What makes the “major” conferences think they’re entitled to as many as nine berths in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament?
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We’re a little over a week away from NCAA hoops bracket time, and I’m in my usual Scroogey mood. I’ll probably tick some people off with this post. And though my complaints primarily relate to the men’s tournament, I suspect the women’s tournament selection process has the same problems.

Simply put, I’m tired of teams with mediocre records getting into the NCAA tournament because “they’re in a strong conference,” or “they had a good record in their last 10 games,” “They played a tough schedule, or “Wow, they stunk up the court most of the time, but they beat Duke once.” Bah humbug.

So, I looked over the conference standings. The radio talkers think The Big East Conference may get 7, 8, or even 9 slots in the NCAA tournament. That would mean letting so-sos like Seton Hall (18-10 overall, 9-7 conference before Saturday’s games), Syracuse (19-10, 7-8), and Cincinnati (18-11, 7-8) into The Dance. Then there are the usual arguments that at least 5 slots should go to the Southeastern, Big 10, Big 12, Atlantic Coast, and Pac-10 Conferences.

Stop it.

Small conferences that are limited to one entrant are getting the shaft. Teams that have no business being there, and actually should be ashamed of going, are being let in.

I noticed that there are 31 conferences and about 10 independents. AHA! Problem solved.

Each conference gets two entrants, PERIOD. The first entrant is the conference winner. The second is either the conference runner-up or the winner of the conference post-season tournament, if the tournament winner didn’t finish first or second during the regular season.

And don’t try to counter with the NC State or Villanova stories back in the 1980s. I don’t care. All those teams showed is that they could win 6 games in a row after sorry seasons. So?

If you want to root for underdog dark horses, they should at least have accomplished something like winning a conference tournament first.

Putting in two teams from each conference gives you 62, plus the independents with the best two records gives you 64. Presto. Done. Totally objective. No mystery. Also, we “miss out” on Selection Sunday, and the inevitable (usually justified) complaints from small-conference teams with great records that they were slighted.

I know this will NEVER happen because the big conferences hold the power. But the current setup, which has allowed teams with 10 or more losses during the year and poor conference tournament performances to make totally bogus claims at being “national champions,” caused my level of interest in the whole affair to drop steeply long ago.

Next on tap, peace in The Middle East.

QUESTION: Why would Californians even think about voting in a tax increase that will drive more rich people from their state?

That’s what they may do in early June (bolds are mine):

Meathead Economics
Hollywood liberals drive productive Californians to leave the state.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006 12:01 a.m.

It takes hard work to drive anyone away from California’s sunshine and scenic vistas, but politicians in Sacramento have been up to the task.

The latest Census Bureau data indicate that, in 2005, 239,416 more native-born Americans left the state than moved in. California is also on pace to lose domestic population (not counting immigrants) this year. The outmigration is such that the cost to rent a U-Haul trailer to move from Los Angeles to Boise, Idaho, is $2,090–or some eight times more than the cost of moving in the opposite direction.

What’s gone wrong? A big part of the story is a tax and regulatory culture that treats the most productive businesses and workers as if they were ATMs. The cost to businesses of complying with California’s rules, regulations and paperwork is more than twice as high as in other Western states.

But the worst growth killer may well be California’s tax system. The business tax rate of 8.8% is the highest in the West, and its steeply “progressive” personal income tax has an effective top marginal rate of 10.3%, or second highest in the nation. CalTax, the state’s taxpayer advocacy group, reports that the richest 10% of earners pay almost 75% of the entire income-tax revenue in the state, and most of these are small-business owners, i.e., the people who create jobs.

And things may soon get worse, thanks to Rob Reiner, who played the liberal “Meathead” on the “All in the Family” sitcom in the 1970s and now plays the same part in real life. He and his rich Hollywood friends have put an initiative on the state’s June ballot that would add a 1.7-percentage-point income-tax surcharge on “millionaires” with income over $400,000, with the proceeds earmarked for universal pre-school.

This isn’t Mr. Reiner’s first foray into confiscatory tax politics. Last year he sponsored a ballot initiative narrowly approved by voters that imposed a percentage-point income-tax surcharge (to the current 10.3%) to pay for government mental-health subsidies. And in the late 1990s he helped to pass an initiative to raise the state’s tobacco tax by 50 cents a pack to pay for children’s health care.

All of this has contributed to the trend of wealthy taxpayers disappearing from the state. State finance office data indicate that the number of Californians reporting million-dollar incomes fell to 25,000 in 2003 from 44,000 in 2000. That decline has cost the state $9 billion a year in uncollected tax revenues. The dot-com implosion of 2000 and 2001 no doubt wiped out many paper millionaires, but migration out of the state to escape its hefty tax premium has also played a role. Republican Assemblyman Ray Haynes notes that the average high-income individual can buy a newly built house in neighboring Nevada and pay for it just from the money saved in a year of not paying California taxes.

Politicians and tax-hikers refuse to believe that many people “vote with their feet” when conditions become intolerable relative to conditions elsewhere, and that those who do tend to be the ones the taxers wish would stay put. See the Previous Posts lists below for more discussion of people who vote with their feet, and why.
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Previous “Voting with Their Feet” Posts:
- Part 1: What Thanksgiving Is Partially About
- Part 2: It’s the Taxes, Stupid
- Part 3: Walking Away from Academic Excellence
- Part 4: Leaving Cincinnati (and Other Ohio Cities)
- Part 5: Willisms Looks at State Migration Patterns
- Part 6: Losing the Very Rich
- Redux: Leaving High-Tax States for Low-Tax States

“These things” are:

• “Economic activity grew in the manufacturing sector for the 33rd consecutive month.” — ISM Report on Business, March 2006 for February 2006 Business, Page 1 (PDF File). Referring back to and building on this BizzyBlog post from August 2005, the 33-month streak is now the highest in almost 17 years, since a three-year streak ended in April 1989.
• “Non-manufacturing business activity increased for the 35th consecutive month.” — Same report, same page, near the bottom. The non-manufacturing sector includes mining, construction, wholesale, retail, and all services.

For these two measurements to keep chugging along despite Katrina, despite the mediocre revised 4th quarter GDP growth of only 1.6%, and despite some of the horrid things happening in the automotive and airline sectors, is pretty remarkable.

Without their help, Tom Ackerman surely would have died:

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