It’s a bit ironic that President Obama would criticize “a comfort with the status quo” in his highly anticipated education speech at the National Urban League. The Obama education agenda, after all, has continued to reward those with a vested interest in the status quo. Case in point: Teachers’ unions have been allowed to set the high-water mark for reform in Race to the Top, the president’s $4.35 billion grant program. Over the past half century, the unions have been at the forefront of perpetuating the status quo in education…
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The Iranian media is attacking Snopes.com for not including Israel’s role in the 9-11 attacks. The Tehran Times reported: ShareSnopes.com, officially known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, has since its humble inception in 1995 come to be regarded as one of the most trusted debunkers of conspiracy theories on the internet. Described by one of its many fans — it apparently has over 6 million visitors per month — as “the grand-daddy of all fact-checking sites,” Snopes is downright cavalier, however, in its attitude to facts…
Since we’re on the subject, Chris Caldwell has a really excellent , easily digestible, piece on Raghuram Rajan take on the financial crisis. I think I need to get the book. A long excerpt: Most notably, in the course of this book Rajan offers a bold and convincing diagnosis of how a screw-up in the regulation of poor people’s mortgages in one country has brought the world to the brink of economic disaster, where it teeters still. He goes beyond the proximate causes of the problem—the subprimes and derivatives and trade imbalances and the like. The ultimate cause, Rajan convincingly argues, is a …
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I first noted the proliferation of porkulus-Democrat campaign road signs last May (see here and here ). ABC News ran a story yesterday (now headlined at Drudge) on the nationwide phenomenon. Republicans are calling attention to politically-driven “guidances” about the sign designs: Congressman Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter to Earl Devaney…
The second annual SAVE Award, a contest in which federal employees propose ideas about how to save taxpayers’ money, will accept submissions through July 22. According to the Washington Post , the winner will earn a meeting with President Obama, and his or her proposal will be included in the FY2012 budget proposal. According to the Post : Last year’s winning idea came from Nancy Fichtner, a Department of Veterans Affairs employee from Colorado who suggested that VA medical centers should permit patients to take home extra bandages and medication …
The prospect of a “lost decade” for the U.S. economy seems to be getting closer and closer to reality based on the June 2010 employment numbers released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall employment was down 225,000 as census activity fell. While private employment crept forward, adding 83,000 jobs in June, this is well below what would be expected or needed for a robust recovery. Fortunately, positive jobs numbers, small increases in home prices, and modest increased construction activity in housing suggest the economy has bottomed out. Unemployment rates also dipped to 9.5 percent from 9.7 percent in May. But high unemployment rates, particularly for teenagers …
(Ilya Somin) In Kaur v. New York Urban Development Corporation , its recent decision upholding the condemnation of property for transfer to Columbia University, the New York Court of Appeals claimed that the use of eminent domain to transfer land to a private university is more defensible than its use to transfer land to commercial corporations, as in the Atlantic Yards case : Unlike the [New Jersey] Nets basketball franchise [one of the key beneficiaries of the Atlantic Yards takings], Columbia University, though private, …
This will come as no surprise to those of us who have read the tremendous work of public choice economists, such as Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock: Like the rest of us, politicians are self-interested. The Washington Post has data that confirms that theory: On the House Agriculture Committee, which holds sway over farm policies and subsidies, members had farming and agribusiness investments worth five times on average the amount held by other colleagues in the House. Many of the committee members’ holdings were in family farms. Nothing prevents those members from also receiving farm subsidies, and in the past, some …
(Ilya Somin) The New York Court of Appeals (which, despite the misleading name, is New York’s state supreme court), recently held oral arguments in Kaur v. New York Urban Development Corporation , the case in which New York City is trying to condemn a large amount of property in the Manhattanville neighborhood in order to transfer it to Columbia University. The Columbia Spectator has an interesting summary of the oral argument here . Columbia and the government’s Urban Development Corporation have are …
The Washington Post this week published a pair of articles promoting and praising the Washington , D.C. , government for increasing the cost of its “free” condom program and making it easier for kids to get the prophylactics. The city is reportedly upgrading from Durex brand condoms to the more widely advertised Trojan brand. The decision was based on name recognition, not evidence that Trojans are better at preventing pregnancy or protecting against sexually transmitted diseases. The city will also start offering Trojan’s larger size condom…
