic knowledge given to elected officials proved that they are slightly less knowledgeable than the uninformed people who voted them into office. Elected officials scored a 44 percent while ordinary citizens managed an amazing 49 percent on the 33 questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. "It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned," said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI. The three branches of government aren't the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria?
Re:I'd care more (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where's the test? (Score:5, Informative)
Google is your friend....
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx [americanci...teracy.org]
Re:I'd care more (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2008/additional_finding.html [americanci...teracy.org]
It's not a great test (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, yeah, people should know the three branches of government and who has the power to declare war. On the other hand, a lot of questions and answers are very vague or misleading. Some examples:
Q: If taxes equal government spending, then:
A: tax per person equals government spending per person
This question tests your grasp of logic or algebra, not civics. For the record, another option is "government debt is zero." This is incorrect because it's the deficit that's zero, not the debt. It's designed to confuse. A knowledgeable person could get this question wrong merely by being careless.
Q: Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than governmentâ(TM)s centralized planning because:
A: the price system utilizes more local knowledge of means and ends
This is not the answer I would have given in a non-multiple choice test. I picked it because it was better than the other options.
Q: Free enterprise or capitalism exists insofar as:
A: individual citizens create, exchange, and control goods and resources
This is just phrased poorly. Why not be clear and ask "What is the definition of capitalism?"
Anyway, of course people should be doing better on this than they are. But it's still a crappy test. And for the record, the "officials" cited aren't exactly Barack Obama and John McCain; they're poll respondents who indicated that they have held elected office at one point. That could include your local dogcatcher, the chairman of your condo association, the head of your PTA, etc.
So don't be too alarmed.
Re:I'd care more (Score:2, Informative)
If taxes equal government spending, then:
A. government debt is zero
B. printing money no longer causes inflation
C. government is not helping anybody
D. tax per person equals government spending per person
E. tax loopholes and special-interest spending are absent
Umm, wtf? Where is None of the Above?
Re:Where's the test? (Score:3, Informative)
The key to that question would be to think about what he would have been allowed to do: three of the four choices require powers the President doesn't constitutionally possess.
Re:I'd care more (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Biden is a perfect example (Score:5, Informative)
Article I. Section 2:
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.
Article II merely describes how the Vice President is chosen and the conditions under which the VP may become President (later superseded by Amendment XXV).
Re:Are these civics? Or is this a push poll? (Score:1, Informative)
The other point was more a vague feeling I got that the questions were pushing an agenda.
Of course they are. The sponsoring organization is a right-wing policy paper mill. Here's some background on ISI.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intercollegiate_Studies_Institute [sourcewatch.org]
http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=177 [mediatransparency.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercollegiate_Studies_Institute [wikipedia.org]
http://www.mediatransparency.org/conservativephilanthropy.php?conservativePhilanthropyPageID=11 [mediatransparency.org]
Re:I'd care more (Score:3, Informative)
You should really look into #8 a little. It's really interesting.
There weren't any justices up for appointment at that time. Roosevelt and congress was going to create positions for more justices and stack them just so if all the regular justices said "unconstitutional", the other ones could override them. This is what eventually led to the expansion of the interstate commerce clause in which the government seems to use to extend it's reach further then any sane reading of the constitution allows.
As for the reasoning, those seem like the same reasons I would miss stuff in school, I would either forget who said what when under pressure or I would miss something small like the difference between debt and deficit. You see, #33 would have been correct if we were only talking about the budget for the year but it was looking at the overall operation of the government throughout the years. IE, no deficit for the year means no debt for the year, but it doesn't erase any previous debt carried over from the previous year.
Over all, I think we did a decent job on the tests.
Re:Are these civics? Or is this a push poll? (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, I got a chance to look at the ISI website, and it is, indeed, a politically conservative organization as I was able to guess from the content of their quiz. One portion of the site is hawking a book about "American Intellectual Conservatism" [isi.org] . Also looking at the mission statement [isi.org] is instructive.
