The Columbia Missourian has an op-ed from the Show-Me Institute’s Joe Haslag and David Stokes. It addresses the question of what legislators should have done with the federal stimulus money coming to Missouri.
Haslag and Stokes recommend using the funds as an opportunity to reduce taxes, rather than increase spending. I enjoyed the piece — it makes a good case for something I briefly blogged about before.
Public education didn’t work for me.
The schools I attended were “great,” or so I’m told. My elementary and middle schools were heralded as model schools of the district and the region, and each produced impressive student results as measured by test scores. My high school was ranked by Newsweek as one of the top 300 schools in the country and produced respectable graduation and college enrollment rates, as well as enviable advanced placement scores.
I started out well enough, but by the time I entered high school, I was of that breed of students that elicit a teacher’s dread. “Over”-intelligent, undermotivated, rebellious, and insufferable. I never credited my progressively worsening underachievement with a specific flaw of the institutions; the system just wasn’t a good fit for me. In it, I felt restrained by the slow pace of the teaching, and repressed by rules that I saw as limiting creativity and independent learning. When I finally left during my junior year of high school to enroll in the University of Missouri’s excellent Center for Distance and Independent Study, my effort improved, “outside” learning accelerated, and I was able to grow — both intellectually and as a person — far more than I could have while “trapped in the system.”
My rambling boils down to a simple observation. School choice proponents and critics alike spend a great deal of research and time arguing about school choice and how it affects students in poorly performing schools. It’s important to remember that improving school choice will afford students from all types of educational backgrounds the opportunity to determine the type of institution that would serve as their very best fit. The society as a whole could be improved if we simply cared that students get the specific education they need for the specific growth they seek.
Over at Cato@Liberty earlier today, Andrew Coulson commented on how school choice is becoming an increasingly post-partisan issue, as politicians from both sides of the aisle increasingly realize that allowing parents to choose the best schools for their children results in both better opportunities and better actual educational outcomes:
Christopher J. Christie just decisively won New Jersey’s Republican gubernatorial primary, but had to veer away from his middle-of-the-road plan and venture into some traditionally conservative territory to do it, according to news accounts. Will that be a problem for him in the general election? Not necessarily. As NorthJersey.com’s Charles Stile observes, Christie’s ardent support for private school choice is not the polarizing stance it once was: these programs “once championed by conservative ideologues, are being embraced by urban Democrats.”
As we’ve been saying at the Center for Educational Freedom for some time now, the post-partisan age of school choice is well within sight, and draws closer every day. The last politicos to see that will find themselves on the wrong side of history, and the wrong side of voters in both parties.
We’ve seen this same phenomenon in Missouri, with prominent Democrats like Kevin Chavous (who is a partner at a law firm with offices in St. Louis and Kansas City) and Rodney Hubbard leading the charge to bring real educational choice to Missouri’s children.
Here’s an interview with Chavous, in which he explains how school choice became such an important issue for him while serving on the D.C. City Council:
And here’s part two:
Two more articles about what makes an earmark, what defines pork, and when are they justified, are in the Missouri media. Dave Catanese has an interview over at KY3 with Rep. Roy Blunt on the subject (link via Combest), and the Columbia Daily Tribune had a story a few days ago about the Jeff City legislative process used to spend the stimulus funds. I particularly recommend the interviews with two former Missouri legislators at the end of the KY3 story.
It is pretty clear that the stimulus money turned Jeff City’s budget process into something a little more like Washington’s. That was probably unavoidable. When you tell legislators to spend a lot of money quickly, it is not going to be pretty. I don’t mean this as a criticism of the people in Jeff City, but I certainly look forward to the return of the old ways next year, when the General Assembly doesn’t have hundreds of millions to throw around. We had considered in the past doing a report on pork spending by the General Assembly, but we never did, because, frankly, there is not a lot of pork or earmarking in Jeff City. The stimulus money changed that, but hopefully only for one year. Former Sen. Wayne Goode put it well:
“The way it works in Missouri, is that you always need a majority vote somewhere — either in committee or on the floor. It doesn’t really work like it does in Congress. The process is tighter, more structured on the state level.”
I am excited to see these discussions taking place in the public, media, and campaign spheres. I applaud everyone participating in the conversation about how our governments decide to spend what they spend. The budget process in Missouri needs to remain much stricter than it is in D.C., and more of our elected officials in both parties need to swear off both earmarks (which I am defining as spending items put into place after the committee process has ended) and pork (which I am defining as using general tax dollars to benefit very limited interests).
