Monadnock School Taxpayers Association News

December 20, 2009
Wall Street Journal

Democrats vote to send poor kids to inferior schools.

he waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to kill the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700 disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a private school.

On Sunday the Senate approved a spending bill that phases out funding for the five-year-old program. Several prominent Senators this week sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid pleading for a reconsideration. Signed by Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman, Democrats Robert Byrd and Dianne Feinstein, and Republicans Susan Collins and John Ensign, it asked to save a program that has “provided a lifeline to many low-income students in the District of Columbia.” President Obama signed the bill Thursday.

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December 16, 2009
Wall Street Journal

Comparing today’s deficits to those in the 1980s.

At least someone in America isn’t feeling a credit squeeze: Uncle Sam. This week Congress will vote to raise the national debt ceiling by nearly $2 trillion, to a total of $14 trillion. In this economy, everyone de-leverages except government.

It’s a sign of how deep the fiscal pathologies run in this Congress that $2 trillion will buy the federal government only one year before it has to seek another debt hike—conveniently timed to come after the midterm elections. Since Democrats began running Congress again in 2007, the federal debt limit has climbed by 39%. The new hike will lift the borrowing cap by another 15%.

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From National Review… December 2009

“The City University of New York was a great conduit for upward mobility through the early and middle decades of the 20th century, with a glittering list of alumni in law (Felix Frankfurter), science (Jonas Salk), the military (Colin Powell), and other fields of endeavor. Sad, then, to read that 90 percent of CUNY freshmen could not solve a simple algebra problem when tested in 2008. Even arithmetic baffled them: Two-thirds could not convert a fraction to a decimal. This is after years of news stories about improved test scores and graduation rates for city schools. The usual response from local politicians is that the school system needs more money. Odd: New York State, with the city well in line, spent $15,981 per public-school student in 2007. The U.S. average is $9,666–just three-fifths of the New York figure. The city is in any case flat broke, with the mayor demanding 8 percent budget cuts. What’s to be done? Ship students to Utah, perhaps. The Beehive State spent only $5,683 per student, yet math-test results are well-nigh identical with New York’s.”

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December 8, 2009
Mark Steyn

As longtime readers know, the Demographic Deathwatch is not a novelty dance craze but a recurring feature of this column. But it’s not just for Europe, Russia, China, and Japan anymore! Some parts of America are acquiring demographic profiles that would qualify them for EU membership.

Take the Green Mountain State. As Howard Dean was fond of saying during his 2004 presidential campaign, “Vermont is the way America ought to be.”

If it is, we’re all done for. Its marquee brands are either Canadian-owned (Vermont Castings wood stoves) or European-owned (Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) and any non-foreign economic activity in the state long ago had any life regulated out of it.

But never mind all that. I ventured across the Connecticut River the other day and picked up the local paper, the Journal Opinion of Bradford, Vt.

And among the other front-page headlines (“Newbury Will Mail Town Reports”; “Upcoming Sand Pile Talk”) was a story on how local school districts were in merger talks. No underlying reason was immediately given for the suddenly pressing need to merge: It seemed to be accepted as a natural feature of life that you can’t do anything about. And then a gazillion paragraphs into the story, the reporter finally explained what was going on:

Throughout Vermont, student enrollment at public elementary and secondary schools is declining. According to figures from the state’s Department of Education, there were 104,559 students at those schools during the 1999–2000 school year. Last year, that figure was down to 92,572.

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