1) FINALLY, Someone In Washington Votes to Cut Spending
Not Biden. Not Democrats or Republicans in Congress.
Who would have thought it would be six justices on the Supreme Court?
And congrats to our CTUP President Phil Kerpen for being the first to identify Missouri as the ideal plaintiff based on its state higher education loan authority, which ended up being the winning standing argument.
2) Remind Us Why Taxpayers Should Be on the Hook To Pay for This Scam
Speaking of out-of-control spending:
College tuition costs have more than tripled after adjusting for inflation since 1980. Our friend and superstar economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University says that no industry/profession has had lower productivity gains than universities - with the possible exception of prostitution.
The solution isn’t to load up more financial student aid and then ask taxpayers to pony up for the delinquent loans when the borrowers can't pay them back with their useless degrees.
We will say it one more time: this is the easiest problem to solve. Every 19-22 year old should pay for their own tuition by working 20 hours a week while in college – as kids do at the College of the Ozarks where tuition is free. If kids are working to earn their college education, they will value it more and they will demand value.
If that doesn’t cover the full tuition then just put an excise tax on each college’s endowment fund to make up the difference. Why is this complicated?
3) Florida Banned Racial Preferences 20 Years Ago – It Worked
Speaking of color-blind admissions policies, no one in the media seems to remember that under then-Gov. Jeb Bush, the Sunshine State adopted color-blind college admission policies in 1999. In the wake of that policy, the percentage of minority students has actually risen. Black enrollment was up - though down slightly in percentage terms - while Hispanic and Asian enrollment ROSE. Diversity was enhanced.
Guess what state was rated number 1 in university education this year according to U.S. News and World Report: Florida.
Oh, and the media assault on the policy back then turned out to be as hysterical and wrong then as it is now in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision. This headline is from a Florida newspaper in 1999:
The education freedom victories keep mounting across the USA.
Ohio already offers private school tuition scholarships of $5,500 for grades K–8 and $7,500 for grades 9-12 -- but only for families under 250 percent of the federal poverty level ($75,000 for a family of four).
Ohio's new budget law, agreed to late last week, includes a substantial expansion – making the full scholarship available to any family under 450 percent of the federal poverty level ($135,000 for a family of four), with a sliding scale based on income above that level down to a minimum of 10 percent of the full amount.
ALEC, our partner in our CTUP initiative to bring school choice to a dozen states this year, played a major role in pushing this great reform through the legislature.
Next door in Pennsylvania, the budget fight went into overtime because they are attempting to create a school choice program -- supported by the Democratic governor – to provide lifeline scholarships to kids in the 15 percent worst-performing schools in the state.
5) If a Solar Project Falls in a Hailstorm, Does the Media Make a Sound?
You can be almost certain that the media will downplay/ignore any bad news related to alternative energy projects, whether it’s off-shore windmills contributing to the deaths of whales, solar panel projects threatening fragile habitats or species, or green energy shutting down during freezes and last year’s polar vortex.
The latest example of green energy going haywire comes from Scottsbluff, Nebraska where a project involving 14,000 solar panels has been destroyed by a single hailstorm. The project had a life expectancy of 25 years. It was demolished less than four years after construction.
“Now residents will surely have to rely on good old, reliable fossil fuel power to keep the electricity flowing,” reports the wattsupwiththat.com website.
“And how long will it take to clean up the toxic mess left behind?”
