Think Tank West

As a recent AP story helpfully points out, big government, dirigist Sweden has had a private school choice program since the early 1990s, and parents are loving it. Private school enrollment is up from one percent to ten percent of total enrollment, and still climbing. Interestingly, Sweden’s education system was described today in a separate news story as [...]

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Until the seedy practice was exposed, the host committee for the Democratic National Convention in Denver was dodging state and federal taxes by filling its cars using the city government’s gas pumps. Defenders of the scam tried to say the GOP elites were doing the same thing in Minneapolis (plausible, but not true in this [...]

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The Wall Street Journal reports today on the front page: “States Slammed by Tax Shortfalls.” According to the story, states are in “pain” because they are having to “slash” spending, which is causing some services to be “hit hard.” The story illustrates the curious way that many newspapers report on state budget issues. The coverage [...]

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The French prefer Obama by a 64-4 margin.

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The WashingtonWatch.com blog has a breakout of all 36 bills in the “Coburn Omnibus.” #36: a greenhouse in Suitland, Maryland!

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The New York Times reports that Providence’s police would prefer to spend their federal grants on crime rather than terrorism. That is because there is crime in Rhode Island but no terrorism. This conflict is national, as I discussed here. Because our domestic counter-terrorism bureaucracy is largely our crime-fighting bureaucracy, the more you chase terrorists, [...]

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I was on the floor of the Cancun Convention Center when the September 2003 WTO ministerial conference officially ended in failure.  What struck me the most about the abrupt termination of the conference was the absolute jubilation with which the Indian trade delegation and its posse of reporters and NGO cheerleaders greeted the news.  There [...]

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“Excessive Heat Can Run up Hospitals’ Bad Debt Expense for Treating the Uninsured: Report,” trumpeted a trade publication called Inside ARM (Inside Accounts Receivable Management). The first paragraph informed us that, “ A report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality suggests hospitals may find they are treating more uninsured patients suffering from heat [...]

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In the Los Angeles Times, Peter Gosselin offers a “news analysis” on the theme that “Americans may be losing faith in free markets.” For a generation, most people accepted the idea that the core of what makes America tick was an economy governed by free markets. And whatever combination of goods, services and jobs the [...]

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I’ll get to the boring Oklahoma data dispute soon, but first I’d like to respond to a small point in my ongoing debate with Sara Mead of the New America Foundation. Mead thinks I’m being uncharitable in my characterization of how she and the New America Foundation approach preschool policy: “And, Schaeffer is most definitely [...]

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