Chris Christie fights for a cap on property taxes.
New Jersey is ground zero in the national fight between taxpayers and government unions, with new Republican Governor Chris Christie trying to pull the state from the brink of tax-and-spend bankruptcy. This week he struck a budget deal with Democrats that makes modest progress, but the real game is now afoot over his proposal to impose a cap on property taxes.
The new D.C. contract could be a national reform model.
In the long war between teachers unions and education reformers, the reformers won a big victory this week that could serve as a model for school districts across the U.S. The breakthrough is a new contract between the District of Columbia and 4,000 public school teachers that shatters taboos on teacher tenure, seniority and pay-for-performance.
The contract, which was approved by the D.C. Council on Tuesday, is a triumph for hard-bargaining Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who took on American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten and has lived to tell about it.
A new documentary by a 27-year-old filmmaker could change the national debate about public education.
‘What’s funny,” says Madeleine Sackler, “is that I’m not really a political person.” Yet the petite 27-year-old is the force behind “The Lottery”—an explosive new documentary about the battle over the future of public education opening nationwide this Tuesday.
In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a freelance film editor, caught a segment on the local news about New York’s biggest lottery. It wasn’t the Powerball. It was a chance for 475 lucky kids to get into one of the city’s best charter schools (publicly funded schools that aren’t subject to union rules).
“I was blown away by the number of parents that were there,” Ms. Sackler tells me over coffee on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, recalling the thousands of people packed into the Harlem Armory that day for the drawing. “I wanted to know why so many parents were entering their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for them.” And so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She grabbed her camera.
Uncertainty about future taxes and regulations is enemy No. 1 of economic growth.
The administration’s stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they inherited as a way of avoiding responsibility for the 18 months for which they are responsible.
But they want new stimulus measures—which is convincing evidence that they too recognize that the earlier measures failed. And so the U.S. was odd-man out at the G-20 meeting over the weekend, continuing to call for more government spending in the face of European resistance.
Read more at the WSJ…