Monadnock School Taxpayers Association News

The EPA wants to take away 7% of U.S. power generation.

Anyone who cares about the U.S. economy is breathing easier now that cap and tax appears to be on the political garbage barge, but don’t be so sure. The White House is still pursuing its carbon agenda through regulation, albeit with almost no public attention, and a new study shows the damage that is already being done.

Yesterday the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a highly regarded federal energy advisory body, released an exhaustive “special assessment” of this covert program. NERC estimates that the Environmental Protection Agency’s pending electric utility regulations will subtract between 46 and 76 gigawatts of generating capacity from the U.S. grid by 2015. To put those numbers in perspective, the worst-case scenario would amount to a reduction of about 7.2% of national power generation, and almost all of it will hit coal-fired plants, the workhorse that supplies a little over half of U.S. electricity.

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A couple who worked from 1965 to 2009 would have beat the government payout by 75%.

As Democrats and Republicans jockey to set Congress’s agenda for after the midterm elections, President Obama has already dismissed one reform that would improve Americans’ financial standing: allowing workers to save and invest some of their Social Security taxes in personal accounts.

That’s an “ill-conceived” proposal, Mr. Obama said in August, because it means “tying your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders and the ups and downs of the stock market.” The financial crisis, he said, should have put this idea to rest “once and for all.”

Missing from the president’s statements is any acknowledgment that, to date…

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The elusive search for villains in the foreclosure crisis.

Millions of Americans have stopped paying their mortgages, creating a giant paperwork snafu and legal crisis, and yet . . .

Funny how many media accounts begin with that rarest of creatures, a homeowner fully paid up on his mortgage, or better yet a Florida man who paid cash for his house, and who was foreclosed on anyway thanks to a paperwork error by some confused bank. This poor shmuck then is made to symbolize the larger phenomenon when in fact the larger phenomenon is precisely the opposite.

You can’t understand the latest mortgage mess without understanding the powerful appetite to cast borrowers as victims and banks as villains in the housing bubble. This tendency is present in claims that minorities have been especially victimized, that people were sold loans they didn’t understand.

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Union drags down schools’ grades

Not all charter schools are created equal.

City charter schools represented by the teachers union scored significantly lower on city-issued report cards this year than did their nonunionized counterparts, a new analysis found.

The seven charter elementary and middle schools whose members belong to the United Federation of Teachers scored a collective

C-minus on this year’s report cards, which are based largely on whether students improve on state reading and math tests.

By comparison, the remaining 50 nonunion charter schools averaged a more respectable B-minus grade, according to the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability in Albany.

Read More at the NY Post…

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As in the 1930s, policy uncertainty and hostility to business have retarded recovery. At least this time around the political price for economic failure promises to be swift.

This may not be your grandfather’s Great Depression, but many aspects of today’s situation would remind him of the 1930s. If the recession that officially ended a year ago feels uncomfortably surreal to you yet familiar to him, it’s probably because the recovery went missing.

During the average recovery since World War II, gross domestic product (GDP) surpassed the pre-recession high five quarters after the recession began. It has never taken longer than seven quarters. Yet today, after 11 quarters, GDP is still below what it was in the fourth quarter of 2007. The economy is growing at only about a third of the rate of previous postwar recoveries from major recessions.

Read more at the WSJ…

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Last week, the New Hampshire Retirement System released a list of all 23,500 state pensions and what type of employee (police officer, firefighter, teacher or other state employee) received them. The list showed that 11 retirees receive pensions of more than $100,000, and 20 make between $90,000 and $100,000. Twenty-four of those 31 retirees were police officers, four were firefighters, one was a teacher, and three were local-government employees.

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It’s class warfare!

Fed-up parents and teachers who saw the explosive education documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” yesterday were left either seething or in tears — and calling for revolutionary change after the film’s Big Apple debut.

“The passing along of children through the system is just disgusting,” said Barbara Levinson, 63, who was crying by the film’s end. “Every child should be treated as an individual.”

Viewers were also rocked by the work’s portrayal of the teachers unions’ protection of subpar educators.

PROTESTING TEACHERS GIVE ‘WAITING FOR SUPERMAN’ AN ‘F’

William Varoli, 36, Glendale, Queens; is unsure whether to send daughter to public school.

“The laws as they stand can protect ineffective teachers who are bad — I’m disappointed in what the union’s become,” said Patricia Jordan, who won state teacher of the year in 1993.

“Effective and wonderful teachers are stifled by the ones who are problematic and hard to get rid of,” she fumed.

The movie, from directors of “An Inconvenient Truth,” takes aim at teacher tenure and “rubber rooms” for teachers facing disciplinary action. It profiles five kids who enter charter-school lotteries.

One parent, from Harlem, is struggling to pay for Catholic school for her daughter Bianca, and another, from The Bronx, is fighting to keep her son Francisco on track in public school.

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The downturn that some have dubbed the “Great Recession” has trimmed the typical household’s income significantly, new Census data show, following years of stagnant wage growth that made the past decade the worst for American families in at least half a century.

The bureau’s annual snapshot of American living standards also found that the fraction of Americans living in poverty rose sharply to 14.3% from 13.2% in 2008—the highest since 1994. Some 43.6 million Americans were living below the official poverty threshold, but the measure doesn’t fully capture the panoply of government antipoverty measures.

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A bipartisan endorsement in Pennsylvania.

This is an encouraging season for education reform, and the latest development is a bipartisan political breakout on vouchers in the unlikely state of Pennsylvania.

Last month, and to widespread surprise, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato came out in support of school vouchers for underprivileged kids. Mr. Onorato said that education “grants”—he avoided the term vouchers—”would give low-income families in academically distressed communities direct choices about which schools their children should attend.”

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How trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus produced a 1.6% recovery.

So two months before an election, and 19 months after the mother of all spending programs, President Obama said yesterday he’s rolling out one more plan to stimulate the economy. We’ll discuss the details when they’re released, but the effort itself is a tacit admission that his earlier proposals have flopped. As the autumn economic debate gets underway, it’s important to understand how and why we got here.

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