My Weekly Reading for December 15, 2024
Friday Feature: SEA Homeschoolers
by Colleen Hroncich, Cato at Liberty, December 6, 2024.
Excerpt:
Conservative Christians probably aren’t generally seen as trailblazers, but they were at the forefront of homeschooling in the 1960s and 1970s. So it’s not surprising that curricula and resources for homeschoolers are often Christian in nature. When Blair Lee, a college professor with a background in chemistry and biology, began homeschooling her son in the early 2000s, she struggled to find quality secular science resources. What started as an effort to fill that gap eventually became Secular Eclectic Academic (SEA) Homeschoolers.
“Homeschooling wasn’t really on my radar,” Blair says. “My son was a very early reader. No Child Left Behind left all of those advanced kids behind. His teacher prompted me to make the decision to homeschool. She told me that with the current system, my child would get lots of test prep, and they would always want to test him because he would make the school look good.” But he wouldn’t be given work that would challenge him and help him grow. The teacher predicted he would eventually wonder why he bothered trying so hard. He’d still be “advanced,” but he’d be achieving well below his capabilities. Blair listened to the teacher and homeschooled her son from first grade through high school.
DRH comment: The way the teacher treated the kid was awful. I’m not necessarily blaming the teacher; it was the higher-level people in government who screwed it up. It reminds me of what was one of the last two straws that motivated us to take our daughter out of the government school in Pacific Grove at the end of 4th grade. We went to parents’ night and said to the teacher, “Our daughter is getting all A’s, but we’re wondering what an A means.” The teacher answered, “Oh, Karen is one of the ones I don’t have to worry about.” In context, it was clear that “worry” meant “think.”
Argentina’s Economic Challenge in Context
by Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist, December 9, 2024.
Excerpts:
When those outside Argentina discuss Javier Milei, who took office as President of Argentina in December 2023, I sometimes feel as if they are actually saying how they would feel if Milei was elected in their own country. For example, Milei has in a year cut Argentina’s government spending by 30% in real terms. So US-based commenters have a tendency to evaluate him by whether they would favor a 30% cut in US government spending. They do not ask such a policy might make sense specifically in Argentina–or what facts in Argentina’s history might make a majority of voters willing to give such a policy a try.
To understand why Argentinians would turn to Milei, it’s useful to ask the question: What if growth in your country’s standard of living had been lagging for decades. Moreover, what if you had had some experience with reforms that seemed to work in the 1990s and early 2000s, but now it felt as if the country was back on the same old treadmill of very sluggish growth and high inflation? Tobias Martinez Gonzalez and Juan Pablo Nicolini provide context for Argentina’s economic experience in history in “Argentina at a Crossroads”(Quarterly Review: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, November 13, 2024). Both are affiliated with the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, and thus have a close-up view of Argentina’s economy and the arrival of Milei as president. Their point is not to dissect the merits what Milei has done in his first year as president, but to convey the economic situation in Argentina to which Milei is the elected response.
And:
The authors summarize Argentinian economic experience in the last half-century with a table and a figure. The table shows that when Argentina’s government was able to keep inflation under control, in the 1990s and for a time in the early 2000s, growth was strong. But when inflation climbed, growth dropped.
Itinerant Baseball Team May “Need” More Taxpayer Funds
by Marc Joffe, Cato at Liberty, December 9, 2024.
Excerpts:
The baseball club formerly known as the Oakland A’s has begun an odyssey that should ultimately take it to Las Vegas in the late 2020s. But the team may need to shake down Nevada taxpayers for even more money before finishing its journey. Professional sports, in which wealthy owners employ well-compensated players to compete in front of disproportionately affluent crowds, may seem like the least eligible business for taxpayer-funded government largesse, but somehow the subsidies keep coming.
