Roger Wicker among Porker of the Month Honorees

Our own Congressman Roger Wicker has been named to the CAGW's Porker of the Month. I know that he wants to "bring the money home" to our district, but so does every other congressman on the hill. Many of these projects that your tax dollars fund throughout the country are an absolute waste of money.

The more light that we can shed on this spending will help insure that your tax dollars are spent as they should be. Please read the release below that was put out by the CAGW:

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) this month named all 171 members of Congress who voted against the disclosure of earmarks Porkers of the Month. On September 14, the House of Representatives voted 245-171 for an internal rule change (H.Res. 1000) that requires all earmarks and their sponsors to be identified in spending, tax, and authorization bills. “This is a serious step toward opening up the earmarking process,” CAGW President Tom Schatz said. Partisan politics and self-interest clearly influenced what was an easy vote for transparency and accountability. Of the 171 votes against the resolution, 147 were from Democrats. Twenty-two of the 24 Republican nay votes came from members of the Appropriations Committee, where most earmarks are anonymously slipped into spending bills by individual appropriators without debate. For ignoring taxpayers’ outrage over the waste and corruption of pork-barrel spending, CAGW names the 171 nay voters on H.Res. 1000 Porkers of the Month for September 2006. Read more about the Porker of the Month.

Education--a moral obligation?

I heard on the local news this morning that educating our children is a moral obligation that everyone shares. I disagree with this viewpoint.

I do agree that, as a parent, we are morally obligated to educate our own children, however I do not think that we are responsible for other children. It is a noble and worthy cause to help educate all children, but I do not think that you can hang "moral obligation" around the idea.

The money that is wasted by our government schools is ludicrous. That was the point of the story this morning--we need more money for our children and we are morally obligated to provide this. Money is not the answer. You can look at some of the worst school systems in our country and they are usually the ones that spend the most money.

The answer to helping solve this problem is school choice. Put the decision of where to send your children to school back in the hands of the parents and the student. I realize that this idea will not solve all problems, but it will vastly improve on what we have now.

Competition would do wonders in improving our educational system. The good schools would grow and remain strong, and the weak schools would soon close. This would get our children into the best schools possible and give them a much better education than they are now receiving.

So, the next time you hear some educator espousing more money as the solution to our woes, tell them to support school choice which does not cost anything to implement.

Wilemon wonders why we don't have school choice...

John Stossel has been shining the light on the poor performance that we are getting from government schools. And that is what they are...government schools, not public schools. They are controlled by government bureaucrats and not by those with the children's best interest at heart.

The time has come for school choice to be an option for parents. Parents having the ability to choose their child's school will help solve the poor performance we are receiving from government schools. Look at the things that government does. It does not take long to realize that government causes more problems than it solves.

The following article by John Stossel does a good job explaining why we need competition to improve our schools.


Our Schools Need Competition Now

By John Stossel

This week's back-to-school ads offer amazing bargains on lightweight backpacks and nifty school supplies. All those businesses scramble to offer us good stuff at low prices. It's amazing what competition does for consumers. The power to say no to one business and yes to another is awesome.

Too bad we don't apply that idea to schools themselves.

Education bureaucrats and teachers unions are against it. They insist they must dictate where kids go to school, what they study, and when. When I went on TV to say that it's a myth that a government monopoly can educate kids effectively, hundreds of union teachers demonstrated outside my office demanding that I apologize and "re-educate" myself by teaching for a week. (I'll show you the demonstration and what happened next this Friday night, when ABC updates my "Stupid in America" TV special.)

The teachers union didn't like my "government monopoly" comment, but even the late Albert Shanker, once president of the American Federation of Teachers, admitted that our schools are virtual monopolies of the state -- run pretty much like Cuban and North Korean schools. He said, "It's time to admit that the public education system operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."

When a government monopoly limits competition, we can't know what ideas would bloom if competition were allowed. Surveys show that most American parents are satisfied with their kids' public schools, but that's only because they don't know what their kids might have had!

As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek wrote, "[C]ompetition is valuable only because, and so far as, its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which anyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at."

What Hayek means is that no mortal being can imagine what improvements a competitive market would bring.

But I'll try anyway: I bet we'd see cheap and efficient Costco-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows what?

Every economics textbook says monopolies are bad because they charge high prices for shoddy goods. But it's government that gives us monopolies. So why do we entrust something as important as our children's education to a government monopoly?

The monopoly fails so many kids that more than a million parents now make big sacrifices to homeschool their kids. Two percent of school-aged kids are homeschooled now. If parents weren't taxed to pay for lousy government schools, more might teach their kids at home.

Some parents choose to homeschool for religious reasons, but homeschooling has been increasing by 10 percent a year because so many parents are just fed up with the government's schools.

Homeschooled students blow past their public-school counterparts in terms of achievement. Brian Ray, who taught in both public and private schools before becoming president of the National Home Education Research Institute, says, "In study after study, children who learn at home consistently score 15-30 percentile points above the national averages," he says. Homeschooled kids also score almost 10 percent higher than the average American high school student on the ACT.

I don't know how these homeschooling parents do it. I couldn't do it. I'd get impatient and fight with my kids too much.

But it works for lots of kids and parents. So do private schools. It's time to give parents more options.

Instead of pouring more money into the failed government monopoly, let's free parents to control their own education money. Competition is a lot smarter than bureaucrats.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate