On the whole, Texas public schools are very inefficient. If we compare student achievement scores with the amount of money spent to achieve those scores, we conclude that about one out of every three dollars spent on public education is being wasted.
America is burdened by an appalling amount of crime. Even though the crime rate is not soaring, as it did during the 1960s and 1970s, we still have more crimes per capita than any other developed country.
Until now, educational reform in Texas has consisted in pouring billions of dollars of new spending into failing school systems and enacting scroes of rules and regulations governing everything from teachers' salaries to pupil-teacher ratios. There is no evidense that this approach has worked any better in Texas than it has in any other state.
Each year Ametica "spends" $105 billion in tax deductions for employee benefits. The deductions cause the tax rates for all taxpayers to be higher than they otherwise would be. The justification is that federal policy should encourage health insurance, retirement pensions, disability insurance, day care, etc. Yet this tax subsidy is highly arbitrary and inequitable. In general, the tax law favors employees of large firms and higher-income employees at the expense of small firms and lower-income employees.