Companies whose executives visited the White House during the Obama administration had their stock prices rise more than normal after the meetings, but underperformed after Donald Trump won the election, a new paper by researchers at the University of Illinois finds.
The finance professors, Jeffrey Brown and Jiekun Huang, published their findings in a working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research and titled "All the President's Friends: Political Access and Firm Value."
Federalism refers to a balance of power between a central government and the various states or provinces in a country, each component of government having powers and responsibilities of its own. Even though, as we all know, we have three levels of government in the USA — federal, state, and local, each with the power to tax and to make laws of its own — federalism in this country refers not to a balance between the federal government and local units (or local and state units) but only to a balance between the federal government and state governments. Constitutionally, local government is under state government. So, an increase in state control of something may mean a decrease in local control — whether or not federal control has seemingly decreased. And local taxpayers seem to have little control of that "something" — their own public schools — under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), first authorized in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty."
Remarkably, the claim by Every Student Succeeds Act advocates such as Senator Lamar Alexander — that it gives back some authority to both state and local governments at the same time it reduces federal control of local schools — has not been recognized as the fraudulent claim it is. ESSA has not increased local control of any policies governing a local district's public schools; nor has it increased the authority of a governor or state legislature, either. Instead, ESSA has puffed up the role of state departments of education (whose staff is mainly appointed) and, to a lesser extent, the (mostly appointed) boards of education typically in charge of them, with members who tend to follow the directives they have been given if they want to keep their seats. State board members are usually not paid for the little they actually do; their main purpose today is not to ask questions but to approve the policies desired by the U.S. Department of Education. (That was the case under Arne Duncan and John King Jr., the education secretaries appointed by President Barack Obama, and it's the case now under Trump appointee Betsy DeVos, who oversees many Duncan and King appointees embedded in the department.) That's true even when federal education policies have demonstrably failed to produce "equal outcomes" across different student groups and seem, instead, to be widening the gaps. Equal outcomes, moreover, was not the goal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, even though closing "gaps" is the explicit goal today of the more recent Every Student Succeeds Act.
