There is no disputing that the Washington, D.C., school system is one of the worst in the nation. Although D.C. schools spend nearly $30,000 per student each year, more than a third of students fail to graduate. In a test to determine whether high-school students were college ready, only 10 percent of D.C. students met proficiency standards in math, and just a quarter met the reading standards. The story is even worse for black students; only 4 percent met the math standards.
In response, President Bush established the Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2004. The program provides scholarships (vouchers) that low-income D.C. families can use to send their children to private schools in the District, including religiously affiliated schools. The scholarships are targeted to those students most in need. The average household income for families participating in the program is under $21,000. More than 83 percent of those families are African-American, and another 14 percent are Hispanic/Latino.
But despite a record of success, the omnibus budget deal failed to reauthorize the program beyond this year. President Obama, having defunded the program once, is expected to oppose reauthorization once again. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is unalterably opposed to the program. Why do so many Democrats seem to favor the teachers’ union over poor minority students?
In order to preserve the program for the 2016–17 school year, Congress will have to either push through a stand-alone funding bill in the face of ferocious opposition from Democratic lawmakers and the teachers’ unions, or hope to include the funding in some future budget deal. It’s really a simple choice: poor, minority children, or wealthy, powerful unions. Where do we stand?
Every child deserves the chance at a great education and the American dream. Unfortunately, decades of student achievement data reveal that the increasingly costly U.S. district school system does not provide an excellent education for all students.
In a new study, Cato scholar Jason Bedrick, with coauthors Jonathan Butcher and Clint Bolick, explains how funding Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) through tax credits is a constitutionally sound method of providing every child with the chance at an excellent education.
In their new policy analysis, Taking Credit for Education, Jason Bedrick, Butcher, and Bolick contend that Education Savings Accounts (ESAs)—when properly designed and regulated through tax credits—can empower families with more educational options.
In order to make ESAs available to children from diverse backgrounds, the authors lay out a series of policy recommendations for legislators that would allow flexible spending while minimizing spending fraud and mitigating constitutional concerns that may arise. These Education Savings Accounts will enhance accountability and free taxpayers from being forced into paying for ideas they oppose by providing funds through voluntary tax-credit contributions.
States such as Arizona, Florida, and New Hampshire have experiences with both privately and publicly managed ESAs and tax-credit scholarships that support the use of ESAs funded through tax credits. Policymakers can combine models from these three states to create tax-credit funded educational savings accounts. ESAs funded by charitable donations that are eligible for tax-credits would blend tax-credit scholarships and flexible spending accounts, increasing liberty for both families and scholarship organizations. For example, scholarship organizations can serve as educational advisers to parents and oversee ESAs, while parents have more spending flexibility with the restricted-use debit cards that accompany these accounts.
Although completely eliminating fraud is impossible for any program, private or public, policymakers can take reasonable measures to minimize fraud without unnecessarily burdening ESA families or education providers. Currently, some programs use a reimbursement method to avoid the misuse of funds, but this can be troublesome for families who don’t have money to use upfront. Tax-credit funded ESAs would mitigate this problem by letting parents access ESA funds through a debit card that could be restricted by vendor or by product or service.
While the constitutionality of school choice has been affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Blaine amendments exist in about 36 state constitutions that generally restrict the use of public funds for religious or sectarian schools. However, scholarship tax credit laws have a perfect record in courts since Blaine amendments usually apply to appropriations of public funds, and tax-credit eligible donations are private funds. Policymakers can also design legislation for these savings accounts in ways that can increase the likelihood of withstanding constitutional scrutiny. For example, lawmakers can fund ESAs through tax credits rather than legislative appropriations, thus making it neither an appropriation, nor a form of aid limited only to religious or private schools.
“Education savings accounts empower families to customize their children’s education,“ the authors conclude. "They are an improvement on traditional school-choice programs because they enhance the freedom of parents to purchase a wide variety of educational products and services and save for educational expenses in future years, including college.”
