This rout of anti-choice incumbent Republicans in yesterday's runoff elections might be the most momentous victory for educational choice in American history.
Congratulations to Governor Greg Abbott who backed a slate of Republican challengers in the State House running against incumbents who had voted to kill his signature bill to establish universal education savings accounts. It was a gutsy move and it worked magnificently.
In all nine anti-choice Republicans were sent packing in the March primary. Last night, the job was finished as six of the eight GOP House members who were forced into runoffs were defeated.
Here are the overall results:
Abbott, who calls universal education freedom his "legacy," said last night he "now has enough votes to pass school choice.” He will still have to work with Dade Phelan, the powerful Texas House Speaker who has often cooperated with Democrats in slowing down school choice. But Phelan only won renomination last night by just one percent of the vote, and after the defeat of 15 of his colleagues he will likely realize school choice is an idea whose time has come.
Teachers unions and other lobbyists spent millions to stop the rebel forces. Several of the defeated anti-choice Republicans were caught in illegal electioneering such as begging school administrators to turn their staff out to vote in the GOP primary. Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued more than one school district for illegal interventions in the election.
Attorneys general in other states should be encouraged to blow the whistle on such blatant violations.
How big a victory is this for parental choice?
The Texas bill could positively affect as many as 3 million kids. Everything's big in Texas.
2) More Evidence That the Trump Tax Cuts Did NOT Cause the Biden-era Trillion Dollar Deficits
Biden keeps claiming that the reason the deficit reached nearly $2 trillion last year and is expected to stay well above $1 trillion annually for the next decade, is the “Trump tax cuts for the rich.” It’s a good line that resonates with some voters. Too bad it is all false.
The Trump tax cuts created more jobs, more economic activity, more investment in the U.S., and… an unexpectedly high rate of tax revenue growth.
Preston Brashers, a Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has compared how much revenues from 2018-27 were expected after the tax cut passed, and the more current estimates based on the tax collections that have already come in through 2022.
He finds that so far tax collections are running at a pace $1.7 TRILLION higher than forecast. Even more amazingly, the revenues are now coming in at a pace some $600 billion higher than CBO predicted over the period 2018-27 with NO tax cut at all.
How did CBO get it so wrong. They still use “static revenue analysis” that fails to take account of the positive economic impact of the tax cuts. They don’t believe in Laffer Curve effects. We won’t say the Trump tax cuts paid for themselves, but we know for certain that they were a major economic stimulus.
Biden’s promise to repeal every provision of the Trump tax cuts would be like shoving Quaalude depressants down the throat of the American economy.
3) Sorry, Joe, "Corporate Greed" Doesn’t Explain Bidenflation - Government Greed Does
President Biden regularly tries to blame corporate greed for the skyrocketing prices since he's been president. He completely ignores the impact of government “greed” in spending and borrowing $4 trillion.
The San Francisco Fed ran the numbers and debunked this oft-repeated theory of corporate price gouging:
An increase in pricing power would be reflected in price-cost markups, leading to higher inflation; likewise, a decline in pricing power and markups could alleviate inflation pressures. We use industry-level measures of markups to trace their evolving impact on inflation during the current expansion.
We find that markups rose substantially in some sectors, such as the motor vehicles industry. However, the aggregate markup across all sectors of the economy, which is more relevant for inflation, has stayed essentially flat during the post-pandemic recovery.
In other words: it wasn't corporate greed that caused the highest inflation rate in nearly forty years. As the chart shows, markups were flat as prices rose.
4) The More Expensive the College - the More Likely the Mayhem on Campus
Washington Monthly decided to check an interesting hypothesis:
"Have pro-Palestinian protests taken place disproportionately at elite colleges, where few students come from lower-income families?"
"The answer," they found, "is a resounding yes."
They used the percent of students on Pell Grants as a proxy for low to middle-income students, and found this remarkable relationship between student family incomes and anti-Israel activity:
A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity.
For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools.
Protest activity has been common, however, at elite schools with both low acceptance rates and few Pell students...
5) Illinois Legislators Vote for Higher Taxes So They Can Give Themselves a Raise
Illinois is one of the highest tax states. And it ranks 48th out of the 50 states in economic competitiveness according to the latest ALEC Rich States Poor States ratings.
So Governor "Putzker" and the Democrats in Springfield are doing all they can to make Illinois number 50 in 2024.
The latest state budget of $53 billion is the largest in state history and includes $800 million in higher taxes. Incredibly, at the same time the Democrats are asking Illinois taxpayers to pay more, they had the audacity to vote themselves a huge pay raise - apparently as a reward for all the wonderful work they are doing.
At some point this once-economically-dominant state in the Midwest is going to financially implode. And when that happens, they will come begging for bailout money from Washington. We would hope that a President Trump would tell Pritzker to metaphorically "drop dead."