It isn't clear to me whether this is an attempt at a sort of "push polling" as I was speculating or whether they're honestly trying to test what they see as the "important" part of civics, which is strongly colored by their world view. It's probably best to assume the latter. However, if they're not testing based on a wide consensus view of what's important in civics but rather based upon their particular ideological slant then they're not exactly testing peoples' knowledge of civics in a fair sense.
Re:Where's the test? (Score:2, Informative)
Debt is the accumulated deficit - it's the total amount we owe. Deficit is how much we added to the debt this year. If we could magically balance the budget this year, we'd still owe $10 trillion, we just wouldn't be adding more to it.
This distinction is important. When Bush took office in 2001, we had a $5 trillion debt, but were running a slight surplus. He talked like the government was taking in money and had nothing good to do with it. If you weren't paying close attention, it sounded like the $5 trillion debt had been eliminated, just because we weren't running a deficit that year. So he was able to pass massive tax cuts and spending increases, and now we've doubled the national debt.
Re:Obama voters fail basic knowledge test too (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/interview-with-john-ziegler-on-zogby.html [fivethirtyeight.com]
Re:I'd care more (Score:4, Informative)
Reread what I said. The word you're looking for is capita, not person. Those do NOT mean the same thing in proper English. Doing something per person means that you did something for each literal human being. Doing something per capita means that you did on average something per person.
The term "capita" refers to an equivalence class of population units in which all people are treated as being equivalent even if the literal individuals that make up the population are not equivalent. Therefore, when you say we spend $1,000 per capita, it means you spend $1,000 on average per person.
By contrast, the term "person" refers to a flesh and blood object. When you say we spend $1,000 per person, you might stretch that terminology to mean that you spent $1,000 per capita. However, a precise interpretation of that phrase is that you spent exactly $1,000 on each person. I'm sure you can understand that those two statements are completely different in their meaning.
Here's an example. I encounter ten homeless people on the side of the road asking for money. If I give $1,000 to one person and nothing else to the other nine people standing there, I gave out $100 per capita within that population of ten people. I'm sure you won't argue that I gave out $100 per person, however. The people who got nothing would beg to disagree with you, as they did not get $100. Okay, after they beat up the tenth guy, they might, but....
The problem is that using the phrase "per person" is ambiguous. It can be interpreted in two different ways---the way you interpreted that statement (as a sloppy way of saying "per capita") and the way I interpreted it (as a logical fallacy that if you spent population * k dollars on a group, this implies you spent k dollars on each member of that group).
Saying "per capita", by contrast, is deliberately unambiguous and can only mean "per average person". There's a reason that people talking about financial matters always say "per capita" and not "per person". To people who are used to precise meanings of terminology like "person" versus "capita", the meaning of those two phrases is completely different. I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people missed that question because by a literal interpretation of the phrase "per person", the "correct" answer is incorrect.
Worse, depending on how you interpret the question, answer A. can also be correct. The question did not specify a time period. If you define the time period of the question to be from the creation of the government up until the present, and if the amount of income equals the amount of money spent during that time period, the debt is provably zero. So by one interpretation, D. is correct, by another interpretation, A. is correct, and by a third interpretation, neither is correct....
See why I object to this question now? Writing good, unambiguous test questions is really hard. This test was pretty well written for the most part, but that question was a real stinker. :-)
Only one free-market question on whole test (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong answers to questions on central planning vs. free markets, however, are due to a devotion to a philosophy that is just wrong.
There was only one question on the whole test that solicited an answer that favored free markets over central planning. There was another question that appeared to favor government action to solve the "free rider" or "tragedy of the commons" problem that is commonly cited as a defect of unregulated free enterprise. And there was another question that was backed up by Keynesian Theory of how a government should respond to an economic recession.
The ISI is an organization that many would characterize as "right wing." I see the question about the advantages of free enterprise as "getting their licks in." But if one has a left-wing world view, there might be only one question on the whole test one would get wrong.
I would think that someone with a "liberal", "progressive", or "left-wing" world view would be at an advantage to get the question about War Powers correct -- yes, presidents have been sending our soldiers all over the place, but that Congress has not declared war on anybody since 1941 is a major talking point in such circles.