“Whatever Congress eventually decides to do in the way of welfare reform, I hope that you will recognize the disastrous consequences of our current welfare system. The status quo is plainly and simply unacceptable. The relationship between our failed social welfare system and juvenile violence and crime is one more urgent reason for reform.”
“The Human Freedom Index presents the state of human freedom in the world based on a broad measure that encompasses personal, civil, and economic freedom. Human freedom is a social concept that recognizes the dignity of individuals and is defined here as negative liberty or the absence of coercive constraint. Because freedom is inherently valuable and plays a role in human progress, it is worth measuring carefully. The Human Freedom Index is a resource that can help to more objectively observe relationships between freedom and other social and economic phenomena, as well as the ways in which the various dimensions of freedom interact with one another.”
“Day after day, year after year, the hole that climate scientists have buried themselves in gets deeper and deeper. The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science.”
“The lessons of Prohibition remain important today. They apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to drastically reduce access to alcohol and tobacco and to such issues as censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion, and gambling.”
“The five most miserable countries in the world at the end of 2014 are, in order: Venezuela, Argentina, Syria, Ukraine, and Iran. In 2014, Argentina and Ukraine moved into the top five, displacing Sudan and Sao Tome and Principe.The five least miserable are Brunei, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, and Japan. The United States ranks 95th, which makes it the 14th least miserable nation of the 108 countries on the table.”
“It would be a national shame if, in the name of security, we closed the door to immigrants who come here to work, save and build a better life for themselves and their families. Immigrants come here to live the American Dream; terrorists come to destroy it.”
“Thanks to the rising burden of taxes, the bonus income actually received from working longer hours is much less than one might think. That is because every extra hour worked is taxed at the worker’s highest marginal tax rate. In some cases, overtime work may even push the worker into a higher tax bracket.”
“When one looks at the facts about gun control, it’s easy to see why the anti-gun lobby relies on emotion rather than logic to make its case.Think you know the facts about gun control? If your only source of information is the mainstream media, what you think you know may not be correct.”
“Of the 859,629 refugees admitted from 2001 onwards, only three have been convicted of planning terrorist attacks on targets outside of the United States, and none was successfully carried out. That is one terrorism-planning conviction for every 286,543 refugees that have been admitted. To put that in perspective, about 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014. The terrorist threat from Syrian refugees in the United States is hyperbolically over-exaggerated and we have very little to fear from them because the refugee vetting system is so thorough.”
“Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.”
The Millennial Generation, those roughly 87 million adult men and women born between 1980 and 1997, now represent one quarter of the U.S. population.
Millennials did not experience the Cold War or the Reagan Presidency as adults, and a significant part of the generation cannot remember a time before cell phones or the Internet. It’s unsurprising then, that Millennials also have distinct attitudes toward a range of important foreign policy issues.
In a new study, Cato scholar A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner suggest that the rise of the Millennial Generation portends significant changes in public expectations and increased support for a more restrained grand strategy.
For years, government has sought to reduce consumption of whole (full-fat) milk. Now that campaign is looking like an error. Cato scholars David Boaz and Walter Olson discuss this issue in-depth.
If you could wave a magic wand and make one or two policy or institutional changes to brighten the U.S. economy’s long-term growth prospects, what would you change and why?
The motivation for asking that question should be clear enough to anyone who has been following the dreary economic news of the past few years. Since the Great Recession of 2008–2009, the U.S. economy has experienced the most stubbornly disappointing expansion since World War II.
So, at a December 2014 conference on the future of U.S. economic growth, Brink Lindsey, Vice President for Research at the Cato Institute, asked 51 thought leaders across the political spectrum to share their best ideas for saving our economy.
Their answers—ranging from encouraging entrepreneurship to liberalizing land use restrictions to radically simplifying our legal code—are bound together in Reviving Economic Growth, a new digital-only collection of essays.
Reviving Economic Growth is a brainstorming session from an exceptional—and eclectic— group of contributors, offering a wide-ranging exploration of policy options from an eclectic group of contributors.
