April 2, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is some of the worst legislation passed in this country since LBJ’s “Great Society.” For newer readers, just check my older posts on this subject for more information (I wrote this one a few months ago). It is not just a bunch of left-wing teachers who do not like the thought of being held accountable in the classroom who loath NCLB. Even right-leaning think tanks like CATO have little to say for it.

This article (from the Goldwater Institute) explains more. Below is a summary:

It looks like Arizona is set to opt out of No Child Left Behind.  Arizonans need transparency and accountability in public schooling, but they do not need NCLB, says Matthew Ladner, vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute.

• Chief among the flaws of NCLB is the fact that it creates an entirely perverse incentive for states to lower their academic standards in order to meet a federal goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014.
• A recent University of California Berkley study that found 10 of 12 states studied had lowered the standards for their state accountability tests.
• States have engaged in a “race to the bottom,” and sadly, Arizona is one of the leaders.

Posted in General post | No Comments »

April 2, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

The psychology of victimhood and the politics of envy are powerful political tools and we see them being exploited this political season. Politicians telling Americans how bad off we are reminds me of one of Aesop’s Fables where a dog was carrying a piece of meat across a bridge. Looking down into the river, he saw his shadow, which appeared to him as another dog carrying a larger piece of meat. Attacking the “other” dog, he dropped his piece of meat into the river and it was gone for good. Aesop’s lesson is something to keep in mind as politicians offer their solutions to income inequality.

Read it all here.

Posted in General post | No Comments »

April 2, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

From The Tax Foundation: 

Yesterday, members of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming spent the day beating up on oil industry executives for “excessive” profits and gouging consumers at the gas pump. Lost in the political theater is the fact that those “excessive” profits are net profits: that is, profits earned after taxes are paid to government. And while the oil companies have enjoyed a few good years, history shows that government has profited more from the domestic oil industry than has its shareholders.

Recent data from the Energy Information Administration shows that since 1981—the first year of the Windfall Profits Tax—total taxes from all oil industry sources exceeded the combined profits of all companies in every year but the past three. Between 1981 and 2006, government collected $1.65 trillion in total taxes after adjusting for inflation. That is 65 percent more than the combined earnings of the 16 largest domestic oil companies during the same period.

As the chart below shows, during most of that 25 year period, government tax collections were nearly twice industry profits in any given year. Indeed, in 2002, before the recent price spikes, the industry earned a collective $20.5 billion in profits. However, government collected more than $50 billion in combined income, property, severance, and excise taxes in the same year.

So, the lesson to members of the House committee is be careful of throwing stones when you live in a glass house.

Posted in General post | No Comments »

April 2, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

From Cafe Hayek:

“Clinton Proposes Plan to Make Firms Inefficient” would have been a more accurate headline to this report at Newsweek.com.  I sent this letter in response:

Courting blue-collar votes, Hillary Clinton promises to use “tax incentives to persuade companies to ‘insource’ jobs in the United States” (”Clinton proposes plan to keep jobs in US,” April 2).  Because firms ‘outsource’ jobs only when doing so lowers firms’ costs of production, Mrs. Clinton’s proposal amounts to bribing American firms not to lower production costs whenever possible.  She wants to encourage American firms to produce inefficiently, which is to say wastefully.  In short, she wants us to be poorer than we would otherwise be.

Mrs. Clinton’s proposal is further evidence that good politics typically is bad economics.

Posted in General post | 1 Comment »

April 2, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

The latest in the series of pointless gestures that constitute Congressional energy policy came yesterday, when executives from five major oil companies were paraded before Ed Markey’s House hearing on global warming. They served as political props for Members to denounce rising gas prices, ventilate Dick Cheney conspiracy theories and otherwise advertise their ignorance of the markets they purportedly oversee.

Read it all here.

Posted in General post | No Comments »