Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #857
09/15/2023, 09/16/2023, 09/17/2023
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1) Just When You Thought the Teacher Unions Couldn’t Get Any Lower…
Just as we predicted at the start of the year, 2023 has been the year of school choice. Seven states adopted ambitious school choice measures this year and five more expanded existing programs. North Carolina, Texas, and Pennsylvania are getting close to the enactment of programs where the dollars follow the students.
The teacher unions are getting desperate as their education monopoly is in danger of crumbling like the Berlin Wall.
In retaliation, that sweetheart Randi Weingarten (the teacher union president who did more than anyone in America to shut down the schools and keep them closed), is accusing parental rights groups and school choice advocates of being motivated by racism. That’s an allegation that has become the last refuge of scoundrels.
You can watch Randi’s rant here:
She fumes that those who use the terms “school choice” and “parental rights” are “attempting to divide parents versus teachers,” likening these education freedom activists’ rhetoric to the southern segregationists in the 1950s who wanted to keep black kids out of white schools. She claims that if the school choice movement succeeds, it will be “white parents versus other parents.”
Our friends at the Daily Signal point out that “Weingarten’s talking points heavily echo the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left organization notorious for branding mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits as ‘hate groups’ or ‘antigovernment extremists’ and placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The segregation argument is a non sequitur because the biggest beneficiaries of school choice programs are minority children and those from low-income families who can’t afford superior private school alternatives. It’s the unions and Democrat politicians who are the modern-day George Wallace, blocking the doors of good schools to prevent black and Hispanic children from entering. THEY are the modern segregationists.
Here’s another big problem with this specious argument, that school choice will lead to more segregation. There have been seven major studies on the impact of private school choice programs on the racial profile of these schools. Six of them found MORE racial integration in the private choice schools than in the public schools. School choice is the best way to achieve real desegregation. It is the civil rights issue of our time.
The UAW — one of the nation’s largest unions — went on strike last night as their demands for a four-year 40% hike in wages have been rejected by Ford and GM. Hollywood writers and actors are on strike as well.
Union strike activity is up more than 50% since Trump left office.
We’re not surprised at all by the agitation and more militant demand by the unions. Inflation has put a huge dent in the real wages and salaries of union workers.
They’ve been losing money under Biden’s inflation. Since Biden entered office the CPI is up around 17.5% and most union contracts fell well short of that mark. Historically, strike activity is highly associated with inflation – and that’s been proven true statistically. The chart above shows the surge in the number of work stoppages in the late 1960s and ‘70s. That’s the period of Nixon-Ford-Carter when inflation surged from 3 to 6 to 8 to 11%.
What irony that Biden (who boasts that he is the most “pro-union president in history”), has done more damage to union real take-home pay than any other president since Jimmy Carter.
As CTUP economists EJ Antoni and Stephen Moore have shown:
“History proves that mismanagement of the money supply and a dollar that loses value causes convulsions in the labor market. Annual inflation spiked to 7.9 percent for 1951, and a record 470 strikes occurred the next year. In the late 1960s, inflation rose to 5.4 percent and the number of strikes rose above 400.
But as price volatility moderated starting in the Reagan years, so did strikes. Not only did inflation decrease in the early 1980s, but it became more predictable too. A stable dollar that retained its value allowed labor and management to reach mutually agreeable contracts on wage increases.”
3) Only 8 House Democrats Voted To Keep Gas Cars Legal in All 50 States
Banning internal combustion vehicles has become a nearly perfect party-line issue, so we commend the eight House Democrats who broke with their party and voted with all House Republicans yesterday to keep internal combustion engine vehicles legal to sell in all 50 states.
Caraveo, CO
Costa, CA
Cuellar, TX
Davis, NC
Golden, ME
Higgins, NY
Perez, WA
Vasquez, NM
The states that have affirmatively banned internal combustion vehicles by 2035 are California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington.
Question: How can you have “interstate commerce” when some states like California want to ban the majority of cars and trucks?
We’re for states' rights, and we hate the abuse of the federal commerce clause. But, if there were ever a case for federal intervention to protect interstate commerce, this is it.
Alas, we're not optimistic that Chuck Schumer will let this bill see the light of day in the Senate.
4) Working From Home Reduces Transit Ridership to Record Lows
The American Community Survey (ACS) for 2022 was released yesterday. The pandemic and post-pandemic environment have reflected major changes in how people reach their work location. The 2022 ACS asked respondents “How did this person usually get to work LAST WEEK?” The chart below summarizes the market shares of the major modes for 2019 (pre-pandemic), 2021, and 2022.
The big surge has been in the percentage of Americans working from home – which is no 15% compared to 6% pre-pandemic.
The big decline has been in transit usage. Today only three out of every 100 workers use public transit to get to work. That’s down from 12% in 1960. Yet Congress and Biden are flooding a record amount of money into transit systems (roughly $100 billion a year). So federal spending is at a record high. Ridership is at a record low. And Biden calls this spending “an investment.”
CNN (of all places) confronted Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates on the hypocrisy of sending her son to a Catholic high school while lobbying against school choice scholarships for her lower-income neighbors.