By bringing together professionals one doesn’t often see in the same publication, the goal is to encourage fresh thinking about the daunting challenges facing the U.S. economy—and, with luck, to uncover surprising areas of agreement that can pave the way to constructive change.
As Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek have stressed, freedom of exchange and market coordination provide the fuel for economic progress.
Unfortunately, the 2015 Economic Freedom of the World report demonstrates that, while global economic freedom increased slightly, the United States, long considered the standard bearer for economic freedom among large industrial nations, has fallen precipitously—from second in 2000 to 8th in 2005 to 16th in this year’s report.
The U.S. has seen its economic freedom score plummet in recent years due to the expansion of the regulatory state, the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the erosion of property rights due to greater use of eminent domain.
“Given the strong link between economic freedom and improvements in the broad range of human well-being, the United States’ long-term decline is particularly worrisome and could cut its historic growth rate in half,” said Ian Vasquez, Director of the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute.
Here’s how the U.S. scored in key components of economic freedom (from 0 to 10 where a higher value indicates a higher level of economic freedom):
Size of Government: changed to 6.61 from 6.96 in last year’s report, falling to a rank of 74 from 62
Legal System and Security of Property Rights: changed to 6.97 from 7.02, falling to a rank of 29 from 28
Access to Sound Money: changed to 9.42 from 9.32, rising to a rank of 38 from 41
Freedom to Trade Internationally: changed to 7.36 from 7.70, falling to a rank of 74 from 40
Regulation of Credit, Labor and Business: changed to 8.27 from 8.06, rising to a rank of 13 from 21
Hong Kong topped this year’s ranking once again, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Other major countries’ rankings include Canada (9), the United Kingdom (10), Japan (26), Russia (99), China (111), and India (114).
Venezuela held on to the lowest ranking out of 157 countries.
Research shows people living in countries with high levels of economic freedom enjoy greater prosperity, more political and civil liberties, and longer life spans. The cornerstones of economic freedom include personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and security of private property.
“Economic freedom is unambiguously good for the poor, who enjoy significantly higher incomes in the most economically free countries compared to less free nations,” said Vasquez.
The annual Economic Freedom of the World report is produced by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, in cooperation with the Cato Institute, and the Economic Freedom Network, a group of independent research and educational institutes in nearly 90 nations and territories worldwide.
The report is the world’s premier measurement of economic freedom, using 42 distinct variables to create an index ranking countries around the world based on policies that encourage economic freedom. Economic freedom is measured in five different areas: (1) size of government, (2) legal system and security of property rights, (3) access to sound money, (4) freedom to trade internationally, and (5) regulation of credit, labor, and business.
Yesterday, Cato’s Center for the Study of Science hosted a Cato Connects with Trevor Butterworth, Director of Sense About Science USA, and editor for STATS.org. Butterworth discussed the relationship of government and science.
Participants were encouraged to tweet questions about the relationship between science and public policy, as well as how research on GMOs, medicines, recreational drugs, the environment, and nutrition affects the laws regulating them.
“Science is not always sound and…evidence is often missing — or misinterpreted or manipulated. The opportunities for making poor policy decisions — or cherrypicking the data to fit a belief or policy objective — are enormous,” says Butterworth. “We can do better. And we should do better, given that evolutionary and even revolutionary developments in technology, statistics, and science can help us chart a course to more reliable knowledge.”
It’s fire season, which means we are yet again treated to stories about how the Forest Service is running out of money and about how it all must be due to climate change. Both of these claims overlook fundamental points about fire policy and firefighting.
As of August 16, the BLM had spent $2.2 million controlling the 88,000-acre Cornet Fire on the Vale District in Oregon. The Forest Service has spent two-and-one-half times that much on a fire that was just 515 acres in size.
Forest Service firefighting costs have risen rapidly mainly because they can: the agency has a virtual blank check to spend on fire.
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