by Colleen Hroncich, Cato at FreedomDecember 6, 2024.
Extract:
Conservative Christians are probably not generally seen as pioneers, but they were at the forefront of homeschooling in the 1960s and 1970s. So it’s not surprising that homeschool curricula and resources are often Christian in nature. When Blair Lee, a college professor with a background in chemistry and biology, began homeschooling her son in the early 2000s, she had difficulty finding quality secular science resources. What started as an attempt to fill that gap turned out to be Secular Eclectic Academic (SEA) Homeschooling.
“Homeschooling wasn’t really on my radar,” Blair says. “My son was a very early reader. No Child Left Behind left all those advanced children behind. His teacher encouraged me to make the decision to homeschool. She told me that with the current system my child would get a lot of test prep, and that they would always want to test him because he would make the school look good. But he wouldn’t get work that would challenge him and help him grow. The teacher predicted that he would eventually wonder why he was trying so hard. He would still be ‘advanced’, but he would be performing far below his capabilities. Blair listened to the teacher and homeschooled her son from first grade through high school.
DRH Comment: The way the teacher treated the child was terrible. I don’t necessarily blame the teacher; it was the higher ups in the government who messed up. It reminds me of what was one of the last two straws that motivated us to take our daughter out of government school in Pacific Grove at the end of 4 years.e figure. We went to the parents’ evening and said to the teacher, “Our daughter gets all A’s, but we wonder what an A means.” The teacher replied, “Oh, Karen is one of the ones I don’t have to worry about.” In the context it was clear that ‘caring’ meant ‘thinking’.
by Timothy Taylor, Conversable economistDecember 9, 2024.
Fragments:
When people outside Argentina talk about Javier Milei, who took office as president of Argentina in December 2023, I sometimes feel like they are actually saying how they would feel if Milei were elected in their own country. For example, Milei has reduced Argentine government spending by 30% in real terms in one year. So US-based commentators tend to judge him on whether they favor a 30% cut in US government spending. They don’t ask whether such a policy might make sense specifically in Argentina—or what facts in Argentina’s history might make a majority of voters willing to give such a policy a try.
To understand why Argentinians would turn to Milei, it’s helpful to ask the question: what if your country’s living standards growth had been lagging for decades? Furthermore, what if you had had some experience with reforms that seemed to work in the 1990s and early 2000s, but now felt like the country was back on the same old treadmill of very slow growth and high inflation? Tobias Martinez Gonzalez and Juan Pablo Nicolini provide context for Argentina’s economic experience throughout history in “Argentina at a Crossroads”(Quarterly overview: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, November 13, 2024). Both are affiliated with the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires and thus have a close-up view of the Argentine economy and the arrival of Milei as president. Their point is not to parse the merits of what Milei has done in his first year as president, but to reflect the economic situation in Argentina, to which Milei is the chosen response.
And:
The authors summarize Argentina’s economic experiences over the past half century with a table and a figure. The table shows that when the Argentine government was able to keep inflation under control, in the 1990s and for a time in the early 2000s, growth was strong. But when inflation rose, growth fell.
by Marc Joffe, Cato at FreedomDecember 9, 2024.
Fragments:
The baseball club formerly known as the Oakland A’s has embarked on an odyssey that would eventually take it to Las Vegas in the late 1920s. But the team may have to shake Nevada taxpayers for even more money before they can end their journey. Professional sports, in which wealthy owners employ well-compensated players to compete in front of a disproportionately wealthy audience, may seem like the least eligible activities for taxpayer-funded government largesse, but somehow the subsidies keep coming in .
Until the early 20th century, American stadiums were normally privately financed. But in 1928, voters in Cleveland, Ohio approved a $2.5 million bond measure to finance the construction of the Cleveland Municipal Stadium. the beginning of the depression era trendtowards government-funded construction projects. Although the stadium was part of it a failed attempt to host the 1932 Olympics, it soon became home to the MLB Cleveland Indians and later the NFL Cleveland Browns. The facility was demolished in 1995, just 64 years after its opening, a fact that throws cold water on the idea that major municipal infrastructure projects are generational investments that will benefit residents long into the future. Instead, stadiums are quickly becoming outdated, requiring replacement or expensive makeovers.
That was the case with the Oakland Coliseum, that opened in 1966, became home to the A’s in 1968, and it was considered outdated long before the A’s finally left in 2024. The Coliseum and adjacent Oakland Arena have been burdened with municipal bond debt throughout their entire existence.
by Phil A. McBride, The lineDecember 10, 2024.
Extract:
For more than a century, Canadian businesses have used checks and the post office to send and receive money across the country and around the world. It’s simple: you write a check, you mail it, the recipient deposits the check in their bank, you wait five business days for it to clear, and voila: you have the money.
However, that is of course not happening at the moment, due to the ongoing postal strike. In fact, a large number of checks in the mail get stuck there, leaving businesses and Canadians with money in transit. I am increasingly convinced that this strike will be remembered in the future as the death of checks in Canada, at least as an important means of commerce.
by JD Tuccille, RodeDecember 11, 2024.
Fragments:
Summoning a collective scream of despair of socialists and anti-corporate types, police in Pennsylvania Luigi Mangione arresteda suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thompson, they insist, stood in the way of the kind of health care they think they deserve, and shooting him in the street was a kind of bloody strike for justice.
The killer’s fans – and the justice system has yet to convict anyone of this crime – are moral degenerates. But they’re also dreaming, thinking that insurance executives like Thompson are the only thing standing between them and their vision of a single-payer medical system that ticks all the boxes. While there is a lot Because there is something wrong with the way healthcare is paid for and delivered in the US, what the haters want is probably not achievable, and the means many of them prefer would only make things worse.
And:
And Canada’s single-payer system relies heavily on long wait times to ration care. “Doctors report an average wait time of 27.7 weeks between a GP referral and receiving treatment in 2023,” according to the Fraser Institute found last year. “This represents the longest delay in the history of the study and is 198% longer than the 9.3 weeks that Canadian patients could expect in 1993.”
One has to wonder what those who are so enraged at Brian Thompson that they would cheer for his murder would say about the officials who run systems elsewhere. None of them provide “unlimited care, by the doctor of their choice, without waiting time, for free.” Some lack the minimal discipline imposed by competition among insurers in the US
by Joshua D. Rauh and Gregory Kearney, Hoover Institution, November 2024.
Extract:
However, most states seriously underestimate their spending by assuming that high investment returns will make up much of their shortfalls, often using rates as high as 7.5 percent. For example, based on an assumed investment return of 7.5 percent, a state can say that a $100,000 payment due in about ten years is “fully funded” even though only $50,000 is set aside today. Using more realistic assumptions related to the Treasury yield curve, the authors of the above study find that a more accurate approximation of the underfunded level is $5.12 trillion.
Because of these concerns, states have largely ignored the opportunity to make major shifts away from the DB [Defined Benefit] Instead, it attempts to offset some of the OB costs by increasing premiums for workers, school districts and, to a lesser extent, state governments themselves. In California, for example, employee contributions increased from 8 percent of wages to 10.25 percent of wages between 2014 and 2024. In the same period, the employer contribution increased from 8.25 percent of wages to 19.1 percent of wages. The state government’s own contribution rate is 8.328 percent, and this could only increase by a maximum of 0.5 percent annually. Without such contribution increases, which are largely passed on to school districts, the unfunded liability will continue to grow even faster.