Public Sector Reform

Changing Education Paradigms

Changing Education Paradigms Sir Ken Robinson In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools’ dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

The animation in the video below is very good and illustrates his points well. The transcript of his lecture is also include underneath the video. [Read more…]

The Superiority of School Vouchers Demonstrated

School Vouchers by Gary Jason –
The failure of the American K-12 public school system has been obvious for decades. Some of us fossils can recall the public uproar that accompanied the release of the report “A Nation at Risk” back in 1987, documenting the mediocre at best, disastrously bad at worst performance of the nation’s public schools.

The public school special interest groups (the PSSIGs) — that is, public school administrators, education department professors, “labor studies” professors, textbook publishers, and most notoriously teachers unions and their members — managed to turn the outrage into support for jacking up spending.

Over the last quarter-century, we have nearly doubled our national per capita spending — we now outspend per capita for K-12 education every other nation on Earth but one. But our national student scores have remained flat, while internationally, we have dropped in ranking among developed nations from 14th during the 1970s down to 24th place today. [Read more…]

Inflation, Back to the ’70s We Go!

Inflation in AmericaConservatives warned about it, economists predicted it, and now it’s here. Inflation has arrived and it’s taking off like a rocket. IBD reports that wholesale prices, often a precursor to consumer prices, rose at an yearly rate of 8% in February. The story warns: “Food prices today are the highest on record, rising at double-digit rates (see chart). Meanwhile, gasoline tests the $4-a-gallon level, the dollar is weakening and gold is near its all-time high.”

This ominous surge is attributable to very high energy and food prices driven mostly by our government’s reckless spending that’s accelerating rather than abating. Combined with Obama’s suicidal energy policies, continuing political instability across the Middle East, the government’s stifling regulatory hold on our economy, the EPA’s assault on manufacturers and energy producers, and the recent catastrophe and devastation in Japan, a dangerous perfect storm of inflationary and destabilizing factors are emerging which will spell disaster for our economy and negatively affect all American consumers’ purchasing power and wealth. [Read more…]

Your Money Belongs To Politicians

by Priscilla Petty –
If I had to pinpoint one single way in which our country has gone astray, I’d say that it’s when we allowed politicians to manipulate the tax code to benefit those whom they favor. There are many ways, of course, in which our country’s trajectory has taken a downward rather than upward turn, but politicians’ control of individual citizens’ money, their taking great quantities of it as though it actually belonged to the politicians to use for their own benefit and for politicians’ chosen purposes, has bankrupted us not only fiscally but morally. [Read more…]

The Welfare State’s Death Spiral

5/10/2010 – Robert J. Samuelson –
Welfare State Death Spiral
What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven’t fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” Vocabulary doesn’t alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul-de-sac. To be sure, Greece’s plight is usually described as a European crisis — especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries — and this is true. But only to a point. [Read more…]

The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

The Wall Street Journal | by John Mackey | Aug. 11, 2009

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone: [Read more…]

Government Schools Win Again

American Thinker | by Lloyd Brown | April 10, 2009

Whew! That was close. Nearly 1,700 children had escaped from the failing public schools in Washington, D.C., and were getting a decent education in private schools – just like the children of fat-cat liberal politicians.

But the fat-cat politicians in Congress put a stop to that. They killed the voucher program that a recent study showed had provided those children some hope of escaping from poverty. [Read more…]