Helping Colorado Students Build Brain Power
Cognitive First founder Larry Hargrave explains how his nonprofit group is working to bridge an important educational gap in Colorado. Learn how to promote help for at-risk and other students, many diagnosed with dyslexia or other learning disorders, to greatly improve their learning capacity and potential for academic success through online brain skills testing and interventions.
High Speed Spending
The Colorado Department of Transportation recently announced how it plans to try to fix the capacity and congestion problems in the Interstate 70 mountain corridor. The plan has two major problems. First, it’s going to take 20 years or more to implement, and second, it will do nothing meaningful to relieve the worst area of congestion from east of Idaho Springs to west of Georgetown.
More Poison, Not an Antidote: Mandating Employer Health Insurance
President Obama is either misinformed or lying about health care. He said the “free market has not worked perfectly.” There’s a market, but it’s not free. It’s infested with harmful political meddling. One example is government’s favoring employer-provided insurance, a poison to affordable medical care and insurance.
Prison Budget: Sentencing Laws Drive State Spending
So the current opportunity cost of Colorado’s extreme prison spending spree is a quarter billion dollars that could have been spent on health care and higher education.
Prison Budget: Sentencing Laws Drive State Spending
Back on June 3, Gov. Bill Ritter signed into law Senate Bill 228, repealing a longstanding statutory spending limitation (the Bird-Arveschoug cap) that held the annual increase in general fund spending in Colorado to 6 percent. But take a breath before anyone gets all teary-eyed – whether from joy or sorrow – because the majority Democrats in the Legislature will finally have the budgetary flexibility to spend as they see fit. Recent history shows that prison spending in Colorado, and the sentencing polices that drive that spending, has been constraining state spending for decades and will continue to do so into the near future.
Why Colorado Should Not Build High-Speed Rail
The Federal Railroad Administration’s high-speed rail plan will cost federal income tax payers $1,000 each— and most of them will never ride it. Colorado isn’t even a part of the plan, but a local proposal for high-speed rail will probably cost $9,000 for every Colorado resident—and most of them will probably never ride it either. High-speed rail won’t relieve congestion, save energy, or reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Colorado should spend its share of federal high-speed rail stimulus funds on safety measures such as grade crossing improvements, not on new trains that will obligate taxpayers to pay billions of dollars in subsidies.
Why Colorado Should Not Build High-Speed Rail
Why Colorado Should Not Build High-Speed Rail
6/11/09
Newsletter June 11 2009
More Paths for Quality Teachers to Enter Colorado Classrooms
Should college graduates have more options to enter the teaching profession without going through traditional certification programs? Can Colorado expect to make more such options available in the near future? David Saba, president of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, offers some insights into these questions and others as Colorado continues its search for more high-quality instructors to fill the state’s learning gaps.
Why Colorado Should Not Build High-Speed Rail
For all of these reasons—high costs, tiny benefits, and interference with property rights—Colorado should not attempt to provide high-speed rail service. Instead, it should use its share of the $8 billion stimulus funds, if it gets any, solely for incremental upgrades, such as safer grade crossings and signaling systems, that do not obligate state taxpayers to pay future operations and maintenance costs.
Who’s More Satisfied: Public School or Private School Teachers?
What do public school teachers think about their jobs compared to private school teachers, and how does that affect education policy? Does school choice benefit teachers, too? Christian D’Andrea from the Friedman Foundation discusses a new report he co-authored by analyzing teacher survey data from the U.S. Department of Education. Some of the results may surprise you.
Economic Research on Direct-Purchase Health Insurance: New Models for Real Health Care Reform
Paying for health care has been a problem since ancient times. In the Middle Ages, guilds collected funds to provide care for infirm members. In 1789, imitating the British, the U.S. Congress funded the Marine Hospital Service by taxing American seamen 20 cents a month.
As U.S. governments grew, they continued passing laws to regulate the kind of health coverage people could purchase. By 1960, most people with coverage got it through their employer. Plans provided by hospital monopolies controlled the coverage market. The true cost of health care was hidden from covered individuals. Vast spending increases were the result. The introduction of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 made the situation worse. Finkelstein found that Medicare increased real hospital expenditure by 23 percent between 1965 and 1970. Extrapolating from the Medicare estimates suggests that the spread of health coverage may “explain at least 40 percent of the rise in real per capita health spending” between 1950 and 1990.[1]
