In case you missed it…
Education
One of the primary reasons school choice policies — such as Education Savings Accounts or Nevada’s Tax Scholarship program — are so important is that, for students who start life out with educational disadvantages, the current public school system tends to trap them in its own programmatic failures. As House Speaker Paul Ryan has put it, the current system effectively quarantines poor and minority children in “failure factories.” Not only does the public-education status quo thus perpetrate injustice, but it also assaults the entire spirit of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, that education is “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” (Read more)
Free Markets
Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” was declared during an address to Congress 54 years ago this month. By its 50th anniversary, the war had consumed more than $22 trillion in federal spending — while doing effectively zip to lower the U.S. poverty rate. Despite the war’s utter failure to achieve any tangible result, self-described progressives continue to push for its perpetual expansion. They seem far more interested in the cheap applause their initiatives receive, than actually solving the real problems that exist. (Read more)
Prevailing wage
For many reasons, government projects regularly run over budget and fail to meet deadlines, and silly bureaucratic burdens are front and center. Clark County commissioners, for example, have postponed a contract to install steel post barriers along the Strip — an important safety feature that authorities say should be done immediately to protect pedestrians — because a past contract might not have paid workers the “prevailing wage” required by a bad law beloved by unions. (Read more)
Healthcare
Socialized medicine might be sold to the public as “free” healthcare, but in the end patients pay plenty for the substandard care they receive. The British government ordered every hospital in England to cancel all non-urgent surgeries this week to deal with a shortage of resources. The order from the National Health Service will result in around 50,000 operations being postponed, as hospitals struggle with what is being described as “third-world” conditions thanks to a winter flu outbreak straining limited NHS resources. (Read more)
Federal tax reform
The federal tax reform bill just recently signed into law is having an interesting side-effect on tax policy in high-tax states such as California and New York. Thanks to a provision in the federal tax plan that lowers the amount of allowable deductions for state and local taxes, some wealthy residents in high-tax states could face higher overall tax burdens in certain circumstances. As a result, both New York and California are toying with ways to protect high-income residents from the change. It’s an ironic twist, given that both states have traditionally been run by lawmakers who claim they want to raise taxes on the wealthy. (Read more)
Individual freedom
Venezuela was once among the richest nations in the world. Today, however, Venezuela is ranked as the second poorest nation in the world, only slightly better off than North Korea. The nation’s socialist “reforms” plundered the wealth of the Venezuelan people in less than a generation, leaving citizens impoverished, enslaved and oppressed. Jorge Jraissati is a student leader in Venezuela who is risking his life to restore freedom to his country. His story serves as a warning to the rest of us to take care that we never take our freedoms for granted. (Watch the video)