Have you had the chance to read my recent letter updating you on the Pacific Research Institute’s achievements in 2022 and our big plans for 2023?
I know how hectic this time of year is, but I think you’ll be excited by what PRI has in store for the New Year. The generosity of partners like you powered our successes last year—from blocking single-payer health care in California to exposing the failures of Governor Gavin Newsom’s disastrous initiatives on homelessness and climate change.
As we prepare to launch bold new efforts for liberty and enterprise opportunity and against socialism in 2023, I hope you will you renew your support of PRI with an end-of-year, tax-deductible gift.
We’ve seen what the unchecked left does with power. The results are lousy public schools, rampant inflation, an epidemic of homelessness, counterproductive energy policies—in short, disaster.
So PRI is advancing a comprehensive set of market-based, proven, and practical policies that can turn our state and nation around.
Our agenda for 2023 includes:
—Training for school board members. Local school boards play a critical role in our nation’s education system. Yet school board members are often outgunned by special interests such as the teachers' unions and entrenched education bureaucracies. Conferences in California, Texas, and Arizona will instruct school board members in such key areas as “woke” curricula, Critical Race Theory, freedom of speech, charter school formation, improving student achievement, and much more.
—National survey on education freedom. We also will be conducting a series of national surveys of parents of school-aged children on their satisfaction with their child’s education. The surveys will cover other issues, including educational freedom and curriculum. The reports will include recommendations for policymakers at the state and federal level to give parents the freedom to choose the best educational option for their children.
—Advancing market-based health policy solutions. As the Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at PRI, I will continue my work to expose the false promise of “Medicare for All” and other progressive health care ideas through research, op-eds in leading media publications, speeches and debates, and appearances on radio, television, and podcast programs.
—Better health through markets, not mandates. Wayne Winegarden, director of PRI’s Center for Medical Economics and Innovation, will author a series of reports examining lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. He will pay particular attention to the relationship between greater government control over health care and infection rates, hospitalizations, and mortality.
—Free Cities Center. Under the leadership of PRI Fellow Steven Greenhut, we will expand our newly established Free Cities Center to address challenges facing cities throughout the American West: rising crime, soaring housing costs, a sprawling homelessness crisis, and underperforming public schools. Our goal with the project is to incubate and promote free-market ideas that will improve our cities.
—Been There, Done That. We Californians have negative lessons to teach the nation about restricting worker freedom, encouraging homelessness, trapping kids in failing schools, fueling energy poverty, and more. We will teach those lessons—and explore doable, market-based solutions in our research publications, media appearances, legislative outreach, and at our 5th annual “California Ideas in Action” policy conference in Sacramento.
We certainly have our work cut out for us going into 2023—and we can’t wait. A promising year awaits, and you and I have a chance to make a real difference.