I’ve heard good arguments on both sides of the term limits debate. The opposing side contends that voters should be able to elect the candidate they prefer, even if that person has already served a few terms. Arbitrary limits could make politicians less responsive to voters if they know they won’t be up for reelection. And term limits haven’t transformed politics into the honest and impartial process some hoped they would.
People in favor of term limits counter that politics works to the advantage of incumbents. Term limits give other people a chance to be elected. Term limits also reduce the returns to bribery and corruption, because any politician whose vote is bought will be out of office in a few years. And term limits can keep politicians from getting too comfortable and insulated from the real world.
Those arguments all have some merit — unlike the arguments against term limits put forth in this article. Here’s why the Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives opposes term limits:
Over time, Richard said, lawmakers develop the institutional knowledge and personal fortitude to become powerful enough to stand up to the executive branch and the hordes of lobbyists who try to influence legislation.
The longer you wield political power, the more personal fortitude you develop? Tell that to Lord Acton!
Combest links to an encouraging article about the August sales tax holiday. I find it encouraging, because I don’t like the holiday, and the article reports that Cape Girardeau won’t participate this year.
Nobody likes paying sales taxes, so what’s the big deal if the tax is lifted for a couple days each year? The problem is, the tax isn’t really lifted. Directing consumers to out-of-the-way places or less convenient shopping dates is itself a kind of tax. The state doesn’t receive any sales tax revenue during the holiday, but consumers lose money and time. They pay a little more to buy gas and drive to a participating municipality. They stand in line a little longer in a store that’s extra-busy thanks to the arbitrary holiday.
I suppose you could say that the holiday is good because, although it’s wasteful, the money that people lose doesn’t go to the state. That’s a little less tax revenue for the state to use in expanding its activities. But, by that reasoning, you might as well throw your money out the window rather than give it to the government. A tax holiday amounts to the same thing.
Missouri is one of four holdouts from the coalition to draft national education standards.
I’m glad Missouri hasn’t signed on. Beware of states bearing standards. No state by itself has particularly good standards, so the chances are slim that all of them together will come up with something better. And bad standards could serve to solidify the near-monopolistic state of the education market. After standards are adopted, textbook companies that go along with them are rewarded and competing curricula are crowded out.
I fear my rejoicing may be short-lived, though, because when Arne Duncan includes the standards in his “Race to the Tax Dollars” — I mean, “Race to the Top” — scheme, Missouri will have little choice but to go along.
There is one reason for optimism: Standards on paper don’t necessarily affect what happens in a classroom. Within a single state, some districts teach beyond the standards, and others lag far behind. That pattern will continue to hold if standards are adopted at the national level.
For more on national standards, and to learn why they’re like unicorns, see Neal McCluskey’s post at Cato@Liberty.
This op-ed defends green jobs subsidies with the argument that the resulting jobs are sustainable.
In a sense, it’s right. Green jobs are sustainable — for the wrong reasons. Once the government starts subsidizing jobs, the people employed by the program are few and easy to organize. They lobby to maintain the subsidy. The people who lose out — taxpayers and consumers — are numerous and spread throughout the economy. They can’t band together to blot out each and every economic inefficiency. So the subsidies perpetuate themselves.
In a complex economy, expecting jobs to be sustainable is unrealistic. Compare the jobs that exist today to the jobs people did two or three hundred years ago. Some professions, like farming and medicine, are still around, although the technology used looks dramatically different. Many jobs have disappeared. You don’t see wainwrights listed in the phone book. (You don’t even see many phone book publishers anymore!) And it’s a good thing, because the decline of some professions made possible the ascent of other, more useful and profitable professions.
A good job is one that makes both the employer and employee better off. Businesses will create new and better jobs whenever opportunities arise, as long as they aren’t bogged down sustaining outdated jobs.
Florida has expanded its statewide scholarship program to provide school choice options for low-income children. That state’s governor, Charlie Crist, signed the bill today:
HB 453, renames the “Corporate Income Tax Credit Scholarship” the “Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program” and expands public school choice for parents and students. The bill expands the program to include insurance premium taxes as a contribution for funding Florida tax credit scholarships. A maximum of $118 million is available for low-income children to attend a school participating in the program. The legislation broadens the base of companies likely to participate and increases the likelihood that the maximum value of the tax credits will be used.
Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, had this to say:
Florida continues to be a big dog in school choice. Without a doubt they are proving that Milton Friedman’s vision of school choice is not a partisan issue and that it is in the best interest for everyone to have a system of education that works for all children.
Congratulations, Florida!
