While a debate rages over whether parents should be able to use tax money – or tax credits – to choose between public and private schools for their children, the movement to provide school choice to children from low-income families through privately funded vouchers is mushrooming.
Last month's tragic sniper attack at a middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and the past weekend's shooting at an eighth-grade dance in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, provided extraordinary opportunities for sociologizing about the causes of youth crime. The usual suspects were trotted out: violence-drenched movies and television, the spread of urban ills to rural America, easy access to firearms, and the decline of the two-parent family.
Tax-funded vouchers are allowing some inner-city children in two large cities to escape failing public schools – but not without fierce opposition, primarily from teachers' unions and from those who question the constitutionality of vouchers.
House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer (R-Texas) has proposed giving tax deductions to people who purchase their own health insurance. House Health Subcommittee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) has proposed an even more radical idea: making health insurance personal and portable for everyone. These proposals would make health insurance more affordable, reduce the number of uninsured and give people more control over their health care.
One of the more exciting developments ever in the school choice movement will begin next fall in the 14,000-student Edgewood Independent School District in a suburb of San Antonio, Texas.
Since the sweeping tax cuts of 1981, little has been done to directly benefit middle-income American families – those with taxable earnings between $30,000 and about $65,000 a year. During that period, federal taxes have been raised eight times, with only one small tax cut in 1997. The latest figures from the Tax Foundation show that the taxes have been ratcheted upward so that in 1997 the total burden of federal, state and local taxes on a median-income two-earner family was 38.2 percent of income.
On Earthday 1998, with the new millennium approaching it is time to build a bridge to a better environment in the 21st century.
An historic educational choice project announced today in San Antonio will enable, for the first time ever, thousands of families in an entire school district to exercise choice of schools.
In celebration of Earth Day a panel of environmental experts gathered in Washington, D.C. at a National Center for Policy Analysis Congressional briefing that urged lawmakers to move away from accusations of who values restoring, protecting and conserving the environment most to focusing instead on sensible environmental policies.
The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) will sponsor a Congressional Briefing to propose principles to help solve one of the most important dilemmas facing modern Americans: How do we best advance environmental protection while ensuring continued economic growth and individual rights?
As a longtime supporter of Social Security reform, my expectations for President Bill Clinton's national dialogue on Social Security were low. It seemed just another White House PR effort designed to avoid making politically difficult decisions. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that something substantive actually came out of the first Social Security conference in Kansas City on April 7th.
As April 15th approaches, the time of year when taxpayers feel most inclined to lambast the Internal Revenue Service, it is imperative that Americans pay attention to the real problem – the tax code the IRS is contracted by Congress to enforce.
You may not be aware that you're eating and coming into contact with hundreds of potential cancer-causing chemicals every day – not from pesticides, but from nature!
What benefit do salaried workers, including federal government employees, have that is unavailable to workers who are paid by the hour? They have the option of choosing "comp time" – time off from the job to compensate for overtime already worked. A bill that would give millions of hourly workers freedom of choice in the workplace passed the House last year (H.R. 1), and the Senate will consider similar legislation, known as the Family Friendly Workplace Act (S. 4), this year.
More than half the natural chemicals in fruits and vegetables that have been tested cause cancer in laboratory rats and mice at very high doses.
John Kenneth Galbraith, of all people, once said, "The State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too."
At the 1992 United Nations' Earth Summit in Rio, the United States signed a treaty establishing the voluntary goal of returning to 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2000. By 1996 it was evident voluntary action was not working.