Until the early 20th century, US stadiums were normally funded privately. But in 1928, Cleveland, Ohio voters approved a $2.5 million bond measure to fund the construction of Cleveland Municipal Stadium, kicking off the Depression-era trendtoward publicly funded construction. Although the stadium was part of a failed effort to attract the 1932 Olympics, it soon became the home of the MLB Cleveland Indians and later the NFL Cleveland Browns. The facility was demolished in 1995, only 64 years after it opened, a fact that throws cold water on the notion that big municipal infrastructure projects are generational investments benefiting residents far into the future. Instead, stadiums rapidly become obsolete, necessitating either replacement or costly makeovers.
Such was the case with the Oakland Coliseum, which opened in 1966, became the home of the A’s in 1968, and was considered obsolescent long before the A’s finally left in 2024. The Coliseum and adjacent Oakland Arena have been encumbered by municipal bond debt throughout their entire existence.
Phil A. McBride: Canada Post’s workers might have killed the cheque
by Phil A. McBride, The Line, December 10, 2024.
Excerpt:
For more than a century, Canadian businesses have been using cheques and the post office to send and receive money across the country and the world. It’s easy: you write a cheque, you put it in the mail, the recipient deposits the cheque at their bank, you wait five business days for it to clear and voila — you’ve got the money.
Except, right now, of course, that’s not happening, due to the ongoing postal strike. In fact, a great number of cheques that are in the mail are stuck there, leaving businesses and Canadians with money stranded in transit. I am increasingly convinced that this strike will be remembered in the future as the death of cheques in Canada, at least as a major medium of business exchange.
The People Cheering Brian Thompson’s Murder Can’t Have the Medical Utopia That They Want
by J.D. Tuccille, Reason, December 11, 2024.
Excerpts:
Evoking a collective scream of despair from socialists and anti-corporate types, police in Pennsylvania arrested Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thompson, they insist, stood in the way of the sort of health care they think they deserve and shooting him down on the street was some sort of bloody-minded strike for justice.
The assassin’s fans—and the legal system has yet to convict anybody for the crime—are moral degenerates. But they’re also dreaming, if they think insurance executives like Thompson are all that stands between them and their visions of a single-payer medical system that satisfies every desire. While there is a lot wrong with the main way health care is paid for and delivered in the U.S., what the haters want is probably not achievable, and the means many of them prefer would make things worse.
And:
And Canada’s single-payer system famously relies heavily on long wait times to ration care. “In 2023, physicians report a median wait time of 27.7 weeks between a referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment,” the Fraser Institute found last year. “This represents the longest delay in the survey’s history and is 198% longer than the 9.3 weeks Canadian patients could expect to wait in 1993.”
You have to wonder what those so furious at Brian Thompson that they would applaud his murder would say about the officials managing systems elsewhere. None of them deliver “unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge.” Some lack the minimal discipline imposed by what competition exists among insurers in the U.S.
State Pension Contributions and Their Impact on State Education Budgets
by Joshua D. Rauh and Gregory Kearney, Hoover Institution, November 2024.
Excerpt:
However, most states are severely underestimating their expenses by assuming that high investment returns will make up a great deal of their shortfalls, often using rates as high as 7.5 percent. For example, using an assumed investment rate of return of 7.5 percent, a state can say that a $100,000 payment due in about ten years is “fully funded” even though only $50,000 is set aside today. Using more realistic assumptions tied to the Treasury yield curve, the authors of the above study find that a more accurate approximation of the underfunding level is $5.12 trillion.
Due to these concerns, states have largely ignored the possibility of making major shifs away from DB [Defined Benefit] plans, instead attempting to ofset some of the DB costs by increasing the contribution rates assigned to employees, school districts, and to a lesser extent, the state governments themselves. For example, in California, the employee contribution rate increased from 8 percent of pay to 10.25 percent of pay from 2014 to 2024. During this same time frame, the employer contribution rate increased from 8.25 percent of pay to 19.1 percent of pay. The state government’s own contribution rate sits at 8.328 percent, and this may only increase by, at most, 0.5 percent year-to-year. Without such contribution increases, which are largely passed along to school districts, the unfunded liability will continue to grow even faster.
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